Originally Posted by sbhikes
I'm glad there are people like this around who care about great infrastructure, and who are willing to do the work to build and knit together neighborhoods the way people want them to be. I'm grateful not everyone (and gratefully hardly anyone outside the rarified world of BF) thinks like JoeJack, John Forester and other like-minded obstructionists.
Diane considers the value of this facility to be in "knit[ting] together neighborhoods the way people want them to be." Madison is rather an hour-glass shaped city, with lakes on each side of the narrow waist. The trail under discussion crosses the narrow waist along the valley of the river that joins the two lakes. The total distance is 1.1 miles. The large part of the cost, it appears, was in tunneling under the major two of the six roads that cross the valley, possibly on bridges. The neighborhoods that would find themselves connected by this trail, in addition to the existing connections by streets, constitute about 30 city block-lengths of streets.
It is rather obvious that there is little transportational potential along this route, particularly since the fish in the lakes at each end do not ride bicycles. This trail is clearly largely a recreational trail, and may well be very nice for that purpose. I have no objections at all to having such a trail completed, provided that it is done with park or recreational funds. I strongly object to calling this a significant facility for bicycle transportation. Doing so is symptomatic of the foolishness of our governmental program for bicycle transportation.
The presence of this trail on this list, devoted to vehicular cycling and associated aspects of bicycle transportation, is an irrelevant affront to many of us produced by whomever introduced this facility into this forum.