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Trick question. Plants should never hang over the sidewalk at head height or below. People shouldn't ever have to walk around plants or get slapped by them. I've had my cornea scratched twice by thin branches. Both times it happened when I was jogging at night, past sparsely-branched trees, after the leaves had fallen for the year. So twigs were hard to see. And one of those times I was running around an SUV parked on the sidewalk; when you're doing that you're mainly paying attention to the uneven terrain underfoot (sometimes including snow along the edge of the driveway apron, polished slick by the tires) and, frequently, trying to avoid hitting your knees on the second vehicle parked behind the first. And believe me, the people who think parking on the sidewalk is okay aren't the kind of folks who do much worrying about keeping the parkway tree branches trimmed high enough so that you don't hurt yourself going around their cars. Both times I blamed myself at first, for not doing a better job of looking out for twigs. But then I realized that it's a freakin' sidewalk, not a forest preserve path: I shouldn't have to be looking out for plants hitting me in the eye all the time.
(I'd forgotten about how, years ago, I ended up with a bloodied--and later heavily bruised as well--arm, after brushing past some fine evergreen leaves when hurrying down a sidewalk. A little inspection afterward made clear what had happened: Some time before, the tree had been allowed to extend a thick limb over the sidewalk. The limb split into two parts, with the outer part dangling. The homeowner then severed the dangling part, but did nothing else. This left a nasty, unbending spike projecting several inches past the sidewalk edge. Some new, harmless-looking leaves then grew over and hid it.)
That sounds like another trick question, and in a sense it is. Obviously the homeowner should keep plants trimmed back from the sidewalk (I've noticed, by the way, that the offending plants are usually sited on the home side of the walk), and if it gets really out of hand the city should step in with at least a friendly prod. (Do cities other than Mayberry ever give friendly prods?) But I'm generally not terribly upset with homeowners, in most cases. Why? Well, for one thing, there isn't any kudzu attack foliage around here: our woody plants are sneaky, growing at something closer to the speed of hair. As with any slow process that you see happening on a daily basis, it's easy to let it get past you without noticing. Also, I'd be willing to bet that a huge fraction of the problem bushes positioned too close to the sidewalk were placed there by previous owners, and just seem to the current owners like landmarks that were always there, seldom even really seen.
I do blame Park Ridge Public Works for the more extreme cases, however, because it's their job to be aware of such matters and make sure that things don't get out of hand, and they simply aren't doing a very good job of it. There are some truly egregious situations that go on for years, with nothing done. As I said, we're not talking kudzu, so how hard can it be to ride around town a few times a year, pause at corners, and sight down the block to see if there are problems? (That's how I'm getting the photos for the gallery.) And, although I don't know if anything like this is on the market yet, it should be possible, with GPS, for employees to simply push a button as they drive by a problem, and have a friendly Mayberry-style reminder letter sent out automatically.
Or, hell, they could even skip the letters and just get out of the vehicle and take care of the problem on the spot with power trimming equipment in a few short minutes, cutting well back so it won't happen again soon. We're not talking highly technical tree surgery here; this is easily accessible brush, and the homeowner can clean up afterward. (The one time I did call in a problem was when a huge droopy pine had branches that went down below my shoulders and several feet past the sidewalk, over the parkway. The branches were, eventually, trimmed far back, and I don't imagine there will be a problem there for at least a decade, if then.)
I firmly believe this is another example, as with the snow problem, of the city knowing full well about the issue and simply not giving half a damn about it. That's not to say that Park Ridge doesn't get on problems when one neighbor calls in about another: Government by Ratting Out seems to get to it when someone drops a dime. But, empirically, it doesn't seem to work very well as a whole, and, perhaps even more important, it is most definitely not a fair system. It also doesn't seem very Mayberry.
Seems to me that the most frequent cause of these problems is that people site plants according to the size they are when bought, not the size they'll attain at maturity. It's easy to do--I've even done it myself. (Well, not me personally, but a relative.) I'm amazed when I see a big evergreen planted 10 inches from the sidewalk--where did the person who put it there think it was going to grow?
So please, find out how big your plants will get, and position them accordingly. This shrub selector can help you both choose a species of shrub you like and find out how big a footprint it will have when mature. Speaking of shrubs,
The plant problem becomes much more of a pain when you walk with someone (or use an umbrella). The sidewalk in front of my house is 60 inches wide. I did some research about body measurement range data that product designers use, and took a few measurements of people myself. Since I could easily find out his height, I also decided to try estimating some measurements from a photo of the man you elected president. Although the method isn't perfect, it's good enough for our purposes, and the numbers I got fit right in with what I'd learned in my research.
So, whether it's a dream or nightmare scenario for you, imagine two George W. Bushes walking toward you to chat. (Since he is said to have great personal charisma, you would probably be overwhelmed, and faint.) For clarity, let's imagine them in a corridor 60 inches wide. Each Bush is about 26 inches wide at the broadest point, meaning that the space between him and the corridor wall next to him, plus the space between the two politicians, has to add up to 8 inches or less. That's less than 3 inches per gap. Given that people generally aren't paying much attention to following a perfectly straight line when they walk and talk, that's not much of a space cushion. If the Bushes pass even a narrow vertical pipe or other obstacle along the edge, chances are that one of them will have to turn sideways a bit if he wants to avoid a bump.
And in fact that's pretty much what I find when walking with someone down the sidewalk: even with no plant intrusion at all, it's a bit close. It doesn't take much of that encroachment before you have to do things like turn sideways and walk on the grass/mud/snow.
The Bushes above never step on the corner parts of the corridor, because their upper parts of their bodies stick out farther than the edges of their shoes. If the walls were taken down, they could stay a lot farther away from each other. If they wanted to.
If you were always able to step out to the very edge of the sidewalk--to be able to use the entire sidewalk--you'd add to your own cushion space, just like Bushes 3 and 4 above. And surely it was intended that the whole sidewalk be avaiable for your use. Otherwise why didn't they just make narrower sidewalks in the first place, and save concrete?
Bottom line: I figure that if you add that side cushion space to some "room to grow" space for the bushes, homeowners ought to be cutting foliage back to, oh, maybe 12 inches from the sidewalk edge, when they trim.
Of course that will become the standard around here about when Hell freezes over. But it would be nice to be able to fully swing your arms and never have to worry about bumping into your companion. The funny thing about the plant intrusion is that you may not often consciously notice it, but it's irritating and slowing you nevertheless. I liken it to when I turn the computer off: the noise doesn't usually bother me extremely when it's on, but it nevertheless feels really good when it stops. And maybe if walking were faster and less irritating, people would do it more often.
Time to try to get you to visit the gallery. I've simply tried to give some visual examples of how much the city of Park Ridge lets sidewalks be encroached upon by plants. I probably included too many photos, but even so, they are only a small fraction of what I took, in a very short time, and it was hard to decide what to leave out. So what I did was to place all the ones I have descriptions for toward the start, to make it easier for you to just quit looking when you get bored.
I took most of the photos near the end of April, which means that the deciduous trees are just starting to bud. I figure that at that point in the year they're about as trimmed as they ever get, plus twigs don't show up very well in my photos, so you won't be seeing as many problem deciduous trees as you would at another time.
Note: I recenty added a handful more photos, taken about a month after the previous batch. I'm going to have to rewrite what I said above about the growing speed of shrubbery: those things can grow fast, even the evergreens. Things have gotten so much worse that I really should redo the entire gallery.
One thing I saw over and over again, as mentioned above, is bushes planted too close to the sidewalk. But also--and I hadn't noticed this before--a lot of homeowners will trim aggressively on the yard side of a plant, but not so aggressively on the sidewalk side. That surprises me a little, because the result often looks kind of silly. Well trimmed but intrusive foliage bothers me more than when people just let things go: if I saw that someone still had Christmas lights up, for example, I figured they probably had bigger problems to worry about, and I didn't bother taking any photos. Also, I took pains to keep identifying landmarks out of the pictures, because I wasn't out to embarrass anyone, just point up a problem.
What's awful about some of these situations is that the bushes have been permitted to grow in sculpted styles for so long that if they were to be cut back to where they should be, the form would be totally ruined, in some cases even an eyesore.
As always, please feel free to email me.