Comment by robocat
2 months ago
It is outrageously expensive.
"Building 101km of cycleways across Christchurch to cost $301m", population 405000, So that is $750 per person, which is about 1% of median earnings for a year. That is paid for mostly by car owners (via petrol tax and car tax) and a bit by home owners.
And the new infrastructure is visibly under-utilised - at best a few % of traffic. You could force people to bike using laws and economics I guess... I would be interested to see a per-trip cost analysis for cyclists.
There is just no way to economically justify bikelanes everywhere - bikes are great for some trips and some demographics.
Can you point me to a report that has a cost/benefit analysis of adding bike lanes for a city? A city that isn't "ideal" for cyclists...
301 million dollars for 101km of infrastructure is cheap compared to building highways [0]. The price of the usual infrastructure is a burden on everyone as well, not just car owners.
You shouldn't have to force anyone to choose any particular mode of transport. I think people choose what is most convenient and that happens to be cycling in urban areas where there is safe infrastructure for it.
Your question reads pretty weird to me; building cycling infrastructure makes a city more ideal for cyclists, that's exactly the point. I didn't read it yet, but I found a paper that seems interesting and in the direction of your question. [1]
[0]https://www.worldhighways.com/news/european-highway-construc... [1]https://economics.acadiau.ca/tl_files/sites/economics/resour...
> is cheap compared to building highways
How about cycleways are cheap compared to building airports?
Cycle lanes are not substitutes for highways nor airports.
Nor the other way round, though.
> It is outrageously expensive.
Quite the opposite.
> Can you point me to a report that has a cost/benefit analysis of adding bike lanes for a city? A city that isn't "ideal" for cyclists...
https://www.benelux.int/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Report_Cy...
The paper suggests biking only 118 days per year. The car ownership costs are not "saved" - the projected savings are wrong. Ownership car costs are 0.167/km and savings by riding a bicycle are 0.349/km.
Two ignored real costs of bicycling are lack of optionality (planning ahead for weather changes, locked into transport mode) and carrying capacity (groceries, children, sports equipment, etcetera). And I'd like to see other costs of cycling (wet weather gear, helmets, locks) included.
About the quality I expected.
> The paper suggests biking only 118 days per year. The car ownership costs are not "saved" - the projected savings are wrong.
Were does it suggests that? The number 118 doesn't appear anywhere in that document.
> Ownership car costs are 0.167/km and savings by riding a bicycle are 0.349/km.
Where do you get these numbers from?
> carrying capacity (groceries, children, sports equipment, etcetera)
I do all grocery shopping for a family of four with a cargo bike. I pick up and drop off children in the cargo bike. You can think up objections all day if you want, but that doesn't change the fact that some people succeed in living car-free.
Nobody is forcing you to take a bicycle. Even if you personally don't like cycling, you should still encourage others to: every cyclist you see riding around is one less car stuck in traffic with you.
> And I'd like to see other costs of cycling (wet weather gear, helmets, locks) included.
Then you're in luck. On page 24, they include a budget of 117 EUR for gear and accessories.
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Bike lane construction tends to be lumped in with regular road maintenance, which makes it look expensive, but the really expensive part is doing repairs on the existing roads. "Building bike lanes" for 300M is more palatable than "fixing potholes and repainting" for 300M
Depends on where you live I guess. "Fixing potholes" would be far more palatable than "bike lanes" over here.
This seems to be the source of that quote: https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/124611551/building-10...
Note that this is NZ dollars, and that spend is over ~16 years. I.e. ~NZ$46/year/person ≈ US$27/year/person at current rates. The article compares the costs to road and motorway costs in Christchurch.
> There is just no way to economically justify bikelanes everywhere
Roads pre-date cars. Cars muscled in and took over, forced humans off the roads onto sidewalks. Now car drivers say it cannot be economically justified for people to move around outside cars? This is "car-brain" thinking. If the cars were banned, people could walk and cycle and wheelchair and skate on the roads their taxes are already paying for. They aren't "car roads", they are just roads - cycles are allowed on them. Car drivers don't want to share, don't want to slow down, keep hitting and killing people, can't control their vehicles safely, so demand cyclists be moved somewhere else - then complain about the cost of doing that! People say cars have taken over, they want somewhere safe from the dangers of cars, car drivers say no it's too expensive to make yourself safe from me commuting through the places you live and work!
It's crazy land. As if the only reason Christchurch exists at all is for cars to drive through.
Can you point to a report that has a cost/beneift analysis of each individual road in Christchurch? Because when Urban3 set out to find out that kind of thing in USA and Canadian cities[2] they found that the dense urban centers ("poor") were the parts of a city with enough tax revenue to cover their infrastructure costs, and the sparse suburbs ("rich") were being subsidised by them. The people in city center apartments, possibly without cars, possibly transit riders, pay for the sprawling suburbs which need long roads and infrastructure serving relatively few houses and businesses, which don't generate enough revenue to pay for those roads, sewers, water pipes, storm drains, electricity supply, etc.
New Zealand $301M is about £139M in UK pounds. Wikipedia has a list of road projects in the UK[1],including:
- Black Cat to Caxton Gibbet. 16 km, £507 million.
- Morpeth and Felton, 12.9Km, £260M. (Morpeth population: 14k)
- M54 to M6 motorway link road, 2.5km, £200M.
- Shrewsbury North West Relief Road, 6km, estimated £120M (population: 77k).
- Arundel bypass, cost £320M (population: 3.5k).
- Newark-upon-Trent bypass, 6.5Km, cost £400-£500M (population: 30k).
Building more roads doesn't reduce traffic. It makes driving easier, quicker, more convenient, which increases the temptation to drive, increases the number of journeys, incentivises and encourages driving, makes traffic worse. Can you point me to a cost/benefit analysis of spending half a billion pounds on one of these road schemes to "reduce traffic" by doing something that doesn't reduce traffic, something that makes traffic worse? Spending 2-10x the cost of rail per km, while moving 1/20th the amount of people compared to rail, polluting more than rail?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_road_projects_in_the_U...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
> Because when Urban3 set out to find out that kind of thing in USA and Canadian cities
The national road agency NZTA in New Zealand is mostly paid for by fuel taxes and car/truck taxes. It is reasonably fair - approximately user-pays. You can find expensive roading upgrades (similar to your examples) but they are mostly paid for by car and truck users.
Local government taxes in New Zealand are dependent on property values, so AFAIK the wealthy generally subsidise the poorer. Low density suburbs are usually high value properties and they pay quite a lot more in taxes. The more rural areas are often in different council areas than Christchurch City Council - I don't think there is cross-subsidy for commuters.