Bike lanes are good for business

Of course. Because cars don't spend money, people do. The more efficiently humans are packed together, the more money-per-square-foot there is available. You could have a drive-thru with six lanes and a mile long driveway, and it still wouldn't do the same numbers as the dingy coffee stand by a bus station at rush hour. That a bicycle is more space efficient than automobiles shouldn't be surprising to anybody.

I&#x27;m always surprised how <i>emotional</i> people get when dealing with anything that might challenge car supremacy. Supposedly, the market is supposed to make people lean towards what makes them more money, but that only works if the people involved behave rationally.

Even in NYC, which generally does have pretty good bike coverage in theory, people will still treat them as extra parking. Frustratingly, the most frequent offenders of this appear to be cops.<p>I used to confront the cops when they did this but I&#x27;ve grown far too lazy for that now.

I&#x27;m in favor of more bike lane infrastructure, but I think the evidence being cited here doesn&#x27;t line up with the claims.<p>The headline is &quot;Bike lane are good for business&quot; and immediately below it says &quot;Study after study proves it&quot; but:<p>(regarding an SF study)<p>&gt; The results were mixed.<p>&gt; In the other district, sales tanked relative to the number of people a shop employed<p>&gt; “The takeaway is that it’s probably a minimal effect on businesses when you put in a bike lane,”<p>(regarding another study)<p>&gt; Once again, the results were mixed.<p>(regarding &quot;the most definitive study&quot;):<p>&gt; Like Poirier, Liu and Shi found that in many cases, only certain kinds of businesses benefited from the bike lanes and street improvements.<p>The top-line the article is trying to draw is that there&#x27;s some unambiguous evidence that it&#x27;s &quot;good for business&quot;, but really some businesses benefit, some don&#x27;t, and some projects have little effect. The reports they&#x27;re drawing on themselves seem biased or sloppy in how they handle evidence. One of the studies cited showed that businesses on the &quot;road diet&quot; being studied had a _lower_ percentage growth in revenue than the &quot;Non-road diet&quot; group (table 4), but the text of the report then decides that absolute sum of revenue growth is more important ... even the road-diet group was substantially larger both in terms of starting revenue and number of businesses.<p>This kind of deceptive summarizing isn&#x27;t going to help the bike-infrastructure cause, because the opponents to this kind of project can easily pick it apart.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nacto.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;usdg&#x2F;yorkblvd_mccormick.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nacto.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;usdg&#x2F;yorkblvd_mccormick.pdf</a>

&gt; So what we need is financial data. Revenue numbers. Sales taxes. Credit-card receipts. Employment figures. That’s the good stuff. And for methodological rigor, we want to case-match our study areas to similar neighborhoods that didn’t get bike lanes — and to numbers for the city overall, to establish a baseline.<p>What we need is an identification strategy [0] that identifies some random or as-if-random source of variation in where bike lanes are deployed, and then compares sales data from places that do and do not get them. I&#x27;m not an expert on bike lanes, but from a quick look at the research in this article, none really has a convincing approach to this problem.<p>We also have lots of examples where a big observational literature says one thing, but the first time someone does an RCT, it falls apart, e.g. Vitamin D supplmements [1].<p>Personally, if I heard business owners saying over and over that bike lanes were hurting their sales, I would assume they knew something that was not captured in studies. (I am a biker who does not own a car, FWIW.)<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jstor.org&#x2F;stable&#x2F;2291629" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jstor.org&#x2F;stable&#x2F;2291629</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;JohnArnoldFndtn&#x2F;status&#x2F;1739696643459440853" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;JohnArnoldFndtn&#x2F;status&#x2F;17396966434594408...</a>

In my perfect world:<p>* there are dedicated bike lanes with barriers, taking away the stress of intermingling with bad drivers<p>* there is secure public parking nearby that always has open spots, taking away the stress of driving around trying to find a spot<p>* there are a few assorted accessibility parking spots scattered about, taking away the stress of having to walk&#x2F;limp&#x2F;wheelchair a far distance<p>* there is nearby public transit, taking away the stress of trying to get home if I’m a little messed up<p>I would be happy.

Most people going shopping need to bring multiple bags home. How about if you have small kids? What about areas of the country that have winter 6 months out of the year?<p>It might increase business for a very small and narrow demographic, but I seriously doubt this will be the case overall.

I&#x27;m a cyclist and totally on board with this way of thinking. But this is simply not believable, and I&#x27;d like to see what confounding factors were at play:<p>&gt; In 2013, a researcher at the University of Washington named Kyle Rowe looked at two shopping districts in Seattle that got put on road diets. Rowe compared sales taxes in these “Neighborhood Business Districts” with those in similar districts in the city that didn’t get bike lanes. In one NBD, which replaced car lanes and three parking spots with two bike lanes, sales closely tracked those in the bike-less areas, both in peaks and troughs. Conclusion: Bike lanes did nothing to reduce business. And in the other NBD, which replaced 12 parking spaces with a bike lane, sales quadrupled

Bike lanes in the US are useless outside of perhaps 3-4 cities (all with exceptional public transportation systems) And they’re really green vanity projects that do not deliver value to urban areas. Utilization is piss poor especially during winter months.<p>Edit: I am not against bike lanes but they’re really the cheapest way for city planners and politicians to pull a publicity stunt. A proper way to increase bike utilization is to invest in public transportation and actually drive down car ownership. But, this is a very expensive (and might even be impossible) feat in the US. WFH is not helping the trend because it’s facilitating people further out of cities which, you guessed it, increases car ownership.

Yeah, right. Study after study can prove whatever the author wants, but the facts of life are that nobody is going shopping on a bike. On a bus, sure, but a bike? I&#x27;ve lived in 2 cities with beautiful, wide bike lanes that nobody parks in (because of fear, not respect). In one they were never used, I&#x27;ve driven countless miles queuing in traffic next to them only to see 1 person per day (while seeing thousands of cars in the same period).<p>The only realistic use case was with part of the bike lane being next to a park, so it was used recreationally during weekends, mostly by spandex bros but also a wider audience when the weather was good.<p>People might <i>say</i> they want to bike more, and they <i>would</i> only <i>if xyz</i>, but actions speak louder than words, so perhaps it&#x27;s time to accept we&#x27;re wasting public space and money with all these projects that end up being good for nothing.