It is a false assumption to think the people who placed this bike charging station are stupid or misguided. I'm quite sure they made a thourough analysis on what is the most cost effective solution to meet their design goals. Which, judging from the pictures, likely include low cost and low impact installation. Maybe even without a grid connection.
No, the track record of urban planning details indicates no such analysis is usually done, or it is based on figures obtained using the Harrison-Stetson method, i.e. invented off the cuff for the purpose. What matters, is whether those making the decision will feel good about it or not; they're not spending their
own money for it, after all. Public pressure is a big factor, yes, but with a suitable salesperson/marketdroid/representative, you can sweet-talk purse holders into anything.
As an example, only ~ 33% of public large-scale IT projects in Finland actually produce a functional result. Most go wildly over budget, and it is extremely rare, almost unheard-of, to hear of any kind of public project completed in time and under budget.
Here we come into the crux of the matter.
Today, it is extremely difficult to get funding for research that others are not already doing, regardless of the potential rewards. Those who fund research, want the positive publicity associated with "being at the forefront of the research, researching what everyone else is researching too".
Publicity and appearance is what matters, not the results.
Like Siwastaja wrote, test installations is one thing, but marketing paving-stone solar panels just does not pass even a rudimentary cost-benefit analysis.
You can associate them with your own projects and how difficult it is to get funding for sensible test installations/projects/products, but it does not change the fact that this one here just does not make practical sense: the results are predictable, and much worse than envisioned or estimated by the project leaders.
People are not doing solar roadways because rudimentary cost-benefit analysis –– "off the envelope" calculations –– indicate it
could be worth it; they're doing it because they can do the marketing, and pay themselves a nice salary and get Green awareness points and positive publicity while doing so, even though they already know the project will fail, and produce shorter lifetime, lower electricity yields, and pretty negative cost-benefit results.
Those just do not matter, because by the time it happens, the people have already reaped the benefits and continued on to other projects. The project managers and politicians get very little to no pushback from these; negative results won't affect their popularity or careers at all.
These are done, because doing them makes both the purse-string holder politicians and civil servants look good in public, provide additional positive publicity, and pays good wages for the people doing these projects, all paid for by the taxpayer. I resent wasting taxpayer money, because it is the reason for the financial state of Finland right now: we've got a bloated public sector with 55% of all workers getting paid by taxes. Because nobody is willing to cut some of that pork fat off, we're having to cut basic social support instead, because those people don't make as much noise as the 10% of the workforce paid by taxes that have questionable job descriptions. Even trying to limit political strikes –– those against the government, not the employers –– to just one day caused huge uproar here. This shit needs to end.
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