Red maple is neither the strongest tree in the street nor the weakest. It can reproduce readily from both seed and stump sprouts - when you see a red maple tree with multiple trunks coming from the same base at ground level, that was doubtless a stump-sprout regeneration event (check these out in Point Pleasant Park).
It is a mid-tolerant species, meaning it can tolerate some competition for light and nutrients when it is young and under a canopy of mature trees. Red maple is kind of a middle-of-the-pack species for me. I’m glad to see it featured more strongly in current planting lists for it adds wonderful indigenous diversity to the streetscape ecosystems of the city.
Perhaps its lack of redeeming features plus its ubiquity in the woods of Nova Scotia are why it has not risen to anywhere near the top of past planting lists for Halifax streets (it is, after all, the 15th most abundant tree in our streets, according to our research data on mature street trees). I find it difficult to identify what features make red maple special for the street environment. Also, though, its buds, flowers, and fruits (the samaras) have red colouring. Most people know that its leaves turn red (and sometimes orange) in the autumn. Red maple is called red maple because so many of its parts are red. It grows on an amazingly broad diversity of sites. I would hazard a guess that red maple is the most common broadleaf tree species in our province.
It co-occurs with other tree species in 87 of the 88 vegetation types we have in Nova Scotia, often found in all the forest plots measured to characterize the veg types of the Forest Ecosystem Classification of Nova Scotia. It occurs naturally in southern Florida all the way to Newfoundland, from the Atlantic to beyond the Mississippi River. Red maple has the largest north-to-south range of any eastern-North-American broadleaved deciduous tree species.