Bicycle Infrastructure Cost Calculator

A painted lane is largely striping, signage, and pavement markings applied to an existing roadway -- roughly $130,000 per mile in this calculator. A protected lane adds physical separation from traffic (concrete curbs, flex posts, or planters), which means real civil construction: grading, drainage adjustments, and installing and maintaining that barrier -- pushing the estimate to roughly $500,000 per mile, nearly 4x the painted lane's cost for the added safety of physical separation from vehicle traffic.

It depends on facility type: this calculator adds roughly $40,000 per intersection for protected lanes and multi-use paths (since crossing a physical barrier safely typically needs dedicated signals or high-visibility markings), versus roughly $15,000 per intersection for sharrows and painted lanes, where crossings are simpler paint-and- signage treatments layered onto an existing intersection.

Not exactly proportionally -- annual maintenance is a percentage of construction cost, and construction cost itself is the per-mile rate times length PLUS a fixed per-intersection cost that doesn't scale with length. So doubling length alone doesn't quite double maintenance if intersection treatments make up a meaningful share of the total; only the per-mile portion scales linearly. The maintenance percentage itself also depends on facility type -- protected lanes and multi-use paths carry a higher rate (roughly 3-4% of construction cost) than sharrows and painted lanes (roughly 2%), since more physical infrastructure requires more inspection and upkeep.

Of the four facility types this calculator estimates, a Sharrow -- shared-lane pavement markings with no dedicated space -- is by far the least expensive at roughly $15,000 per mile, since it requires no new pavement, barriers, or major signal work. It also provides the least separation from vehicle traffic -- protected lanes and multi-use paths are the safer facility types, so the cheapest option is not necessarily the recommended one for a given corridor's traffic conditions.