What Makes a City Livable?

One of the things that upsets me most about living in a city where developers pretty much do as they please is the demolition of trees. Recently the pace seems to be picking up and now, apparently, 143 live oaks will be fed into shredders to widen Kirby Drive from Richmond to Westhemier in a drainage improvement project.

They will be replaced with smaller trees (the existing trees are about 20 years old) but really, does this make sense to you? Losing great trees to widen a street that doesn't need it? In my 30+ years of traveling on Kirby I cannot recall seeing an accident there.

What are your thoughts?