How does it cost £290 000 to build 1km of cycle route.

Once again, I have stuck to the time honoured tradition of not researching the facts before venting my outrage on STW.

http://www.centro.org.uk/about-us/news/2014/wolverhampton-cycle-route-is-on-the-right-track/

For all I know, there’s a 100 year old bridge on the route that needs replacing at a cost of £280 000, but I feel that stories like this are counter productive.
How many people are going to read this and think “Oh goody, a new 1km cycle track, I’ll buy a bike and cycle to work from now on” ?
How many are just going to resent more money being wasted on cyclists while they are stuck in traffic jams ?

Love the way they describe it as “inventive” and “innovative” too, like they are the first to ever come up with the idea of tarmacing a disused railway.

hope this want it

There is a sustains doc here: http://www.sustrans.org.uk/sites/default/files/images/files/migrated-pdfs/17%20costs%5B1%5D(1).pdf which outlines per km costs for a number of different projects, all at 2007 prices.

Its costing the best part of £3/4million to build a shared access path along the A24 in Ashtead (surrey), the length is about 0.5-0.75 miles long. <sarcastic mode> They seem to be doing a wonderful job <sarcastic mode>

I especially like the way they built the path around recently installed lampposts, then dug the newly laid path up to move said lampposts. I also like the 4″ high curbs where the path crosses 3 roads..

The M74 in Glasgow cost £86.5 million for 1km, so £290k is pretty cheap* 😉

* I know, I know, not a good comparison, different type of road etc etc.

But the point is that these things cost huge amounts of money, and the amounts of money spent on even ‘flagship’ cycling schemes are tiny compared to normal roads.

E.g. there is a 3 year project to supposedly cover huge areas of the city with decent cycling routes here. They’ve got £4m for infrastructure over 3 years. One road junction a few miles away is currently being redone at a cost of £150 million, naturally with no serious consideration for cyclists or pedestrians…

C-h-l, there are a few like that round our way. A bit pointless when most cyclists (or anyone for that matter) don’t realise they are for funnelling cyclists on and off shared footway bits. There is one on my commute which i have never seen anyone use! It is poorly placed btw, in fact you are better off filtering into the traffic at an earlier point so perhaps that’s why no one uses it.

“This is a really inventive way to make use of a rail line which has been unused for more than 40 years.

No it ****ing isn’t!!!! Reusing railway lines as shared use/green corridors is fairly standard practice!!!

If they were claiming it was a lang-lauf/Roller-ski course then maybe they would be on to something.

As for the cost, I hope to god that there is a ****ing good excuse! That is a lot of money, compulsory purchase of some trackbed, bridge renewal, etc. On the face of it, it does seem someone has bent over and been shafted.

I really despair over cycle provision, because at the end of the day this is not going to be a cycle path it is going to be a dog toilet where the local alcoholics hang out. it will have the usual extending leads stretched the full width and idiots claiming that you can’t cycle there. It wil ignore all the DfT guidelines that state the path will need to be cycle-able at 20mph, that sightlines are accounted for etc.

Sui – Member

Its costing the best part of £3/4million to build a shared access path along the A24 in Ashtead (surrey), the length is about 0.5-0.75 miles long. <sarcastic mode> They seem to be doing a wonderful job <sarcastic mode>

I especially like the way they built the path around recently installed lampposts, then dug the newly laid path up to move said lampposts. I also like the 4″ high curbs where the path crosses 3 roads..

Bloody stupid isn’t it. And no one new will use it. Bonkers

Wow, some of those numbers on the Sustrans link !
£93.50 per metre for granite kerbing.
£87.50 for a small sign, plus another £117 for the post.

Bails, I think the significant difference is that this is an old railway line, the main structure, built to support a 100 ton railway locomotive, is already there. All it needs is a bit of tarmac on top. But yes, that does make it look cheap.

Oh yeah, and the £290,000 won’t just be the cost of the diggers, workmen and tarmac. You have to consider all the time spent planning and negotiating. The cost of legal advice when local residents challenge the plans. The cost of holding meetings and doing surveys ( in the construction sense, and the ‘counting people before and after’ sense.)

And it won’t be being built by the council themselves, it’ll be being done by their contractors who will have had to bid for it, if someone was offering to do it for less then the council would probably have chosen them.

Bloody stupid isn’t it. And no one new will use it. Bonkers

I’m also waiting to see what impact the new traffic lights will have on the rush hour traffic.. 🙄

New traffic lights? Fortunately I don’t have to go that way to work anymore.

Our 1km route at a cost of £50k is a bargain then…

Our 1km route at a cost of £50k is a bargain then.

Depends, if it’s 6 times shi**er then it’s not a good deal 😉

I assume you’re taking the financial risk that the sub base is on then MTG? On the basis that you’re not then theyrecosting excavation of a 3m wide 1km stretch to a depth of 0.5m at least so something like 200 loads out and 1500 tonnes of material needing managing, then you’ve got aggregate costs to actually get the material in, staff costs (including engineers who designed it, planners, etc before you get to the guys with the spades), it’ll be CDM notifiable at a guess so that needs appropriately staffing too, assuming you’re not digging by hand then you’ve plant costs too. And then unless you’ve got a spare couple of hundred thousand lying around you’ll be financing it at 5% at best. Seems pretty reasonable to me to be honest.

£50 paint
£450 labour
£289,500 paperwork, admin, H&S assessments, traffic consultants, etc.

If it’s an effective shortcut or encourages people to walk/cycle to their destination surely thats a good thing?

£50 paint
£450 labour
£289,500 paperwork, admin, H&S assessments, traffic consultants, etc.

If it was on the road then yes. Bit from the sounds of it it’s an unsurfaced route, so it will have to go from overgrown mud/gravel/trackbed stuff to smooth*, wide**, well maintained*** tarmac with separate space for walkers and cyclists traveling in both directions****.

*ha

**Haha

***Hahaha

**** stop it, you’re killing me!

Playing Devil’s Advocate here…

If it costs £86500000 to build 1km of motorway and £290000 to build 1km of cycle track, then bearing in mind that motorways are a lot busier than cycle tracks, how does that average out as a cost per user ?

In short are there 8650 cars for every 29 bikes ?

I’ve just realised this goes from a Metro stop to the city centre. But as far as I can tell you’re not allowed to take bikes on the Metro, so how are you supposed to do the first bit of your commute by Metro and then bike the last km to the city centre?

The Dawlish railway repair only cost 35 million.

MTG: fair question. I suppose you could argue that each Km travelled by bike had a positive value to society but each km travelled by car has negative externalities (so it might make money for the driver, but society bears the costs of noise, pollution, collisions etc).
One mile on a bike is a $.42 economic gain to society, one mile driving is a $.20 loss

It does seem a lot but as has already been said a pittance compared to road workings. Didn’t know about the economic gain to society scale Bails, cheers.

Should they be tarmacing it? is it in the middle of the city linked by road either end? They just did the outwood trail on my commute prestwich-ish area. It is a silky smooth bit of tarmac suitable for road bikes but it goes through a forest so is now covered in mulch and windfall, either end there are good hard packed gravel tracks (so no point making the middle section suitable for slick 23c tyres) the gravel tracks don’t suffer from frost/ice as the tarmac will and won’t crack as I fully expect the black stuff to do soon (they already patched a couple of bits where roots caused bumps). Maybe someone who knows about road/track building could explain why there’s this bit of tarmac in the middle of no where but I can’t figure it out.

Some friends were pressing for a cycle route to be built from Edinburgh to a campus outside town, and were quoted £1 million a km to build it.

Because the local authority were already subsidising the bus route, there was no way they would fund an alternative too. Rubbish!

@ DONK, either surface will need maintaining, but the tarmac ‘should’ need less. at the end of the day if you’re going to tip some stuff out the back of a truck and roller it, which you would have to do with either surfacing material, it may as well be tarmac, as ( properly laid ), it will tend to sheet water off more easily, and even if it doesn’t pooling water will cause less damage long term, therefore last longer. you can think of it as gravel in waiting if it makes you feel better 🙂

Knowing the area it goes through they should have put a bit more into the kitty for full time security / Police patrols.

I’d rather they put sleepers and rails on disused railway lines, than tarmac.

Molgrips, that’s a whole ‘nother rant.
Closing down the non-profitable branch lines in the hope that passengers would drive to the nearest mainline station, then continue their journey by train was a mistake. They won’t, they’ll just drive all the way.

Selling off the land to be built on, so that there’s no hope of ever reopening the tracks as tramways, light railways, guided busways or whatever, was criminal.

Del that’s fair enough I guess, I’d have thought the tarmac was the more expensive option but I guess the work involved probably dwarves the cost of materials. I just think unsalted/unswept tarmac is more risky than gravel. You know where you are with gravel, get up to tarmac speeds then hit a patch of mulch or worse ice/frost and you could be in a world of hurt.

There was talk of a cycle track to link up our village and the new* cycle track to the next village over, with a bridge to link over a main road to a MaccyD’s. In fact, I believe tthat the cycle track and bridge was a pre-requisite for the development of the MaccyDs.

So, in true form, nothing was done on the development until the requirement for the cycle track and bridge was binned. Then, the MaccyDs’s got built.

It’s nice really, dodging HGVs following satnav on a shortcut from the A1 to the A14 brings big sense of excitement when commuting to work. Especially when it’s dark, rainy, windy or clear.

£290K doesn’t really sound that much really, seeing as it’ll require lighting. If you really want to get jiggy look at how much the Cycling Superhighways in London cost per kilometre.

£93.50 per metre for granite kerbing.

Granite kerbs say average 28 pounds/m – here

4 groundworkers laying @ 13 pounds per hour – 416 pounds

Concrete @ 70 pounds per meter

Kerb lifter @ 100 per day

JCB 3CX @ 100 per day
3t dumper @ 100 per day

lay 40 meters per day so

kerbs- 1120 pounds
labour- 416 pounds
concrete – 280
part load – 70
plant – 300

total – 2186

divided by 40
54.65/meter actual cost
Cabins/traffic management/ Health and safety/Engineering/Supervision/profit not included so 93.50 sounds about right. Maybe a bit cheap.

I wasn’t questioning the cost of the granite as such, it’s just that these sort of projects always seem to be short of funds, so I wondered why granite, not concrete.

Granite do look a thousand times better. They are crazy money but do have a timeless look.
Many times it depends on what’s already installed in the area.

Hopefully Opex will have been considered, and in terms of finishes – Granite, for example, has a high inherent slip resistance value compared to PC slabs which can become polished.

Correction: you’re not stuck in traffic, you are traffic.