Where the sidewalk bends

By Melissa Tiefenthaler

Tree roots won’t be cracking the sidewalk in front of this Vancouver home. Here, the sidewalk bends!

This sidewalk is made from interlocking rubber tiles made from recycled tires. It can be taken apart and put back together like a jigsaw puzzle, which makes pruning problematic tree roots much easier!

These sidewalk pavers are made from rubber.

As a volunteer for my neighborhood association, I led this project to demonstrate an installed rubber sidewalk. I hope the project will inspire others to give some sidewalk alternatives a try. By reducing the conflict between tree roots and sidewalks, trees can live longer in our neighborhoods and share their benefits with us as long as possible.

Street trees have a lot to offer. They clean our air, drink up rain water so we don’t need to treat it in our stormwater sewer system, cool our homes with their shady branches, make us feel like driving more slowly on our neighborhood streets, and raise our property values—and much more! These benefits grow with the trees.

The planting strip was too small for the tree that was planted, and the traditional sidewalk cracked and heaved.

Unfortunately, just when a tree kicks into high gear to benefit our community and environment, if the right tree wasn’t planted in the right place, the tree’s roots can damage the sidewalk. Often a tree is removed when this happens, and all those environmental benefits go away with it. Planting the right-sized tree in the right place reduces this possibility significantly, but wouldn’t it be nice if cracked sidewalks were simply never a problem? Maybe that will be the case if this rubber sidewalk performs well in Vancouver!

These tree roots were pruned away before installing the rubber sidewalk.

The first steps to installing a rubber sidewalk are the same as installing a conventional sidewalk. Once the concrete is broken out, the tree roots can be pruned away.

Then a gravel bed is built up to prepare for the sidewalk. Here’s where the differences start. Instead of pouring concrete in place, the rubber sidewalk is installed as interlocking pavers. They can move together as the roots grow and can even be taken apart and reassembled easily to allow the tree roots to be pruned. Since there is a small gap between the rubber pavers, rain water can drain straight through. This encourages the tree roots to grow deeper, away from the sidewalk, to drink up the rain that seeps deep in to the soil.

From afar, the rubber sidewalk doesn’t look much different from a conventional concrete sidewalk, but for those who know, it’s a lot more environmentally friendly!

This is the completed demonstration project!
The rubber sidewalk is assembled from interlocking pavers.

I coordinated this demonstration project as a volunteer for the Hough Neighborhood Association. It is partially funded with grants from the Vancouver Watersheds Alliance and from the Office of Neighborhoods for the Safe Neighborhoods Streets Project. Grant funds were matched by volunteer projects and monetary contributions.

If you’d like to know more about the rubber sidewalk demonstration project, I’m happy to tell you about it. Send me an email: [email protected].

–Tiefenthaler is co-chairperson for the Hough Neighborhood Association and coordinated this demonstration project as a volunteer effort.  She also works for Friends of Trees as a Neighborhood Trees Assistant.