Bay Bridge bike path: From $200 million to $1 billion
You could see the Bay Bridge bike path boondoggle coming way back in 2007 when I first wrote about it. From a low estimate of $160 million in 2001 to $1 billion today! Does anyone think that will be the actual price tag in the end?
The Bicycle Coalition thought that $200 million for the bike path was "a drop in the bucket," and they were undaunted by the $500 million estimate. Those drops keep getting a lot bigger, but they will never be too big for the bike people.
The Bay Bridge bike path project now qualifies as a megaproject, and the price tag will keep escalating, as all parties get on board the gravy train---unions, management, Bay Area "progressives" and their representatives in Sacramento and Washington, et al. Only the taxpayers will be left off the train, though they will be paying for the ticket, which will surely be a lot more than $1 billion.
Labels: Bay Bridge Bike Path, Bicycle Coalition
posted by Rob Anderson @ 11:02 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Rob, I thought you had lost it when you wrote the bike path could cost 1 BILLION, but I read your links posted, and realized you are using the historical evidence of what happened with the new Bay Bridge. Your 1 Billion estimate sounds very realistic. If they are saying 550 million now, you just know it will be at LEAST 1 billion! (Perhaps 1.5 billion!)
Why doesn't Leah Shahum raise the funds through her so-called huge membership? When she is on her next Bike Coalition sponsored trip to Europe so she can "learn" how to "improve" San Francisco she could have her members sponsor her by the mile. She seems to have done pretty well getting others to pay for her "learning" as she enjoys the South of France, Amsterdam, and other parts of Europe, all so she snap and blog pictures of happy people on bikes and then come back here to lecture us on how we must change.
The Bay Bridge originally had a walking path (on both sides), and rail on the bottom.
The walking path and rail were removed to make way for our post-war car obsession, where only one transportation type was privileged over all others, and the right of an individual to cross the Bay under his own power was revoked.
Decades later, the BART system was built, at phenomenal expense, to replace the perfectly good rail lines that were removed.
Restoring pedestrian and bicycle access to the West span (and that is what it is - a restoration) will be the undoing of a huge mistake. And yes, mistakes tend to cost more to fix than they would cost to have been avoided in the first place.
Sorry about the price tag, Rob. Should've been done years ago.
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