I looked up prices as I was initially in doubt if this was a good cost-benefit. This article claims that New York Cty trees have a lifetime cost of ~3,500 USD (in gardening). I was under the impression of a much higher annual cost, so I was way off in my initial reasoning.
This report puts annual gardening costs of Portland trees at around 40usd [1]
These numbers do not include added road, curb and sidewalk maintenance incurred by the tree, as far as I can tell.
At the end of the day it's money not being spent on something else. Would you rather spend 4min sitting in traffic on a tree lined street because plans to upgrade a 4way stop to something that can handle more volume was canned in favor of adding trees.
Pretty is nice but beauty without function gets old really quick.
