Lane County, OR Tree Protection: Parkway Planting (2026)

050G, Lane County's road design standards for Urban Arterial and Collector streets set the framework for parkway planting strips. Where setback sidewalks are used, the preferred design under the code, the sidewalk must be a minimum of five feet wide paired with a planting strip at least six feet wide. The code explains the strip's purpose directly: it separates pedestrians from vehicle traffic and provides space for street trees, landscaping, ground covers, or turf, adding an aesthetic benefit to the streetscape. Critically, the code splits maintenance responsibility down the middle of that strip's contents rather than its footprint: street trees standing within the public right-of-way are maintained by Lane County itself, while shrubs, groundcovers, and turf in the same strip fall to the adjacent property owner.

If a curbside sidewalk design is used instead (minimum six feet wide, excluding curb width), the code allows it mainly to add separation from parked cars or higher-speed traffic, or extra width where mailboxes, signs, or utilities obstruct the walkway, but it does not carry the same explicit tree-planting-strip language as the setback-sidewalk option. Whether a given road gets a planting strip at all depends on its classification: this standard applies specifically to Urban Arterial and Collector roads under LC Chapter 15's road system development and design standards, not to every rural road in the unincorporated county.

Property owners along a qualifying arterial or collector should expect County crews, not their own landscapers, to handle any street tree in the strip, while everything green underneath and around it is theirs to keep up.