Its also only a partial story as “damage done” doesn’t directly relate to actual costs.
Take Ottawa as an example
Transitway is nothing but buses all day long, and that has an amortized annual cost of $42,100 per lane/km/year.
A local road that sees a couple hundred car trips a day costs $14,122 per lane/km/yr.
So that’s 3× the capital cost for way way way more vehicles at 1-3,000x the “damage” per vehicle.
Bicycle lanes an amortized captial cost of around $5-1000 per lane/km/year (this number is REALLY hard to peg down due to all the different ways cities account for bike infrastructure and the type of infrastructure it is).
So a bike lane is somewhere between 14 to 3000x less expensive than a local road, despite 160,000x less “damage”
Yeah, that’s because other things besides vehicles damage roads too; the weather being another big contributor to road damage, especially in places that have cold winters.
It’s sensible policy to understand how each factor contributes to costs (and benefits), but it’s not sensible to assume there are only one or two factors.
Its also only a partial story as “damage done” doesn’t directly relate to actual costs.
Take Ottawa as an example
Transitway is nothing but buses all day long, and that has an amortized annual cost of $42,100 per lane/km/year.
A local road that sees a couple hundred car trips a day costs $14,122 per lane/km/yr.
So that’s 3× the capital cost for way way way more vehicles at 1-3,000x the “damage” per vehicle.
Bicycle lanes an amortized captial cost of around $5-1000 per lane/km/year (this number is REALLY hard to peg down due to all the different ways cities account for bike infrastructure and the type of infrastructure it is).
So a bike lane is somewhere between 14 to 3000x less expensive than a local road, despite 160,000x less “damage”
Yeah, that’s because other things besides vehicles damage roads too; the weather being another big contributor to road damage, especially in places that have cold winters.
It’s sensible policy to understand how each factor contributes to costs (and benefits), but it’s not sensible to assume there are only one or two factors.
Yeah, and that just capital costs.
With the same Ottawa example, a sidewalk isn’t much cheaper than a road in in operating costs, but a pathway is nearly nothing.
That’s based on paths getting little to no snow and ice clearing.
Yes, but it’s pointing out that maybe fixating on a singular metric could backfire.