SEATTLE _ Instead of a ribbon-cutting, Seattle officials called for a "soft launch" this month for a protected bike lane on Seventh Avenue. They didn't celebrate an expanded bicycle lane through Belltown on Second Avenue, completed in February.
Photo-ops might bring attention to the startling $12 million-a-mile cost to build new downtown cycling routes, a ripe target for commuters bitter about traffic and growth.
Cycling supporters aren't happy either.
At present rates, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) says it might be able to afford only half the 50 miles of bike lanes promised in the Move Seattle levy approved by voters in 2015.
"Clearly, SDOT needs to work much harder on value-engineering the costs of these projects down," interim director Goran Sparrman said in a recent interview. "Second Avenue clearly is a far outlier. But we simply can't afford those things."
The costs helped push the citywide average for bike-lane construction to $1 million to $2 million per mile _ double the $860,000 rate shown in ex-mayor Ed Murray's levy proposal and four times national averages.
Why are they so expensive?
There's more to a project than paving a bike lane.
Direct costs to install Seventh Avenue's 6-foot-wide asphalt path, including bike-shaped icons and signals over 4 { blocks, consumed less than one-tenth of the $3.8 million spent, city records show.
It's the other stuff _ curbs, engineering, sidewalk retrofits, traffic control and especially drainage _ that can break the budget.
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Bicyclists using Second Avenue's nearly 1-mile, two-way lane actually ride on old pavement, but new signals account for 40 percent of the $11 million spent, Sparrman said. All intersections were rewired for the new traffic lights and steel posts, including three that had none before.
Actually, the city didn't promise downtown bike lanes for only $860,000 a mile. Nor did it overrun budgets by a factor of 14. That figure is an average that includes much cheaper locations.
Elliot Helmbrecht, an SDOT liaison to community groups, said it appears levy planners simply divided the plan's $94 million bike allotment by their goal to develop 50 miles of protected bicycle lanes and 60 miles of landscaped, slow roads called greenways to improve pedestrian and bicyclist safety.
"It's a math equation," said Helmbrecht, who earlier managed the Move Seattle campaign. "If you were to deliver 110 miles of commitments, you would have to see that number."
City Councilmember Rob Johnson said the $860,000 figure looked reasonable based on what they heard from other cities, including Chicago.
Seattle projects exceed an average for U.S. bicycle lanes of $133,170 a mile and a high of $536,680. More elaborate paved trails averaged $481,140 with a high of $4.3 million a mile, a 2013 national report says.
Murray's transportation director, Scott Kubly, who now works for the bike-share company LimeBike, declined to comment for this story.
Former deputy director Barbara Gray, now Toronto's transportation director, said she doesn't believe SDOT misled voters.
Creating solid, bottom-up estimates for each corridor was "not practical for a levy," she said. "I don't think you get any reasonable certainty on cost, until you get to 30 percent design."
