Is this true? If it is then they could have rehabed the railroad for that much.
I am definitely in the wrong business.
…Here in our fair city we have a bike and walking trail 30 plus miles and I really don’t remember the figure of cost to build it but it was NOT 1 million per mile. It is built on road bed of former CSX RR.
I suspect if you took the last zero off of that it would be much more accurate…
Some one tell them I will do it for a steal at $500,000 a mile…
When the Hennepin Canal was redone in northwestern IL 5 years ago, it was done for a total cost of around $25 million. The bike trail was the bulk of the money wasted (oops, I mean spent) and you wouldn’t believe the amount of rock hauled in for it. *** thing is built better than a lot of roads are.
What are they paveing it with, Gold?
I noticed by the way you worded you inquiry, you leave a LOT of room for creative interpretation.
Can the cost run up that high?
I’m sure it could, Add in enough seating, landscaping, restrooms, water fountains, etc, through in a ton for signage, public interest focus points, and you could surely make a porkbarrel out of such a project but ,…with sound CONSERVATIVE oversight and administration, I’m sure the price is generally a fraction of that,.
probably a more sensible way to approach the question would be to ask how cheaply a mile of paved pathway alone (no excavation, structures, accessories, etc) can be layed for, and then figure in the extras.
I’ll bet you can get that for $40-60K /mile
If they were building a Mag-Lev System, then the cost would be accurate.
It’s true. The cost of building bike paths over railroad ROW’s often exceeds the costs of rehabbing the rail line to begin with.
Here in Idaho, some minor flooding caused some damage to a mothballed rail line between Moscow ID and Lewiston ID. The estimate to fix the rail line to operating conditions was $2.5 million, according to the Idaho State Rail office in 1997.
Now the juicy part…
Once all the ROW is paved for the occassional recreational user, it will have cost the State of Idaho over $25 million!
And now if they decide that a rail line would be more useful, it would probably cost the State of Idaho at least $100 million to convert the bike trail back into a viable rail line.
Yep, we got some pretty smart folks there at the Idaho DOT!
We use the figure of $100-150,000 per mile in our Greenway/Bikeway planning, including amenities, but not including any wetland or environmental remediation that we have to do alng the way.
Well if it is a city bike path I would not doubt 1,000,000 a mile with new traffic siganals.
In Pittsburgh on the Mon thrail the state made them replace all the railroad bridges with
heavy duty bridges capable of carring a future light rail line or busway
rotflmao!! Only if the bikepath is built through a buncha bareback mountain types wanting to see NIMBY country. [:O]
I’m sure that if you had to replace bridges from scratch your costs could go up pretty quickly. They built a bridge on our local path a couple of years ago, and it had to be strong enough, and wide enough, for a roadway vehicle to pass over it–new regulations, it was reported. I think the cost was close to a mil, even back then. So even if the rest of your mile didn’t need any other bridges, you could probably hit that figure.