4/10 mile of MUP, $2.4 Million US Dollars
 

Read about the opening of a short segment of recently opened multi purpose trail in Northern Virginia that cost $2.4 million. I don't know if there were any land acquisition costs and I haven't seen seen or traversed the trail so can't comment on expensive features other than the 90 foot long prefabricated bridge that was probably a big chunk of the cost. Still, at over $1000 per foot, it seems like a lot of money. I like new infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians but the price tag is high.

https://www.insidenova.com/news/fair...13ba24db2.html

the rest of the 27 miles will probably cost a cpl thousand, right?

Behind a pay wall...Well at least a banner covering the story. Hitting "reader view" before the banner gets the story visible.

For one, the trail is fully lighted from end to end. That surely has some cost. Especially if the surrounding infrastructure had to be upgraded. No word on that.

Then as you noted, land acquisition costs. No word on that. I tend to agree, it would be much added cost if that were a factor.

Then the legal costs of fighting/defending it in court. That would surely add to the total as well if that were a factor.

We have about a 1 mile section of public street with on street parking here in Seattle that an anti-cyclist adjacent property owner has been fighting for 30 years. The totals are in the 10's of millions. The street is known among cyclists as "the missing link" because it connects 2 already existing sections of an already existing trail.

Sometimes you fight because what you are fighting for is just & the right thing to do.

In any case, I would expect 2.1 million to have extenuating circumstances.

That's not unreasonable for a long bridge. Cost of a 10 foot wide bike path is around $150,000 per mile. The cost of building a mile of a new 6 lane highway is $7,000,000 in a rural area or about a $1.1 million per mile. That jumps to $11 million per mile in an urban setting.

The bike path seems like a bargain, especially considering that the bike path and bridge will be mostly maintenance free for the next 40 years. That 4 lane highway will need major renovations in 5 to 10 years at about $1 million per mile per lane

Fairfax County is the most expensive part of the state (D.C. Metro area) and the Tyson's Corner has been one of the most highly-developed areas there for decades.

It's a lot of money, but it makes more sense if you know the neighborhood

I was staying at Tyson's Corner for work a few years ago and went to the Tyson's Galleria for dinner. Holy schmoly, Gucci, Prada, Burberry, Cartier - just shows you what kind of money is in the area (and how much you should expect real estate to cost) https://www.tysonsgalleria.com/en/directory/

We're getting 4 miles for only $13.2 million. You win! :thumb:

We're spending 22 million to rebuild... one city block worth of path.

And get this, 2 blocks from there the path dead ends!

It's going to be something like a hundred million to close the mile gap to where it picks up again.

https://www.6sqft.com/east-river-esp...yoral-funding/

First, consider that America has 55% of the world's lawyers, and that the amount of red tape one must navigate simply to add bike lane paint markings is significant. Next, consider the potential liability involved with things like curbs, lane markings, traffic signals, hedges, and barriers, and the cost of the insurance required to protect cities, counties, and states from these liabilities.

Second, think about the process used to award construction contracts for infrastructure projects. If you hire a contractor to build a house, a driveway, or a swimming pool, your contractor must complete the work for the contracted price within the contracted time. If he fails to abide by the terms of the contract, you can sue him. But if your city, county, or state hires a contractor to build a new road, bridge, or train line, there is no firm requirement that it be built within the contracted time or cost. As there is no penalty for failing to abide by an infrastructure contract, cost overruns and delays are encouraged. This is intentional, the higher the cost, the more contractors, politicians, and the politically-connected can derive in favors and kickbacks.

I live in Japan, where infrastructure is modern and well-maintained. Yet, Japan spends a fraction per capita what America spends on infrastructure. In Japan it is quite easy to add a bike lane, a subway, or new high speed train line, though there is lots of red tape, it is nothing even near as dense as that in America. People in Japan do not litigate, lawsuits are rare, and awards are small, liability insurance is not necessary. Work is finished within the contracted price and time.

$2.4 million in Japan would pay for a hell of a lot of highway, let alone roadway or bike lanes. The reason infrastructure is crumbling in America is because the process is not because too little is spent, but because too much is spent, and too little work is done for the money.

There is plenty of red tape in public infrastructure construction, especially when federal dollars are involved. With those dollars come things like Davis-Bacon, DBE %'s, AIS, ADA, FHWA, AASHTO, OSHA, and lots of paperwork. Most contracts for infrastructure are not "lump sum" but are paid for actual quantities placed at the bid price for that item. Yes, unforeseen conditions like contaminated soil, underground obstructions, and weather may add costs and delays. There are also penalties for delays, and often incentives for early completion.

As someone involved in public construction (local/state level), I can assure you cost or completion date overruns are are not "encouraged". You'll find most delays are due to contractors bidding more work than they can handle, especially in a tight labor market, material availability, and weather related issues. Contract deductions are a real thing for missed completion dates. There are plenty of lawsuits for construction delays on public projects. https://wma-online.org/for/for-desig...ion-contracts/

If you think every house, driveway, swimming pool etc gets built without cost overruns or delays you're mistaken.

Some times the mayor's brother-in-law owns a construction company.

I suspect part of that is corporate culture as well.

Here, in the US, housing in particular is bad...build it as fast as possible and as cheap, cutting any corners where possible, as possible to maximize profit for the developer. Then the developer advertises a "lifetime warranty" on the houses to sell it. Once the houses are built and sold the developer unincorporates and vanishes leaving that "lifetime warranty" a completely worthless piece of paper. Unsurprisingly, in short order, the home owner finds problems--and are SOL. No notions of "honor" or integrity passed the paycheck.

In my (newer) neighborhood, for example, to save money/time the developer poured the concrete basements/foundations in winter back 15-20 years ago. Which home owners have discovered due to all the flooding the last few years, as those winter-poured concrete basements leak. Homeowners (even the original ones) are SOL. And make no mistake, those concrete workers knew they were doing wrong pouring when they did--but their boss and their bosses boss said to pour, so they did.


Similar things happen in commercial construction contracting. The contractor and his subs show up to do the bare minimum...even if the client expressly states what they need and how it needs done. At my workplace, basically every contractor-bid job in the last decade called-in ended up being a FUBAR in short order...because the contractor/subs think they can soft-pedal and get away with it.


Which makes it unsurprising that liability insurance is a thing...in an industry rife with doing the bare minimum where things are found wrong in short order necessitating costly fixes.

if you think that's bad, don't look at the price of road construction

I've been making extensive use the the US 36 Bikeway, completed a couple years ago.
This thread got me curious about what it cost.
I just found this: https://www.denverpost.com/2014/12/1...ostly-venture/
So $16.5M for 18 miles; $917K/mile.
Yikes! I had no idea it cost that much.

Costs of doing things like this in a highly developed metro area go up fast. This isn’t a strip of pavement out on the edge of town.
Plus, there’s a bridge involved, and from what I could see in the photo, some significant stabilization work on the creek bank. Also, DC Metro means that the creek is part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed, so some level of environmental impact work was involved.
More than just a strip of pavement.

Well, that is NYC, of course it's expensive. Ours is in a podunk rural county at the top of California, between two "cities" with the population of a couple of blocks in your neck of the woods. I'll bet the local drama is the same, though. ;)

Ditto

How much does it cost per foot or per mile for automobile roadway?

Plus maintain costs means roads need to be shoveled in the winter. Bike paths through parks usually aren't.

Mikael Colville-Anderson, a world respected urban designer, in this video


at 34:47 stated

Denmark:
+25 cents profit for every km cycled.
-16 cents net loss for every km driven
Copenhagen:
$1.10 profit for every km cycled.
53 cents: Value of living 7 extra years
22 cents: Value of being less ill whilst alive
35 cents: Value of health care costs saved

Have heard that at least 3/4 of the cost for government projects goes to Fed/State/Local gov..
at least 3 of each: permits, fees, engineering-firms, inspectors, legal depts, research departments, safety dept, union reps, EPA........
...
Normal to see 6-8 pickups with 2 people each watching 4 or 5 workers . (Materials, equipment & Workers wages at $70/hour or more are the cheapest costs)

Pick one...higher cost with accountability/oversight, or lower cost with no-accountability/no-oversight.

There's a reason all the procedural/legal/oversight red tape and personnel is there. Because in the near or distant past there was wrong-doing, either wilful/cheapskate or sheer stupidity, and people/property got damaged/hurt/killed as a result....someone sued someone for screwing up, and the buck got passed to someone necessitating oversight/red-tape. When bottom lines are concerned, you can always predict the cheapest-allowed-under-the-law, even if it is a dumb idea, path will be chosen. Even if it means the workers doing it know it is wrong and will likely lead to problems.

One of our paths around here has an MUT bridge over a creek...that bridge has a 10 Ton rating. Which looks massively overkill, until you realize that Parks&Rec uses that path as a defacto road access for construction equipment for path maintenance--and that is the only way to get that equipment through that area.

State Hired the same Contractors as they do for motorways?

As an employee of the State of NY working for the City University of NY, I've been involved with a lot of construction projects. Tons of ways to get cost overruns and I see it all the time, thus nothing surprises me and I could write a book on the wastage. But not today.

The recently opened State of NY Parks Dept. extension of a boardwalk and path ran $3.5 million, has 1.5 miles of bike path width asphalt laid and another 2.5 miles of conversion of existing concrete parking lots, so a lot of line painting and signage. Expensive paint it seems and it's gotta be put in the correct place so that costs.

A few years back they extended a path to the actual beach and bath houses at this park, that essentially involved installing Jersey barriers to separate the MUT from the existing parking lot, then paint the lane markings on the old parking lot. About 100 ft of new asphalt was laid. $1.5 million. I'm betting about half that cost was design.

:thumb:
Need more Gov’t control
only Gov’t smart enough
to spend $10 million on a $1 million project.

When they wrote up the master plan for the "Santa Ana River Corridor Trail System" in 1990, after about 40% of the 110 miles of the trail were already complete, they estimated that the remaining 3 construction phases would be completed at a cost of $37-39M, split between three counties and the US Forest Service. Annual maintenance costs estimated at $10,000 per mile for the paved trail. They also estimated that the whole thing would be complete within 20 years, by 2010.

Fast forward to almost 30 years later, and we got... 7.5 miles of that trail added-- back in the early 90s. The missing section in Corona might be finished by 2023 or 2024. Maybe. The lack of trail of any kind through Norco? Probably never. Phases 3 and 4 will similarly never be finished, based on the current condition of the state/county economies. But they're adding one lane in each direction to the 405 freeway down in the OC, for a stretch of 16 miles. The initial cost projection for that is a mere $1,900,000,000. That's just $22,500 per foot.

Priorities.

Same thing and worse happens with commercial contracting. Would you rather spend $10 million on a $1 million project, or spend $1 million and in short order have $20+ million in civil or criminal liability never mind cost of litigation? There's a reason for permits and regulators and oversight--because repeatedly time-and-again private construction businesses cannot be expected to be competent and not screw things up.

A few years back--a place I worked ordered a few hundred gallons of commercial paint. Facilities boss has done this dance far too many times--while the delivery pallets were still being offloaded, he took out one can and painted a sample and signed the RMA right then and there to send it all back. Wrong color, not even close--their people had even come out to look to see what we needed in terms of color and still screwed up. Ordered commercial chair seating on the order of 500 units, the contractor that supplied the seats sent 50% of one SKU and 50% of another SKU that were mutually incompatible. They thought we wouldn't notice and it wouldn't make a difference--we did and for our use it most certainly made a difference. Sent all of them back. Had $250,000USD in new linoleum flooring purchased and installed...the installers screwed it up and had to come back the day after they thought they were done to fix what they'd done. I can keep going.

After a while, experience teaches that you cannot trust private enterprise to do a job even right (NVM on budget), like children they need babysat.

The Margaret McDermott bridge(s) that go over the Trinity river to downtown Dallas is a project where they took a regular car bridge (paid for by the state) and added big fancy arched hike and bike bridges on either side. So a few years ago they spent $115 million for this hike and bike bridge. But the city decided to save themselves $20 million by skipping the stress tests and using cheaper parts (cables) than the architect called for. After they built it, the cables started snapping in high winds (hmm, seems like a stress test would have caught this. oh, yeah.). The hike and bike bridge has been closed (even to foot traffic) since they built it. So now they are saying that another $7.1 million "might" fix the bridge, and "might" take 3 years to do.

So we are looking at $122 millions dollar and 10 years for a bike bridge that goes over a river that is 50 yards across 95% of the year.

Sorry, Virginia. If you want to play with the big boys of corrupt and incompetent city politics, you need to bring your A game to compete with Dallas.