Bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure is growing in importance to the public, and increasingly being incorporated into highway and bridge projects. However, systems have not been in place to track ""incidental"" expenses for bicycle and pedestrian accommodations within highway, bridge and interchange projects. This has made it difficult to understand the scope of the bicycle and pedestrian elements such as bicycle lanes, pedestrian sidewalks and bridge widening that has been included in highway projects and the cost of those improvements.
Incidental bicycle and pedestrian costs are those costs included in the budgets of larger, scheduled highway improvement projects. They can include bicycle lanes, sidewalks, intersection improvements, and widened shoulders. Adding pedestrian accommodations to bridges requires additional bridge width, increasing their structural costs. Projects funded exclusively for bicycle and pedestrian improvements (considered ""independent"" bicycle and pedestrian projects) are not included in this research. A detailed analysis of incidental bicycle and pedestrian expenses or guidance on quantifying incidental costs for bridge accommodations was not available to researchers or other interested groups. This report attempts to fill in these gaps and provide guidance and greater understanding of incidental expenses for bicycle and pedestrian elements.
An accurate cost calculation for incidental bicycle and pedestrian expenditures requires both a detailed accounting of all identifiable bicycle and pedestrian costs by category and an estimate of the additional costs associated with bridge elements. Whether a bridge was widened to accommodate pedestrians is not routinely tracked as part of project cost data, so those data were gathered and calculated in a separate process, with the results incorporated into the final total cost calculations.
This report quantifies the costs for incidental bicycle and pedestrian elements in a sample set of North Carolina highway and bridge projects. NCDOT highway and bridge projects that contain bicycle and pedestrian elements and have sufficient data for analysis have been identified from July 1, 2011 to June 30, 2014. For those identified projects, detailed cost data have been summarized to analyze the bicycle and pedestrian incidental costs.
Data are presented for 84 projects in FY 2011 to FY 2014 with incidental bicycle and/or pedestrian elements. Fourteen of these projects were let at NCDOT Division Offices. The remaining projects were let at the NCDOT Central Office. For the 70 centrally-let projects, contract total budgets were $847,698,452. Of that total amount, an estimated $19,931,546 (2.35%) was used for incidental bicycle and pedestrian elements. Bridges were the largest element by cost at $11 million, followed by sidewalks ($7 million). Detailed bridge data provide information on the average additional cost to widen bridges to accommodate pedestrians (22%). The cost-share agreements with local municipalities are analyzed to obtain more accurate net costs to NCDOT. In the dataset, 27 projects had municipal cost-share agreements that were estimated to cover $3.1 million of the bicycle and pedestrian elements in those projects, 26% of the incidental elements in those projects – although of items identified in individual agreements cost-share averaged 55%.
In addition to the report, the data is also available to help create better tools for future budgeting, justify future funding requests, produce reports and for integration with other databases.
