Comment 106355

By kevlahan (registered) | Posted November 20, 2014 at 13:23:45 in reply to Comment 106352

Hamilton spends about $22M to clear snow and ice from our streets for motorists each year. Even if we dedicated only 1% to cycle lanes, that would still leave us $220,000 per year.

Hamilton has a total of 6200 lane-km of roads to maintain, so on average each lane km costs about $3500 to clear each year.

Now, a bike lane is about 1/3 the width of a regular lane, so it would cost about $1200 per cycle lane km to keep clear for a winter (probably less as it can be cleaned at the same time as the rest of the street).

So, even spending just 1% of our winter maintenance budget on cycle lanes, we could keep 180km of cycle lanes clear all winter.

This is many times Hamilton's current amount of cycle lanes (even Toronto has only 112km), so there is no excuse not to maintain them in the winter even if "only" 1% of of road users are cyclists. Cyclists pay property tax too!

And, don't forget that if the cycle lanes were properly maintained we would see a lot more winter cyclists. And the coming bike share scheme will be running year round ... further adding to demand.

Comment edited by kevlahan on 2014-11-20 13:30:40

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