Spend a Dime, Get Back Twenty Cents! Is it Madoff?

Imagine the joy for a small business owner who could lay down a pipeline where the open tap would gush forth money instead of water. Another Cherner flight of fancy? No, it’s a rail trail. There are few better ways to deliver eager, well-heeled shoppers right to your front door. Let’s look briefly at a few brick and mortar examples.

Arnold's restaurant is just off the Cape Cod Rail Trail in Eastham, MA (a fact which is prominently mentioned on their landing page). Sit yourself down in the corner of the parking lot, where you can see folks who come in from the trail, and compare that with the number who drive up in their Denalis. We have no scientific survey evidence, but our best guess is that you’d find twenty to thirty percent enter from the trail. Again, no concrete evidence, but we’d be willing to wager that the bicycle customers are hungrier than the Durango drive-ups, and have more desire (and less guilt) when it comes to mass consumption of fried food…

Care for another example? Have a quick peek at The Bikeway Source in Bedford, MA, “so named because it is at the head of the Minuteman Bikeway” as mentioned on their web page. Here’s a thriving sports shop even though it's set well away from the center of town, nestled among factories and warehouses. Their location at the start of the Minuteman has assured that the store is well known to pretty much anyone in the Boston metropolitan area who’s ever ridden this heavily used trail. That is one whopping customer base, and as more people become interested low cost, high quality recreation it is sure to get even bigger.

Sadly, there is the expense to consider. Rail trail construction averages a million dollars per mile, or so they say. How can we justify such extravagant spending in these Troubled Times? Expense often needs to be viewed in perspective. Here in Boston, we’ve just completed The Big Dig, at a cost of one million dollars per foot. Said to be the most expensive public works project in the history of humankind, this bold undertaking has provided Hub residents with the opportunity to experience greater traffic density, breath a higher concentration of carbon monoxide, and get crushed by pieces of falling ceiling. Now does a million per mile sound cheap by comparison? Need more convincing? Then consider the savings on health care.

A quick Internet search for the cost of cardiac care suggests that the average heart attack hospitalization runs about thirty thousand dollars, a figure which sounds suspiciously low even to these untrained ears and probably doesn’t include follow up visits and medication. But let’s say it’s accurate. Then for the sake of argument we’ll allow that five hundred heart attacks are prevented because more folks are getting out and exercised. Bingo, you’ve just bought your community five miles of rail trail! Get some more folks out there, prevent a thousand coronaries and you’ve bought ten miles—and the payback happens every year, regularly plugging well needed dollars back into our healthcare system.

I could go on, but you get the point. Given the return, how could we not spend a few dollars to expand our system of rail trails, especially in these Troubled Times? And that’s my rant for today…