Our feature OKI Wanna Know is a chance for you to ask the question that's been bouncing around your head for a while with no obvious answer. This week, we look at medians and right of ways with WVXU's Bill Rinehart.
Susan Smith of Anderson Township wonders why the trees and bushes have been removed from alongside parts of I-74 and I-275.
"Are they planning road improvements, like widening? Or what's the reasoning for it? Because if it was just to cut it down it didn't really make sense to me," she says. "Because I thought the trees would be better environmentally, it would help with erosion. It helps with noise. I just wondered why they were doing that."
I-74 and 275 aren't the only places where vegetation has been taken out. Kathleen Fuller says the Ohio Department of Transportation has been doing it around the state.
"Not on all of our roadways, but on a lot of them," she says. "We're focusing on the interstates, interchanges, some of our principal four-lane routes in our urban areas in the state, so not just Cincinnati. We're doing this in Columbus. We're doing this in Toledo, Dayton, Cleveland, Akron area."
Fuller is a public information officer for ODOT's District 8, which covers much of southwest Ohio.
She says the clearing is done for a number of reasons. For one, she says crews are getting rid of invasive species.
"We have a lot of honeysuckle. We have Bradford pear trees," Fuller says. "So we're trying to clear those from the right of way. But also, we're also trying to get rid of the dead wood, the dead trees as well."
Fuller says they want to keep those old or dead trees from falling onto the road.
"We have large storms. People have seen that in the past with trees coming down in the roadways during storms," she says. "Also we have a lot of utility lines that get tangled up in some of these trees, so cutting them back does help to prevent that."
Fuller says roadside trees also can make snow and ice removal a little more difficult.
"We get greater sun exposure when we don't have the canopy, and that sun exposure actually helps to warm up the pavement," she says. "We have cold spots during snow and ice where it's a little bit harder to clear off those sections of roadway and we have to either hit them a little bit harder, add more salt, or we just simply have to wait for that pavement temperature to warm up."
There's also safety concerns. If a car goes off the road and hits a tree, the tree isn't moving. That could mean more serious injuries to anyone in the vehicle.
Fuller says fewer trees also mean better visibility.
"What do we have in southern Ohio? Deer! Deer approaching the roadway. And so we're clearing up those sight lines."
Fewer trees lead to fewer leaves and branches clogging up culverts and ditches, and that lessens flooding.
Fuller says they can't replace trees with bushes and shrubbery. Even though that might make the roadways look nicer, they are a collection point for trash. And that defeats the purpose.
"We do have a lot of problems with litter — everybody knows that. Gets harder and harder to clean that up, because when the wind picks up and blows it in there, it just kinda gets stuck."
At one time, ODOT worked with a horticulturalist in District 9, and had a landscaping program.
"We kinda got out of the habit of it. One is, it's a maintenance issue. Because over time it's going to look weedy. It's not going to look pretty anymore. And we're spending tax dollars to landscape," she says. "So right now we're trying to get away from landscaping, and just really try to get around to maintaining and keeping it clean."
Fuller says a lot of the time, the wrong plants were selected.
"And it wasn't because they picked the wrong thing, they just didn't always know what the right thing was," she says. "And then, invasive species took over, like the honeysuckle, and things get intertwined and mixed in, and it's like 'How do you kill off that and not kill off the good stuff?' "
Immediately after crews clear some vegetation, the land is not going to look good. She says give it time.
"Things will start to grow back a little bit. We'll see some other trees, trees that aren't being choked out by invasive species will start to come back and do better."
Fuller says when ODOT first started creating pollinator habitats along highways, there were complaints about how those looked.
"It's a process to get a thriving pollinator habitat, because you have to do the cuttings. It's kind of like with anything: what you see initially doesn't always look so good and so great but eventually you get to where you want to go," she says. "Pollinator habitats are one of those. It takes two or three years cycling through it before you get something that thrives and looks kind of pretty."
Fuller says in addition to asking people to be patient, she says to remember that ODOT is not tearing everything out. Just certain plants in certain places.
