Residents search for road to tree protection

Last month, when Jennifer Ahern-Koch was returning to her Tahiti Park home, she was greeted by an 18-wheeler stuck at the entryway to the neighborhood.

The neighborhood is tough to navigate for larger vehicles. It consists of what is more or less one circular, narrow road, impossible for even two cars to navigate at the same time. Even when a delivery truck can make it into the neighborhood successfully, it’s difficult to turn into a driveway or from Tahiti Parkway onto Palmetto Lane on the other end of the circle.

When Ahern-Koch went to make sure all was well with the man behind the wheel of the truck, she found an apologetic driver who wished he knew about the road conditions before he arrived.

“I walked over to him and he told me, ‘I’m so sorry, I'll move, I had no idea,’” Ahern-Koch said. “I told him, ‘I’m so glad you’re not even trying to get in.”

What might have been an odd sight for some was familiar territory for Ahern-Koch, who serves as president of the Tahiti Park Neighborhood Association. Although that driver realized the challenges the neighborhood would pose, others push forward — creating difficulties for residents in the area.

The problem isn’t just the inconvenience created when trucks take 45 minutes or more to try to make a turn, ultimately giving up and backing out the way they entered. In the process of trying to navigate the neighborhood’s streets, Ahern-Koch said, the large vehicles are damaging the natural vegetation in the area.

“While they're doing it, they damage property,” Ahern-Koch said. "They run over landscaping, they run over tree roots, hit stop signs.”

This is a significant problem in Tahiti Park, which has a lush tree canopy with many older oaks standing throughout the neighborhood. That greenery is a major selling point for residents in the area, which magnifies the dismay when a semitruck sends a tree branch flying in the process of delivering an appliance.

Ahern-Koch raised her concerns at an April meeting of the Coalition of City Neighborhood Associations, outlining her vision for solving the problem.

“We want to put sign in our neighborhood,” she said. “It can say, ‘If you’re taller than this, wider than this, longer than this, you’re not going to make it down there.’”

During that meeting, she discovered this isn’t a problem unique to Tahiti Park. Residents of neighborhoods such as Avondale said that they, too, have encountered problems with large trucks traveling along their residential streets.

Since then, a formal group has formed, comprised of other neighborhoods facing the same issue. Working alongside Todd Kucharski, the city’s general manager of public works, they hope to discover a viable solution for cutting down on the damage to trees caused by these trucks.

Unfortunately, Kucharski said, he hasn’t been able to find much precedence for the type of restrictions the neighborhoods are pushing for. Although the county does have a system for designating certain streets as canopy roads, there’s not an underlying restriction associated with that distinction.

“The county just designates them — there are no regulatory issues other than stating it's a canopied road,” Kucharski said. “We're just trying to open up the discussions to see what could potentially be done.”

Already, there are some regulations in place governing the height of trees over roadways and the space necessary for vehicles to travel beneath them. On state roads, there is a minimum clearance height of 13 feet, 6 inches, and on city roads that height is 14 feet, 6 inches. Kucharski said those heights are designed to accommodate important municipal vehicles, such as fire trucks or garbage trucks.

"Now, some of these trees are so large that if you were to try to make pruning cuts, it would potentially harm the tree."

A solution might be tough to navigate in areas that don’t meet those standards. Without careful management of private property, it can be difficult to retroactively maintain old trees that have matured and sit above the roadway to better accommodate large vehicles.

“It's kind of unfortunate, but the reality is, a lot of the property owners — not in a bad way — didn't maintain or prune their trees in the past to minimize impacts into the roadway,” Kucharski said. “Now, some of these trees are so large that if you were to try to make these pruning cuts, it would potentially harm the tree.”

Ahern-Koch believes that isn’t an issue in Tahiti Park — that, despite meeting the required clearance regulations, big branches still get knocked down when trucks come through. As a result, she’s an advocate for restricting any vehicles larger than the garbage and fire trucks to avoid the nuisances and preserve a valuable asset.

“It would just be a win-win for everybody,” she said. “Including a win for whoever's delivering.”