CAMPO met last night to approve a list of transportation projects. Among the projects it approved is a bicycle bridge on MoPac (a limited access highway) acrosss Barton Creek.
Ben Wear took a potshot at this project on Monday:
The people who make transportation policy for Central Texas will decide tonight how to divvy up $132 million from the Legislature and Uncle Sam.
If they go with a list of projects that has bubbled up from the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization over the past few months, bike, pedestrian and transit projects will get almost 40 percent of the money. That includes almost $5 million for a bicycle bridge on MoPac Boulevard (Loop 1) at Barton Creek taken from funds that, by state law, are supposed to go only to road improvements.
And the list, if approved, would represent a departure from the CAMPO board's longtime policy on what percentage to spend on bike and pedestrian projects.
Ben clearly doesn't believe that a bicycle bridge qualifies as a "road" project:
Almost all of the Proposition 12 projects on the proposed CAMPO list clearly are for roads, including $11 million to improve congested intersections on Loop 360, $14.4 million for studies on putting toll lanes in the medians of U.S. 183 in Northwest Austin and MoPac south of the river, and $13.8 million to widen FM 685 near Hutto.
But the $4.9 million for that MoPac bike bridge, at the least, stretches the definition of a road project. The City of Austin proposed it a few years ago, hoping to create an alternative for cyclists who brave the heavy and fast-moving traffic on that bridge before returning to the frontage roads north and south of the creek.
Ben concludes:
Building the bridge might be a good thing. It could encourage a lot more Southwest Austinites to cycle to Central Austin for work or play. But is it a road project?
Ben meant this to be a rhetorical question, and I agree that it is, but it's rhetorical the other way.
There are a couple of ways to approach this. The first is that we should not equate "road project" with "projects that benefit only vehicles." Roads are used by vehicles, bicyclists and (sometimes) pedestrians. Roads can be improved to benefit motorists, bicyclists, pedestrians or all three. Road improvements that benefit solely pedestrians or bicyclists are still "road" improvements.
Although this plan calls for adding a separate, parallel bridge, that's a distinction without a difference. We could add a reserved bicycle lane to the MoPac bridge but that would probably be more expensive than adding a separate bicycle bridge. The bicycle bridge should be thought of as a more cost-effective way to widen the MoPac bridge than actually widening the MoPac bridge.
I'm sure I'm in the minority here. But there's another way of thinking about this particular project. CAMPO intends to convert the existing southbound lane from a shoulder used by bicyclists to a vehicle lane. The road improvement will improve vehicle traffic at the expense of bicycle traffic. Even if we postulate that "road improvements" means "improvements solely for the benefit of vehicles," it's still fair to require that road projects include money for mitigating their impact.
Suppose that the road project were instead the widening of a street in central Austin that required the elimination of existing sidewalks. Wouldn't replacing the existing sidewalks count as part of the "road project?" (Rhetorical question!) Wouldn't restriping the bicycle lane on the widened street count as a "road project?" (Ditto!)
The harm a road "improvement" can cause bicyclists and pedestrians is just one type of negative spillover. A more general point is that the government builds roads for vehicles without accounting for their full costs. It's a truism that taxpayers who don't use roads much subsidize roads for those who do. But subsidies aren't the only issue. Road "improvements" often impose very serious costs -- real financial losses -- on others. TxDOT routinely replaces at-grade streets with elevated highways and frontage roads and bars abutting property owners access to the frontage road. That's a big deal when the property was worth something only because it had highly visible, convenient access to the at-grade street. But the Texas Supreme Court has a distinguished history of concocting reasons to let TxDOT off the hook . (For example, loss of access is not compensable merely because the project requires "increased circuitry of travel." Ask a store owner what happens to business if his customers suddenly have to drive two miles out of their way.)
The right question is, "Is the bicycle bridge worth the cost?" Even though it counts as a "road" project, it might not be worth building. That's a topic for another time, but I'll note for now that the MoPac bridge is the only access for bicyclists traveling from the 360/MoPac interchange to William Cannon, Oak Hill and points south without a several-mile detour up 360 to South Lamar and then back down the frontage road to Brodie Lane or MoPac. That's not really a practical alternative.
