HDB resident says ‘cutting down a rainforest tree for a bicycle lane in Ang Mo Kio is just plain ridiculous’

An HDB resident posted side-by-side photos of a street at Ang Mo Kio from 2018 and today, with a large tree noticeably absent in the current photo.

Mr Cheah Kim Huat wrote on the Ecolink@Causeway Facebook page on Tuesday morning (Oct 11) that it was due to a bicycle lane that the tree was removed.

“Cutting down a rain forest tree for a bicycle lane in Ang Mo Kio Street 42 is just plain ridiculous. This is a small back lane road and if you stands here for 2 hours, maybe you can only see 2 bicycles pass-by the most,” he wrote.

He then went on to ask whether the town council had carried out a survey before choosing “to upgrade this pedestrian walkway into a joint bicycle leave-way?”

The resident added that two bicycle tracks already exist at Street 43 and Ave 8, before writing that it “is useless to put one more in between them.”

He also asked, “Who will cycle here where the road only connected to a HDB carpark and a school driveway?”

Mr Cheah also expressed regret over losing the decades-old tree.

“For that under achievement, we lost about a 70 years old tree standing 40 meter high giving good protection for a HDB playground slope and an unshelter pedestrian walkway…,” he wrote.

In the comments to his post, he added he had seen that the tree had been cut down after coming back from a weeklong holiday and that the newly-upgraded bicycle lane had come with a “foot high retaining wall” which was “too close to the tree roofs for contractor redesign” submission.

TISG has reached out to Ang Mo Kio Town Council for comment, as well as to Mr Cheah.

In answer to a question in Parliament posed by Mr Leon Perera (WP-Aljunied GRC) last November, NParks said that “Trees are removed when they are in poor health, when they impact public safety, or when there are development works.

Prior to removal, NParks’ arborists carry out professional assessments to decide if a tree can be saved or transplanted.

When there is no choice but to remove a tree, NParks will study replanting options at the site.”

A number of netizens appeared to agree with Mr Cheah.

One guessed that since the tree is around 70 years old, it should be removed before it falls down.

Another said that the tree might have a disease, otherwise, it would have normally been allowed to live. A commenter noted that more transparency in such matters would be good so that the public would not wonder.

/TISG

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