I suspect that Councilor Caterina has done the math and is of the view that $100M over represents the interest of cyclists at the expense of competing interest groups. What other special interest group receives that kind of money without making a supplemental financial contribution to their pursuit. In response to your assertion that the capital cost of constructing roads is greater than bike paths, I don't dispute that. However, let's attribute the cost of utility corridors for water, sewer, and electricity as well as overhead lighting to bike paths instead of roads and see whether bike path or roads are cheaper to construct on a km basis.
You think he’s done the math??? He’s done it as good as you have bud.
Our cycling number for transportation is somewhere around 1-2%, for the entire city, which excludes children.
If you include kids, and look at central areas, that number jumps to 3-6% in many neighborhoods. Especially ones with safe bike lanes.
In our last budget cycle, we spent 1.8 billion on roads (purely new/renewal…not potholes, snow clearing, sweeping). If you want to proportionally invest in bike infrastructure, whats 2% of that? 36 million.
In previous budget cycles, nowhere close to that has been invested in cycling. So 100mil is barely catching us up for the last decade, not even close to the last 30+ years.
And the 1-2% numbers are somewhat silly because:
a) central areas see 5-10% rates, which is where much of the infrastructure has been built and therefore you could argue even more should be invested.
b) the numbers don’t represent kids/youth who need safe ways to get to school, jobs, friends.
c) doesn’t represent the massive increase in fair weather bikers we see in summers. Occasional riders deserve safe infrastructure too. We invest hundreds of millions in playgrounds and seasonal amenities…why do we see bike lanes differently?
d) none of this points to the level of investment needed to hit our “goals” or latent potential. The question we should ask is: if we had safe bike lanes on every road, how high would our cycling numbers get? 10% citywide? 15% centrally? If so, how much do we invest to work towards that? Same way you don’t say “no one wants to use transit” in a city with 5 bus routes and no trains. You have to consider what a true metro and robust bus network might do.
We don’t have a robust network of bike infrastructure yet. We have random paths here and there and a few central lanes. A true network will boost ridership.
There’s a point where extra investment has diminishing returns on investment, but we are nowhere close to that yet. A route like 102ave downtown saw just a few thousand rides in summer months before we built bike lanes. Now that route sees 30,000+ monthly rides for half the year and 5000+ rides in our coldest months like January. There’s still a good dozen or more routes with that sort of ridership growth potential in our city, so we need to keep building.
