From time to time, we ask city staff members and others to write on subjects on behalf of the office. For this article, we asked Paul Smith, a Planning Manager at the Portland Office of Transportation, to write about a recent budget analysis he performed on Sam's request. The findings are rather striking.
At one of our regular PDOT management meetings with Sam, he brought up how much flack he got from a small but vocal group of people who were seemingly incensed over the amount of transportation dollars PDOT invested in bicycle infrastructure improvements and other bicycle-related programs. These people often complained that automobiles and freight are getting the short end of the stick, and that those modes have needs that are not being attended to - while all the while, funds are being lavished on bicyclists.
While it may be true that there are many freight and automobile-oriented projects with merit that are still waiting in line for full funding, and while it is true Portland has much more extensive bicycle infrastructure than many other American cities, the amount of money the City of Portland spends that is bicycle-related is nonetheless a tiny fraction of PDOT's total budget. For the city staff involved in allocating the funds for transportation projects, this is pretty clear. But for many in the public and particular lobbies, it is not. And quite frankly, the city budget has never been broken down by transportation mode - until now.
Wanting to have some hard numbers to be able to present to the public and take a look at himself, Sam asked me to go through the entire PDOT budget - capital expenditures, maintenance, staff and all transportation programs - and find out how much money we were actually spending on bicycles and how much we were spending on freight projects. On this post, I focus on capital infrastructure investments. (Soon, I will look at all other costs for bicycle projects, too, do the same for all the other modes of transportation - automobile, pedestrian, and transit - and share those results on the blog as well.)
Despite how it may seem on the surface, this was not an easy task. When you are paving a road, how (and should) you differentiate costs associated to the design and pavement of bicycle lanes as opposed to that for transit or the automobile? You can read about my (conservative) methodology and take a look at the actual costs of specific projects in the memo I wrote Sam, available as a pdf document you can download here [1].
The main findings of my analysis: we are budget to spend about $3.5 million over a 5-year period (2007-2011) on bicycle-related capital improvements, though that estimate is a liberal one that attributes costs to bike lanes that would have been expended regardless - for instance, the cost of pavement in bicycle lanes was put into the "bicycle cost column," - even though that pavement would have been there as an automobile shoulder anyhow.
When it comes to freight-oriented capital improvement projects, the city will spend just under $50 million over the same 5-year period.
A brief summary: The biggest city expenditures on bicycles are probably bike lanes, which are simply a stripe of paint and not a huge cost to the city. On the other hand, freight projects include lots of overpasses and bridge replacements, which are pricey. When all is said and done, for every dollar the city spends on bicycle improvements, at least $14 are spent on freight projects.
There will be more to come on this issue, and you will see PDOT's budget broken down into other transportation modes soon.
- Paul Smith
You can take a look at PDOT's budget sources here, in a pdf document [2]. 1 in 4 dollars comes from gasoline taxes, the rest from other sources.