Pollarding street trees - preserving shade in troublesome spots

I'm Australian living overseas, and periodically get to spend time with family in Australia. On my last visit to Melbourne I was struck by the prevalence of carefully pollarded street trees.

In many places there was an avenue of trees planted either side of the road. Repeated pollarding had been used to form a really strong, but size restricted framework. Pollarding keeps the trees to a manageable size, so that maintenance crews can quickly sort out a whole street worth of trees, but also preserves shade for the summer, and prevents trees from fouling power lines.

In some cases whole rows were grown into uniform "Y" shapes, with power lines right down the centre line of the "Y".



This image is of a rather formal pollard of the style you see in Europe - the Australian ones seemed somehow both more casual and more practical.

There are many other uses for pollard, but I was struck by how well this system worked in a location where shade was needed for summer temperature reduction, but full sized trees would be inappropriate.

I've really struggled to find an example image of what I saw, but this gives an indication:



Notice that at some point in the past they have all been pollarded at the same height - around 7ft - so all branch at that point.

I wish we would do this in the states.
Most urban forestry here seems to be entirely reactive, with no planning.
Rather than pollarding a tree when it gets to be 7 feet, they  top it when it's 25 feet tall and threatening utility lines.
The trees usually die from this maltreatment, and are replaced with a fast growing, weak timbered tree that soon suffer from its own brutal beheading.