Benefit/Cost of bike/ped improvements--over 10X return on investment

by B' Spokes
Tuesday, February 16 2010 @ 09:49 AM GMT

From the People Powered Movement list:

Hi all,

I have mentioned this before but with the announcement of the federal TIGER grants coming tomorrow it's on my mind again.

We often talk about how valuable and important bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure is, how it makes communities more liveable, improves community health, reduces air pollution and congestion, etc etc etc.

However, we rarely are able to put specific dollar figures to those benefits.

For the Kansas City metro area's TIGER application--which included a request for federal funds for a comprehensive bicycle & pedestrian program for Kansas City--we were able to do that.

The results blew me away. Over a twenty year time frame:

- an investment of about $30 million (initial cost plus maintenance)
- in a comprehensive bicycle & pedestrian program (5Es)
- will have benefits of over $353 million

And that is using conservative figures that only capture part of the benefit.

So let me say that again: a comprehensive, 5Es bicycle & pedestrian program has more than a ***10 TIMES RETURN ON INVESTMENT***.

The TIGER application the KC metro area submitted included several other types of projects--transit, highway, rail, etc. None of the others even come close to this kind of rate of return. For instance:

Transit project has a benefit/cost ratio of about 2
Freeway interchange has benefit/cost ratio of about 4
Freight RR corridor reconstruction/update has benefit/cost ratio of about 5

Thanks in large part to the work of the Advocacy Advance Team (BikeLeague + Alliance) in pulling together a lot of key resources for estimating the value of these benefits, we were able to use some very simple but powerful methods to estimate the value the bicycle/pedestrian program.

For instance, researchers have worked out simple per-mile or per-trip rates for factors like health benefit, pollution reduction benefit, mobility benefit, recreation benefit, safety benefits, and so on.

So if you can estimate how many bicycle or pedestrian trips and/or miles your project will generate annually then you can easily calculate an estimated dollar value of the benefits associated with that project.

You can see how Kansas City calculated the miles, trips, benefits, and cost in appendices D-2 & D-3 here:

<a href="http://www.marc.org/Recovery/assets/tiger/APPENDIX_D_Bicycle_Pedestrian.pdf">http://www.marc.org/Recovery/assets/tiger/APPENDIX_D_Bicycle_Pedestrian.pdf</a>;

Those appendices also list the dollar/mile or dollar/trip amounts used along with a citation of the source for that figure.

Some of the most useful research/studies for this purpose are listed below:

* Advocacy Advance Team's summary of research with references:
<a href="http://www.bikeleague.org/resources/reports/report_economics.php">http://www.bikeleague.org/resources/reports/report_economics.php</a>;

* Probably the most comprehensive/exhaustive single resource on the issue of calculating the cost/benefits of investements in bicycle facilities:
<a href="http://onlinepubs.trb.org/Onlinepubs/nchrp/nchrp_rpt_552.pdf">http://onlinepubs.trb.org/Onlinepubs/nchrp/nchrp_rpt_552.pdf</a>;

* Quantifying the benefits of nonmotorized transportation:
<a href="http://www.vtpi.org/nmt-tdm.pdf">http://www.vtpi.org/nmt-tdm.pdf</a>;

* Others:
<a href="http://nexus.umn.edu/Papers/TrailsLanesOrTraffic.pdf">http://nexus.umn.edu/Papers/TrailsLanesOrTraffic.pdf</a>;
<a href="http://www.railstotrails.org/ourWork/advocacy/activeTransportation/makingTheCase/index.html">http://www.railstotrails.org/ourWork/advocacy/activeTransportation/makingTheCase/index.html</a>;