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Phys.org reports on a pilot project in the Netherlands to generate power from solar panels in a bike path that has so far exceeded expectations:
The first six months of the pilot phase were successful, according to a SolaRoad press release issued earlier this month. The energy yield was beyond their expectations. Spokesperson Sten de Wit said they were surprised to see the level of success so quickly. Case in point: "The bike road opened half a year ago and already generated over 3,000 kWh," he said. "If we translate this to an annual yield, we expect more than the 70 kWh per square meter per year, which we predicted as an upper limit in the laboratory stage. We can therefore conclude that it was a successful first half year."
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SolaRoad Cycle Path Electricity Yield Exceeds Expectations
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(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 13 2015, @03:54PM
Locally the "rails to trails" and similar groups publish reports and going from "flat-ish landscape" to paved trail is a decent fraction of a million per mile. Usually expressed as cost per lineal foot so $75/foot for something that'll be a couple feet wide and need some bulldozer work and a roadbeds and some culvert work but nothing astounding.
Assuming its repaving/reconstruction work the cost drops quite a bit, because you've already got a mostly flat and landscaped surface.
IF they blew $3M or more on the project, the exact cost doesn't matter very much because it'll be a rounding error, less than 10%.
Something interesting to think about is a paved trail that is well designed and never carries more weight than some fat bicyclists will last a very long time, and at least around here you need to purchase a trail pass to ride a bike on a paved state trail, so even at relatively modest popularity the overall program ends up being vaguely revenue neutral. The local trail connecting my home town to the next town on the bike path network is a couple miles and historically they only pave it about every 20 years and they only need to sell a thousand or so trail passes annually to pay for that link in perpetuity, which is far less than they actually sell, of course connecting 100 person farm towns is a bigger financial challenge but on a state wide average it works out. ANYWAY the point is you need "about ten times the trail pass cost" or "about ten times the number of trail users" to survive the cost of trail installation and maintenance going up by a factor of about ten. I don't think the market would survive ten times the trail pass cost. IF the trail is ten times more popular than my "recreational capital" area (good luck with that) then maybe it's affordable, although its converting something that was a massive cash cow into barely breakeven.