Some years ago now, a bunch of bike lanes got added to the streets in my city. The city did a big project of adding them and afterwards proudly declared that X number of kilometers of bike lanes had been made.

When an investigation was done into how the decision process had gone for where to add them it turned out that the only consideration had been "how cheap is it to add bike lanes in these locations?" Not "would bike lanes actually be used in these locations?" They were solely trying to maximize the kilometers-of-lane-per-dollar-spent so that they could put out that headline with as big a number as possible.

Subsequent studies showed that a lot of those lanes weren't being used by bikes in any significant number. Bike lanes had been added on streets that ran alongside sidewalks that were already designated bike paths. I'm a bike rider myself, some lanes were added in my neighborhood but they somehow managed to put them everywhere except the routes I usually took. The city wound up spending a bunch more money to remove a bunch of the bike lanes that were doing nothing but increasing congestion.

It may be that this was a similar situation, where someone wanted to proudly show off headlines of how they'd pushed for bike access and got X numbers of kilometers installed and those were the only real metrics that mattered.