This is as expensive as a road, and $30,000,000 round number price tag smells fishy. It’s disrespectful of real projects that have real benefits and are much less costly to put this porky proposal on the table.

The money they are requesting could not be used to fund neighborhood councils or balance the budget, nor does it mean that funding to build out the bike plan won’t be available at a later date. Seems to me this is a total non-issue. If the funding is made available, great; if not, we’re no worse off.

And the benefit of building this wouldn’t be simply to see pretty scenery. It would allow cyclists to bypass an exceptionally dangerous section of PCH where they are currently forced to share a lane with cars traveling high speed, and open up access to wider sections of PCH for riders who aren’t comfortable taking a lane under those conditions.

Yes, it has a high price tag. But long as there is no cost to the city, and it doesn’t take away from future funding for on-street infrastructure, it doesn’t hurt to ask.

but I read the situation a bit differently… from my reading, this is the city council endorsing lobbying the federal government to spend their federal money on this bike path.

The city motion doesn’t say L.A. is going to spend our own money to build this project (that’s a non-starter.) The motion as I read it is to support possible federal transportation funding to be allocated to L.A. to build this project. They’re carving pork in Washington DC, and the city wants some federal transportation pork. I haven’t done the research, but I would bet that So.Cal. legislators are also asking for that federal transportation money to go toward projects that I expect you and I think are shortsighted/wrong… stuff like widening and tunneling the 710 Freeway.

Federal money comes with a lot of administrative strings attached. The city has to do lengthy federal environmental review, etc. Because of those hurdles attached to fed $, the city of L.A. won’t use fed $ for projects under $1M… so bike lanes, being very cheap, just don’t need federal funding. And then the question becomes… what sort of transportation investments do we want locally that make sense to pay for with L.A.’s share of federal transportation monies? The beach bike path has some flaws (the $30M price tag seems to indicate that it’s going to be over-built – will it look like an elevated freeway?), but in my calculus, it’s probably a better use of federal transportation dollars than most of the car-centric projects that I suspect would otherwise be on the city’s list.

I don’t mean to be gung-ho in favor of the beach bike path extension as a top priority for me or for C.I.C.L.E. … but I would not be opposed to it being on the city’s wish list for federal monies.

With regards to Council File 10-0002-S4, I would like to voice my opposition to the $30,000,000 2 mile bike path extension. I fully support bike path and lane plans, but this plan is too much money for too little benefit. The city draft bike plan quotes 1 mile of bike lane at $28,000. I would rather have 1000 miles of bike lanes throughout the city than 2 miles of path along the coast. Please, I urge you not to support such irresponsible use of our money.