We Cannot Wait 1000 Years: Does a Half Mile of New Sidewalk in Nashville cost $356,400 or $2,640,000?

https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2017/10/31/nashville-has-allocated-60-million-sidewalks-what-has-city-accomplished/801154001/




Reading this article from October 2017 again and it brings up a lot of questions! I encourage you to revisit it - some of the highlights are below.

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Bowling Av, from West End to Woodmont, has been my 'pilot project' - my Sidewalk Project #1 - and my entrée into walkability issues in Nashville.  My advocacy on this single stretch began in 2013 and we are proposed to have 'shovels in the ground' fall of 2018 thanks in large part to Councilperson Kathleen Murphy. 

The proposed project runs from Forest Park to West end (0.9 miles), and we are immensely thankful for it, but it leaves a 0.5 mile stretch to Bowling Ave's terminus at Woodmont without.  So close to completing the necessary step for an entire neighborhood to get to Green Hills, West End, Hillsboro Village on foot!  It is a little hard to take! 


The Tennessean article raises the alarming specter that our sidewalk network will not be completed for 1000 years at the pace we are working.  It also made me consider working towards a private-public funding source to complete the last 1/2 mile (AKA 2640 linear feet, importance of which is in red below). 


But, how much would it cost?  How do I get a realistic price to know if this is even possible?  Is it $356,400 or $2,640,000 (again, see below)?  In regards to bringing money to the table, these are 2 very different scenarios!

Bowling Av near Woodmont

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Nashville's sidewalks key to Mayor Barry's transit plan, but construction lags

October 2017

The Tennessean

One of Mayor Megan Barry’s first major announcements after taking office in September 2015 was to devote more funding to sidewalks, which Nashville sorely lacks.

She allocated $30 million in each of her first two years in office, more than her predecessors. Her ambitious public transit plan depends on people walking to bus and light rail stations.

So what has the city done with the money? It built 3.5 miles of new sidewalk, in addition to making repairs. That’s slightly more than the average built during the previous five years, but less than half the pace set out by the city’s recent pedestrian and bikeways plan. At that clip, it would take more than a millennium (1000 years!!!) to line all of Nashville’s streets.

Nashville lags behind comparable cities. Nearly two-thirds of the city’s streets have no sidewalks, according to a Metro consultant’s plan released this year. Austin, not a shining example, has half of all streets covered. Seattle has 71 percent.

With the scope of the problem laid bare, Metro officials have spent much of the past two years developing a system to prioritize which sidewalks to build first. Some projects, officials also say, are taking longer to design because they’re more complicated than those built during previous administrations.

“There’s perception that sidewalks are pretty easy to do, and sometimes they are, but sometimes they’re like mini road projects,” said Michael Briggs, the Metro Nashville manager of multimodal transportation planning. “The real reason we’ve slowed down is we’re getting to a lot of the harder projects.”

Earlier this year Metro finished its WalkNBike plan, which identified 91 miles of high-priority stretches of roadway. The priority sidewalk segments are along transit routes, dangerous roadways, near schools, and places with glaring sidewalk gaps. The total bill for those projects was estimated at $550 million. In total, Metro has 1,900 miles of streets without sidewalks.

Metro officials say outsourcing allows them to ramp up the program quickly, and to scale back, depending on the funding. Also, if a given project is especially difficult, Briggs said, “it’s easier to shift contractors around from job to job if there are challenges.”

But some observers question if the city is getting the most for its money. Besides the complex project designs, contractors handle less technical tasks: they attend community outreach meetings, interact with council members, and work on the project budgets.

“There’s a lot of non-engineering stuff that happens in the management of these contracts,” said Adams Carroll, a former Nashville planner who now directs Pittsburgh's bike share program. 

He surveyed four other cities to see how much they budgeted per linear foot of new sidewalks. The average from Memphis, Louisville, Denver and Austin was $135, compared to Nashville’s estimate of more than $1,000 per foot  (at 1000/ft this would equal 5.3 million per mile!). Metro officials point out their figure includes stormwater infrastructure costs and the cost for acquiring rights-of-way from adjacent property owners. It’s not clear whether the other cities factored in those costs. 

Carroll said the comparison may not be perfect, but it points to another one of Nashville’s challenges: The city lumps a lot of expenses into the sidewalk budget besides sidewalk construction — from gutters to sewers, trees, and layers of consultants.

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https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2017/10/31/nashville-has-allocated-60-million-sidewalks-what-has-city-accomplished/801154001/




To donate to new sidewalks:
The Sidewalk Foundation - Nashville