From http://www.infrastructurist.com/2011/01/18/bike-lanes-create-twice-as-many-jobs-as-road-repair-work/
Bicycle advocates can point out many reasons to endorse the growing popularity of the transit mode, from environmental friendliness to the rise of walkable cities to efficiency during rush-hour traffic. Now they can add one more to the list: job creation.
Last week on the Department of Transportation’s FastLane blog, Secretary Ray LaHood called attention to a new report that compared the employment impact of various pedestrian, bicycle, and road projects. The case study (short pdf), published in December, was conducted in Baltimore by Heidi Garrett-Peltier of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She found that for every million dollars the city spent on a road maintenance project, about seven jobs were created. That was the case for both basic resurfacing jobs as well as more elaborate repair work.
Now seven jobs is nothing to sneer at, especially considering the recent woes of the construction industry. But the figure pales in comparison to footway repair projects, which produce about 11 jobs for each $1 million spent, and it’s only half of the 14 jobs created by investing the same amount in bike lanes:
The reason for this difference, writes Garrett-Peltier, is that compared to road repair work, bike and pedestrian construction projects are more “labor-intensive,” meaning a greater share of the money goes toward human labor rather than toward materials. All infrastructure projects will create jobs, but when it comes to bang for your construction buck, cities might want to take a long look at bikes.
Image and Figure: “Estimating the Employment Impacts of Pedestrian, Bicycle, and Road Infrastructure”
