On August 13, 2024, the Boulder County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to approve that funds be sought for design and construction of the North Foothills Bikeway. This is the next and critical step for the project to eventually be realized.
Thanks to the White Line Foundation for their significant support of the project in the form of making it one of their three requests tied to the Ride for Magnus event.
According to the $430,000 feasibility study that was partially funded by C4C, the total cost of the project with a “risk” or contingency fee set-aside is $95 million. The study breaks the full bikeway into parts thereby allowing the project to be funded and built incrementally.
C4C is focusing on the segment from the City of Boulder to Lefthand Canyon Drive. It’s the most dangerous and most used segment. C4C’s current intention is to bring seed funding to the effort to build this segment and, thus, incentivize construction as soon as possible.
C4C has partnered with Boulder County Government on this project from its inception at least five years ago. There is a lot of credit to go around. Here are specific thank yous.
- One of C4C’s two founders, Russ Chandler, proposed the idea. At the time, it was a pipe-dream.
- Boulder County Commissioner Claire Levy authorized Boulder County staff to partner with C4C on the project. That included two years of failure and wandering around in the proverbial wilderness looking for funding. Commissioner Levy calmly persisted.
- Boulder County staff persons Kathleen Bracke, Alexandra Phillips, and Alex Hyde-Wright patiently endured the process, professionally engaged C4C and others, and remained pleasant throughout it all.
- C4C’s board of directors provided focused board governance during the entirety of the process.
All of this is great news. The funding, however, is a complex problem. Inherent to Boulder County’s decision to proceed is a challenge to state and federal funding agencies that if they are serious about safety outcomes, among other things, then they need to reassess funding in a fundamental way.
Currently, most bike-ped projects have a funding limit of $3 million to $5 million. Those amounts treat bike-ped projects as a sort of “toy” piece of infrastructure or an accessory to a larger roadway project. There’s a saying in transportation that “you cannot build you’re way out of transportation problems.” The North Foothills Bikeway proposes that you can, but not with roadways. Instead, funding and construction must shift to multi-modal projects.
Now is when we find out how that goes.
An actual photo with a rendering to the left indicating what the North Foothills Bikeway could be. Note the typical cycling traffic in proximity to 60 MPH+ auto traffic and the two memorials in this photo alone.