This news about a bike path redesign comes from one of our favorite blogs ecoRI.org.
The Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC) is considering an application that proposes to fill in a section of the Seekonk River in the city’s Fox Point neighborhood to build a bike path along the river’s edge. The application was submitted to CRMC by the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management in cooperation with the Department of Transportation.
This would provide a much safer route for bicyclists who are currently forced to share Gano and Pitman Streets with vehicular traffic, and it would certainly be more scenic. Further,
The path would continue over the abandoned railroad tracks leading to the decaying Crook Point Bascule Bridge, then behind the strip mall that houses East Side Market Place.
I never knew the name of that thing.
I have very mixed feelings about this proposal.
Funding for transportation can be complicated. If we get grants that are earmarked to this project and can’t be repurposed, then I say why not go ahead and do it. It would obviously be scenic, as you point out.
But the cost of this could be very high as bike projects go. A boardwalk bridge in Philadelphia cost $14 million for 0.4 miles. If the funding scheme allows us to use the funding for different bike projects, the amount we’d put to this one might get us exponentially more bike infrastructure throughout the city than this one would, and in a less peripheral location.
The cost of bike projects, even very expensive ones, is very reasonable compared to some of the most expensive highway projects that we toss our money into a hole over. So the context has to be carefully framed. This could be a nice thing, for sure.
But I’d like to see our city actually focus on making on-road routes bikeable. One of the major arguments in favor of this project is essentially that we can’t make Gano bike friendly. There’s plenty of room to do that if we have the backbone to remove a lane of parking and put protected bike lanes in. In addition, the lanes on Gano could be narrowed to reduce speeding. I wouldn’t want us to use this project as a way of sidestepping the changes that have to happen on-street.