Yesterday was Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard's annual bike ride. This year's event covered in part new bike lanes on Lafayette Road, a major thoroughfare on the northwest side of the city. According to the Indianapolis Star more than 500 people turned out to celebrate the City's commitment to bicycling, including the development of additional bike lanes, including those on Lafayette Road. As reported by the Indianapolis Star in today's paper:
Bike lanes cost $50,000 to $200,000 per mile to install, depending on the type of street work that must be completed, said Andy Lutz, city bicycle and pedestrian coordinator. Most funding comes from federal transportation grants, which pay for 80 percent of the cost, while the city matches 20 percent. Some Department of Energy federal grants fully fund some lane additions.
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| Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard |
Really? In April of 2011, when these bike lanes were discussed, the Mayor said the City would be spending $10 million for 33 miles of bike lanes, which would be $303,030 per mile, not $50,000 to $200,000 as claimed by Lutz. Here's a link to my
blog entry on the subject. Since the Star article I linked to has been taken down, here is a link to the Mayor's campaign website which
reposted the Star article.
This afternoon, the day after the Mayor's bike ride, I drove up and down the stretch of Lafayette Road (71st Street to 96th Street) that has the new bike lanes Mayor Ballard was promoting. The temperature was a pleasant 75 degrees, perfect weather for bike riding. How many bike riders do you think I saw using the Lafayette Road bike lanes? Zero.
As a person who has regularly commuted by bike to work for the past last seven years (10,000 plus miles), I am all for making bicycling in the city more safe. Spending millions to slap down a line of paint on a road without any thought to whether those bike lanes are safe to use is not the way to improve bicycling in Indianapolis.
In most cities that develop bike lanes, there is a debate among bicyclists about how to design those lanes so they are actually safe to use. In Indianapolis though the recreational bicycling community, and not serious bicycle commuters, runs the debate. Those in the recreational bicycling community are so thrilled that someone is finally paying attention to them that they never speak out to question whether the bike lanes being developed are actually safe to use. They are not, which is why most serious bikers won't be using them.
