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.
You find it so obvious to be almost snarky about it. Almost no one in my city thinks like that, most see bikes only as recreational vehicle, or as the last resort for deviants and DUI-convicts. For these people, shopkeepers included, a bikelane is an assault on parking and therefore common sense.
Fascinating that your perspective and 'common sense' is to be the complete opposite to mine.
It is high time americans see the great future that is non-car focused but people orientated.
I'm always surprised how emotional 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.
> I'm always surprised how emotional people get when dealing with anything that might challenge car supremacy.
People don't think "car supremacy is being challenged," they think "my commute is annoying already and now it's about to get a lot more annoying."
I like bike infrastructure and use it frequently and I'm way closer to the yuppie-urbanist edge of the spectrum, but it's important to understand where people are coming from if you want to sell it to them democratically. "Car supremacy is being challenged" sounds to them like "fuck you and how you get around town," and it's unsurprising they react emotionally to that.
Also when no working alternative is being offered. Just shutting down car access and offering a bike is difficult to swallow. Add to that a workable public transport network and we may talk. Some people love to drive but having the option to sip your coffee and read the news in a not-overcrowded bus going from across your street to the office building with say only one change in the same time driving requires, is an option quite difficult to beat.
"Car supremacy is being challenged" sounds to them like "fuck you and how you get around town," and it's unsurprising they react emotionally to that.
Assuming it is a personal attack is not rational though.
According to the article, there are apparently 40 years of studies showing these business owners that bike lanes are good for business. Business owners are usually trying to make good business. What other selling points do they need?
I think the frustrating part is that if less people were driving there would be less traffic. Bike lanes won't change the equation as heavily but mass transit sure would.
From the areas I've lived in, the same people pushing for limiting cars, more bikes are also anti-growth when it comes to housing. Like yeah I'd ride a bike if I lived a mile or two from the office but I can't afford that so have some understanding on the less privileged.
Cars are the suburban denizen's power armor. They are not a tool, they are an extension of the self. Walk up to a person in a car and lay your hand on the hood - they will likely react as if they felt a stranger's caress on the small of their back
Why do you assume people aren't behaving rationally?
Even construction of roads takes years--public transit takes longer. Everybody present suffers the effects of the construction for benefits that may or may not materialize in a reasonable timeframe.
As for bike infrastructure, the fundamental problem is that you cannot share car and bike infrastructure. Bikes are simply too vulnerable to cars. That means that bike infrastructure needs to be separated which, by definition, takes space away from cars. If you have a new development, you can do that since nobody has an expectation. However, if you take something away and make life more irritating for people, they're going to naturally complain. Loudly.
Finally, public transit doesn't do any good until it hits a critical mass. Modern cities don't always help that--most US cities don't have a core that everybody works in--where people work is smeared out across a geographic area. You have to reverse that, but those same people are also the people that don't want to commute anyway and want to work from home so you lose a lot of possible users of your system.
> if you take something away and make life more irritating for people
Taking away a car lane in actual reality, doesn't necessarily make driving worse. A single lane can be better for drivers, cars chugging along calmly in single file, and can be more efficient than the reptile brained jostling for position that arises when you have two parallel driving lanes.
Drivers have an adverse reaction to cyclists, specifically them. It is not rational, it is a weird freudian thing. The rational brain rarely comes into it.
Why do you assume people aren't behaving rationally?
Sorry, I thought this was clear from my comment: according the article, bike lanes are good for business. Rational business owners want business to be good.
A local metro area put in a light rail train down through a major city street. It was sold as a way to reduce congestion and bring more people and development opportunities through.
The reality is a lot of small minority owned businesses couldn't survive the years of construction and reduced parking, and the trains didn't bring more shoppers through.
A lot of homes and buildings were sold as taxes went up, but the new development were all luxury style apartments.
The people who benefited were commercial developers and yuppie types, and the lower class, largely minority people who made up most of the area were pushed back into other neighborhoods.
It turns out, judging the effects of an action like development requires a lot of local context, and people can quite rationally be upset that they are going to be sacrificed for someone else's gain.
One problem is that decent transportation makes areas nicer and more appealing, so more people want to live there, which of course makes the existing housing stock more expensive. This is a consequence of decent transportation being so rare, sadly.
The short term effects from installing transit are overall worth the long term benefits, but I fully agree it can be hard if you are seeing the short term ill effects.
New luxury are a good thing - it means there is more housing in your city. Sure the local area looks more expensive, but rich yuppies need to live someplace. The real question is are you building enough that the poor can afford to live someplace, or pushing poor out completely. All housing starts out as luxury housing and then 20-40 years latter becomes were the poor want to live. So if you have a problem with housing costs today the problems are rooted in the decisions of 1985! You cannot correct them overnight. However crying the rich benefit so we do nothing just ensures the problems will remain in 2065.
Why did taxes go up? That seems to be separate from the issue of construction causing an inconvenience, but is apparently a decisive factor.
FWIW the Civic Center area of SF used to be the theater district before BART was built through there in an extremely invasive cut and cover way, which led to theaters shuttering and being replaced by ... seedier operations.[0]
[0] Source: I remember reading this somewhere like ten years ago
What town was this in? We are fighting the same type of thing right now. They are trying to put in a light rail to bring in more "equity," while at the same time re-zoning the existing low income housing that they're claiming the rail is for for townhomes.
I think it’s because automobile transportation defines an entire lifestyle.
The cost of vehicle ownership needs to be offset by suburban real estate to justify it.
When much our our auto infrastructure is operating over capacity at peak times, the idea of doing anything but doubling down on automobile infrastructure means these folks will be doomed to have suboptimal transit for the rest of their lives.
Transportation alternatives only help folks who haven’t built their lives around a car.
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.
I used to confront the cops when they did this but I've grown far too lazy for that now.
In Australia this doesn't seem to happen nearly as much. The rules are enforced by the council rather than the police. It'll just be an employee of the council who walks down the street and prints off a fine for everyone parked incorrectly. Which presumably makes money for the council and covers the cost of the worker.
From a driver's perspective it makes sense: park your car on the bike lane or side walk to avoid blocking car traffic. Never mind blocked cyclists or pedestrians.
I've sometimes considered (but never followed through) parking my bicycle on the car lane. (Ie. Next to a police car.)
As a passive aggressive gesture hoping to be forced to explain to a cop that I was just trying to avoid blocking the bike lane and side walks.
Parking on a sidewalk is a violation of many rules and norms, but the one that matters the most to me is that people in wheelchairs cannot maneuver around these. I tried reporting some in my local neighborhood via 311 but it's pretty much useless (I'm fairly confident the car was an unmarked cop car anyway).
I have yelled (successfully) at ebike riders that go on the sidewalk; they ended up apologizing to me even though I speak no Spanish and they spoke little English. There are tons of kids in my neighborhood and it takes a village etc.
I'm in favor of more bike lane infrastructure, but I think the evidence being cited here doesn't line up with the claims.
The headline is "Bike lane are good for business" and immediately below it says "Study after study proves it" but:
(regarding an SF study)
> The results were mixed.
> In the other district, sales tanked relative to the number of people a shop employed
> “The takeaway is that it’s probably a minimal effect on businesses when you put in a bike lane,”
(regarding another study)
> Once again, the results were mixed.
(regarding "the most definitive study"):
> Like Poirier, Liu and Shi found that in many cases, only certain kinds of businesses benefited from the bike lanes and street improvements.
The top-line the article is trying to draw is that there's some unambiguous evidence that it's "good for business", but really some businesses benefit, some don't, and some projects have little effect. The reports they're drawing on themselves seem biased or sloppy in how they handle evidence. One of the studies cited showed that businesses on the "road diet" being studied had a _lower_ percentage growth in revenue than the "Non-road diet" 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.
This kind of deceptive summarizing isn't going to help the bike-infrastructure cause, because the opponents to this kind of project can easily pick it apart.
> 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.
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'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.
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].
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.)
> 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 live in SF a few blocks from a very controversial new bike lane. The business owners hate it. It came at a time of economic change, with inflation and layoffs etc, so there’s a lot of pressure on small businesses city-wide. The city has said sales data for that neighborhood has dropped less than the city-wide average, and has shown to be more resilient.
I was out getting coffee and overheard someone complain to a business owner about the “bike lane bad” sign. The owner repeatedly said it was bad for business, but couldn’t give an example. It was pretty heated until eventually the owner capitulated and said it was harder for him to park near his work. That was it. He wanted to park closer to work, it had no business outcomes.
Another example of a business very publicly complaining that the bike lane was killing their business was interviewed in the press. In this interview the business owner admitted he struggled to afford the loans to repair his bar after flooding (pre bike lane flooding). The business was already collapsing, and he admitted he didn’t think many people drove and parked at his bar.
The only examples I believe are the furniture and appliance stores. Bikers probably don’t pick up and shop for those items as much as car drivers. But of course I have no data.
> The only examples I believe are the furniture and appliance stores. Bikers probably don’t pick up and shop for those items as much as car drivers. But of course I have no data.
Even though I own a mini van and will happily load it with large purchases, I'm more likely to get a piece of furniture or a large appliance delivered.
That said, I think there's lots of reason to be skeptical of alleged data in general, regardless of whether it suggests a "for" or "against" position on adding bike lanes. I read the article and it often repeated "better streets = good for business", which makes total sense but it also made me realize something:
If better streets = good for business, then a corollary is that bad streets = bad for business. And I've never seen a bike lane added to a bad street without also making general improvements to that street. It stands to reason, therefore, that bike lane vs no bike lane is a hard topic to study while controlling for all other variables. Are we sure that the bike lane itself improved business or could the overall improvements to the area in general be the most significant cause?
And obviously the more important claim is that there is no evidence that bike lanes hurt business. I'm not arguing that I think they do (I have no idea and I'm certainly open to the possibility that bike lanes are good for business), but it seems to me that there are similar methodological challenges when it comes to studying this, since streets that have bike lanes might be in better overall condition than streets without if only because bike lanes in most North American cities are a relatively recent addition and so streets with bike lanes have benefited from maintenance more recently. Local politicians might also be under more pressure to fund and direct the maintenance of streets with bike lanes (maybe those streets have heavier traffic, maybe there are campaign promises to add bike lanes etc.)
From what it on the article, only one of the studies even tried to look at different kinds of streets.
Anyway, my guess is this is not much a problem of identification, as it's a problem of determination. Somebody has to go and dictate what kind of business will thrive on what streets exactly, and at the same time, where people will go in their commute, and where they will go when shopping around.
Every street trying to satisfy every need isn't working.
I think a lot of paid parking has a lot of additional stress
* trying to figure out if you are being ripped off, so you keep driving around to make sure there isn’t some much cheaper option
* in some spots, worrying about having to go back and pay additional money if you are taking too long
* worrying about leaving your car overnight
My favorite paid parking area is downtown Pomona, California where there are a ton of city-run parking lots with easy payment with very affordable prices and even an option to extend your time until the morning just in case (and it’s like $2). Zero parking stress whenever I go to see a concert there.
I would also add: legal code for theft of bikes is analogous to what we have for cars; Law Enforcement takes bike theft seriously and there is a nationwide clearing house of information on stolen bikes/parts.
I don't go exclusive for bikes locally because a) weather and b) theft. A distant third is c) safety but that's because my region has motorists who are generally bike-aware.
Local bikeshare has been a godsend for me. I own like 5 bikes but they're all either fancy or broken, but I can walk a couple blocks, almost always grab a bike immediately, and ride off.
In the city center of my perfect world I'd skip your point 2, making sure that there are easily reachable parking blocks outside the center, big enough and well connected to public transit to about any spot.
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?
It might increase business for a very small and narrow demographic, but I seriously doubt this will be the case overall.
Check out the style of bike called a bakfiets (or any other cargo bike) it's a game changer. I have carried my wife and groceries a couple of times, and also picked up lumber and tools with it.
Granted they're expensive (compared to most bikes), but it costs me about an ebike most of the time that my car goes into the shop, and my e-bakfiets has never needed any repairs that I was not able to do myself (even if you take it some place it's much cheaper).
> Check out the style of bike called a bakfiets (or any other cargo bike) it's a game changer. I have carried my wife and groceries a couple of times, and also picked up lumber and tools with it.
Okay, I did. What is your definition of lumber? The bikes I saw would only be suitable for what I would consider "small sticks".
For big grocery trips I'll use my car. But I can comfortably carry four bags of groceries using a bike rack and two large pannier bags. My bike is nothing fancy, either. The whole thing (bike, rack, panniers) is under $1000, and just uses leg power.
If someone wants to haul more on a bike, there are solutions out there.
Are you sure about that? Quite a few people going shopping are just to pick up a couple of items - they need milk for the kids' breakfast, or forgot to pick up a couple of tomatoes for dinner. There's a 15-items-or-less counter because people use it.
A bike can carry several bags, with a front basket and two side baskets.
In an area not built solely for cars, the purchasing dynamics change a lot. With a bike, you can park in front of the store and be in and out pretty quickly. You end up doing a smaller trips more often rather than large trips. You also end up having more smaller stores nearby, for daily shopping.
You still use the car for the monthly big trips to Costco, but walk or bike to fill in the odds&ends. Also, several grocery stores in our city offer delivery, so that's another option for the bulky items.
I love reading these sort of takes. It really is AND/AND. Yes, have your car, do all the car-things. But it _also_ should be safe and convenient to ride a bike. These things are not in opposition, especially since roads are so wide in most american cities, there is so so much space to really have our cake and eat it. It really pains me, looking at the downtown streets in my city, 4-6 lanes dedicated to cars, barely used, and seeing the odd bicyclist scurrying like a rat, on&off the sidewalk, hoping not to get hit by a car going way too fast, just because of all that wide open buffer space. All it takes is paint and a few bollards. And it's just too much. It takes years, if it does even happen.
I get that, but then, in actual reality, tens of millions of people, daily, in all weather, again, in the actual real world, in the netherlands, belgium, scandinavia, in wealthier countries than america, some with extreme climates, run errands with their bikes, have kids go to school, get their needs met. All without cars. Daily. In pouring rain, snow. These people do not come home wishing they had a car, which they likely have anyway. They just shrug, ugh, nasty weather, and get cozy as they kick of their shoes
So I don't know, it all feels like arguing from the gut. The gut says bikes don't have a place as a convenient or respectable means of transport in America, and therefore, arguments from geography, climate, ... are marshalled to support that position.
I live in a fairly walkable area. The supermarket is close enough that I can go multiple times a day if I want. I just buy exactly what I want when I need it.
Buying a weeks worth of food and letting half of it rot is just another symptom of car dependency.
I'm a cyclist and totally on board with this way of thinking. But this is simply not believable, and I'd like to see what confounding factors were at play:
> 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
Readit News
People don't think "car supremacy is being challenged," they think "my commute is annoying already and now it's about to get a lot more annoying."
I like bike infrastructure and use it frequently and I'm way closer to the yuppie-urbanist edge of the spectrum, but it's important to understand where people are coming from if you want to sell it to them democratically. "Car supremacy is being challenged" sounds to them like "fuck you and how you get around town," and it's unsurprising they react emotionally to that.
Assuming it is a personal attack is not rational though.
According to the article, there are apparently 40 years of studies showing these business owners that bike lanes are good for business. Business owners are usually trying to make good business. What other selling points do they need?
I don't really get what's supposed to be so special about a car that we should feel good about letting others "walk up to and lay a hand on" it.
Even construction of roads takes years--public transit takes longer. Everybody present suffers the effects of the construction for benefits that may or may not materialize in a reasonable timeframe.
As for bike infrastructure, the fundamental problem is that you cannot share car and bike infrastructure. Bikes are simply too vulnerable to cars. That means that bike infrastructure needs to be separated which, by definition, takes space away from cars. If you have a new development, you can do that since nobody has an expectation. However, if you take something away and make life more irritating for people, they're going to naturally complain. Loudly.
Finally, public transit doesn't do any good until it hits a critical mass. Modern cities don't always help that--most US cities don't have a core that everybody works in--where people work is smeared out across a geographic area. You have to reverse that, but those same people are also the people that don't want to commute anyway and want to work from home so you lose a lot of possible users of your system.
Taking away a car lane in actual reality, doesn't necessarily make driving worse. A single lane can be better for drivers, cars chugging along calmly in single file, and can be more efficient than the reptile brained jostling for position that arises when you have two parallel driving lanes.
Drivers have an adverse reaction to cyclists, specifically them. It is not rational, it is a weird freudian thing. The rational brain rarely comes into it.
Sorry, I thought this was clear from my comment: according the article, bike lanes are good for business. Rational business owners want business to be good.
The reality is a lot of small minority owned businesses couldn't survive the years of construction and reduced parking, and the trains didn't bring more shoppers through.
A lot of homes and buildings were sold as taxes went up, but the new development were all luxury style apartments.
The people who benefited were commercial developers and yuppie types, and the lower class, largely minority people who made up most of the area were pushed back into other neighborhoods.
It turns out, judging the effects of an action like development requires a lot of local context, and people can quite rationally be upset that they are going to be sacrificed for someone else's gain.
New luxury are a good thing - it means there is more housing in your city. Sure the local area looks more expensive, but rich yuppies need to live someplace. The real question is are you building enough that the poor can afford to live someplace, or pushing poor out completely. All housing starts out as luxury housing and then 20-40 years latter becomes were the poor want to live. So if you have a problem with housing costs today the problems are rooted in the decisions of 1985! You cannot correct them overnight. However crying the rich benefit so we do nothing just ensures the problems will remain in 2065.
FWIW the Civic Center area of SF used to be the theater district before BART was built through there in an extremely invasive cut and cover way, which led to theaters shuttering and being replaced by ... seedier operations.[0]
[0] Source: I remember reading this somewhere like ten years ago
The cost of vehicle ownership needs to be offset by suburban real estate to justify it.
When much our our auto infrastructure is operating over capacity at peak times, the idea of doing anything but doubling down on automobile infrastructure means these folks will be doomed to have suboptimal transit for the rest of their lives.
Transportation alternatives only help folks who haven’t built their lives around a car.
I used to confront the cops when they did this but I've grown far too lazy for that now.
I've sometimes considered (but never followed through) parking my bicycle on the car lane. (Ie. Next to a police car.)
As a passive aggressive gesture hoping to be forced to explain to a cop that I was just trying to avoid blocking the bike lane and side walks.
I have yelled (successfully) at ebike riders that go on the sidewalk; they ended up apologizing to me even though I speak no Spanish and they spoke little English. There are tons of kids in my neighborhood and it takes a village etc.
The headline is "Bike lane are good for business" and immediately below it says "Study after study proves it" but:
(regarding an SF study)
> The results were mixed.
> In the other district, sales tanked relative to the number of people a shop employed
> “The takeaway is that it’s probably a minimal effect on businesses when you put in a bike lane,”
(regarding another study)
> Once again, the results were mixed.
(regarding "the most definitive study"):
> Like Poirier, Liu and Shi found that in many cases, only certain kinds of businesses benefited from the bike lanes and street improvements.
The top-line the article is trying to draw is that there's some unambiguous evidence that it's "good for business", but really some businesses benefit, some don't, and some projects have little effect. The reports they're drawing on themselves seem biased or sloppy in how they handle evidence. One of the studies cited showed that businesses on the "road diet" being studied had a _lower_ percentage growth in revenue than the "Non-road diet" 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.
This kind of deceptive summarizing isn't going to help the bike-infrastructure cause, because the opponents to this kind of project can easily pick it apart.
https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/yorkblvd_mccormick.pdf
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'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.
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].
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.)
[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2291629
[1] https://twitter.com/JohnArnoldFndtn/status/17396966434594408...
I live in SF a few blocks from a very controversial new bike lane. The business owners hate it. It came at a time of economic change, with inflation and layoffs etc, so there’s a lot of pressure on small businesses city-wide. The city has said sales data for that neighborhood has dropped less than the city-wide average, and has shown to be more resilient.
I was out getting coffee and overheard someone complain to a business owner about the “bike lane bad” sign. The owner repeatedly said it was bad for business, but couldn’t give an example. It was pretty heated until eventually the owner capitulated and said it was harder for him to park near his work. That was it. He wanted to park closer to work, it had no business outcomes.
Another example of a business very publicly complaining that the bike lane was killing their business was interviewed in the press. In this interview the business owner admitted he struggled to afford the loans to repair his bar after flooding (pre bike lane flooding). The business was already collapsing, and he admitted he didn’t think many people drove and parked at his bar.
The only examples I believe are the furniture and appliance stores. Bikers probably don’t pick up and shop for those items as much as car drivers. But of course I have no data.
Even though I own a mini van and will happily load it with large purchases, I'm more likely to get a piece of furniture or a large appliance delivered.
That said, I think there's lots of reason to be skeptical of alleged data in general, regardless of whether it suggests a "for" or "against" position on adding bike lanes. I read the article and it often repeated "better streets = good for business", which makes total sense but it also made me realize something:
If better streets = good for business, then a corollary is that bad streets = bad for business. And I've never seen a bike lane added to a bad street without also making general improvements to that street. It stands to reason, therefore, that bike lane vs no bike lane is a hard topic to study while controlling for all other variables. Are we sure that the bike lane itself improved business or could the overall improvements to the area in general be the most significant cause?
And obviously the more important claim is that there is no evidence that bike lanes hurt business. I'm not arguing that I think they do (I have no idea and I'm certainly open to the possibility that bike lanes are good for business), but it seems to me that there are similar methodological challenges when it comes to studying this, since streets that have bike lanes might be in better overall condition than streets without if only because bike lanes in most North American cities are a relatively recent addition and so streets with bike lanes have benefited from maintenance more recently. Local politicians might also be under more pressure to fund and direct the maintenance of streets with bike lanes (maybe those streets have heavier traffic, maybe there are campaign promises to add bike lanes etc.)
Anyway, my guess is this is not much a problem of identification, as it's a problem of determination. Somebody has to go and dictate what kind of business will thrive on what streets exactly, and at the same time, where people will go in their commute, and where they will go when shopping around.
Every street trying to satisfy every need isn't working.
* there are dedicated bike lanes with barriers, taking away the stress of intermingling with bad drivers
* there is secure public parking nearby that always has open spots, taking away the stress of driving around trying to find a spot
* there are a few assorted accessibility parking spots scattered about, taking away the stress of having to walk/limp/wheelchair a far distance
* there is nearby public transit, taking away the stress of trying to get home if I’m a little messed up
I would be happy.
* trying to figure out if you are being ripped off, so you keep driving around to make sure there isn’t some much cheaper option
* in some spots, worrying about having to go back and pay additional money if you are taking too long
* worrying about leaving your car overnight
My favorite paid parking area is downtown Pomona, California where there are a ton of city-run parking lots with easy payment with very affordable prices and even an option to extend your time until the morning just in case (and it’s like $2). Zero parking stress whenever I go to see a concert there.
I don't go exclusive for bikes locally because a) weather and b) theft. A distant third is c) safety but that's because my region has motorists who are generally bike-aware.
It might increase business for a very small and narrow demographic, but I seriously doubt this will be the case overall.
Granted they're expensive (compared to most bikes), but it costs me about an ebike most of the time that my car goes into the shop, and my e-bakfiets has never needed any repairs that I was not able to do myself (even if you take it some place it's much cheaper).
Okay, I did. What is your definition of lumber? The bikes I saw would only be suitable for what I would consider "small sticks".
If someone wants to haul more on a bike, there are solutions out there.
A bike can carry several bags, with a front basket and two side baskets.
In an area not built solely for cars, the purchasing dynamics change a lot. With a bike, you can park in front of the store and be in and out pretty quickly. You end up doing a smaller trips more often rather than large trips. You also end up having more smaller stores nearby, for daily shopping.
You still use the car for the monthly big trips to Costco, but walk or bike to fill in the odds&ends. Also, several grocery stores in our city offer delivery, so that's another option for the bulky items.
So I don't know, it all feels like arguing from the gut. The gut says bikes don't have a place as a convenient or respectable means of transport in America, and therefore, arguments from geography, climate, ... are marshalled to support that position.
Here is a great video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
Buying a weeks worth of food and letting half of it rot is just another symptom of car dependency.
> 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