Menno Henneveld was speaking at the Main Roads end of year celebration tonight. Food was great, and unlike the do I attended the night before, the booze was free. If I remember correctly Menno said 800 million dollars were spent on road infrastructure last year, and they built a new road somewhere up in Cervantes for about 2 million dollars per kilometre. I spoke to him later and suggested that perhaps the money spent on cycling via Bikewest, 1.5 million dollars was too little. He thought they spent more. And I remarked how incongruous it was that MainRoads could build roads for 2mio$ per km, but to build a cycle path in Perth cost 1mio$. He said “that can’t be right”.
(See also “How much does it cost to build a PSP”
At http://btawa.org.au/2009/11/02/hom-much-does-it-cost-to-build-a-psp/)
Promoting everyday cycling three days a week (or more...)
I do not consider it is correct to compare the cost of a road in Cervantes with a shared path in Perth when the construction environment is completely different.
I better example would be to compare the cost of the latest stage of the Freeway to Mandurah to the cost of the parallel shared path. They both started out with the same conditions and would have been built at approximately the same time, using the same plant and contract costs.
Hi
Interesting comments and thanks for sharing. I am curious but, about the $1 million figure for bike paths. Do you have a credible source for this number?
Thanks
Andrew
To my knowledge 1.5 mio is what Bikewest gives out as grants in a year. If a new highway is built and it has a PSP alongside, that is not counted in the above figurel
The $1mio per km is meant to be an illustration of the disproportionate costs for cycling infrastructure compared to normal road building. It is used by some people in Mainroads as the reason why we cannot build the PBN network more quickly.
I suspect that the cost of building the PSP along the Mandurah highway would be pretty marginal, and no, I do not have access to the detailed costings.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2009/2758349.htm
Go there for the transcript of the ABC background program from last Sunday. Do we spend enough on cycling infrastructure? Victoria has a apparently a 38BILLION transport blueprint for the next decade. Cycling is included – 0.3%….