Do We Really Want Funding For Bicycle Projects?

by Walker Angell, Streets mn

We hear frequent calls for more funding for bicycling — for painted bike lanes, door zone bike lanes, sharrows, protected bikeways, bicycle parking, giant motor traffic intersections for Trader Joe’s, programs to encourage people to ride and any number of things.

We don’t need all of that special funding. We may specifically not want that special funding.

Asking for funding for bicycle facilities is backwards. It’s inefficient, can result in poor or over-priced outcomes, and sometimes the funding can be sidetracked for projects that have little or nothing to do with making walking and bicycling better and safer.
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We need to think about it differently. Not as bicycle projects or pedestrian projects or people with disabilities projects or guardrail projects, but as one comprehensive transportation and space project. Mitigating the negative impacts imposed by motorists must be a core element of traffic engineering and of every roadway, not an optional add-on.
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When engineers design a bridge, they don’t use a painted line to keep cars from driving off and plunging to their death. NO! They design it from the outset to be safe. Can you imagine if bridges didn’t have guardrails and we had to fight for funding for them?
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Our response is that we’re going to spend 99% of our money making roads smoother and faster for drivers and 1% to improve safety for those endangered by the fast drivers. We protect people from falling icicles and from plunging off of high bridges but not from errant drivers? That’s messed up.
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Rather than start with funding, we should begin with what we should do — build safe roads — and then let the funding follow. If there is only enough funding available to reconstruct 22 miles of roadway to the new safer standards rather than the planned 25 miles of fast, smooth, and unsafe road, then that’s life. If a road cannot be built safe for all of those impacted then it should not be built or reconstructed or repaved.

[B' Spokes: Or how I look at it, we can build those extra 3 miles next year. Over 90% of our projects have the sole purpose of solving so called problems 10 years down the road using inflated numbers and arguably incorrect cost benefits so really those 3 miles of car-centric roads can wait a year.]
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https://streets.mn/2016/12/07/do-we-really-want-funding-for-bicycle-projects/