I live in Indianapolis and we added bike lanes and more parking at the same time. The real driver in retail sales has been the increase in residential units downtown. Mass transit in Indy was and still is terrible ... It takes 1.5 hours to go 6 miles.
I live 43 miles from my job, all on major interstates, in a big metro area. What good would this do? Unless you designed the city for mixed living/working/shopping in the first place, most US cities could never change to be bike first. This isn't SimCity where you can raze the whole town.
My city did that. Only they waited for most of the businesses to fold first. What a great reward for weathering the recession those businesses got. Turns out when you kill parking in favor of bike lanes in a small city that does a lot of business by being a commerce destination for the surrounding towns it doesn't work well. Also nobody bikes here because the entire city is hills (plenty of people walk though) so bike lanes are an attempt to solve a problem that doesn't exist but they tried it anyway because they're politically fashionable, details of the specific situation be damned
Adding more bike paths to reach city center from suburbs and locking down city center for cars should follow next. There are plenty of research which shows that slow traffic brings more business to shops
"transferred the benefit of lots of public property from car commuters and small retail businesses"
I wonder how many studies have to be done to prove small businesses grow when bike lanes are added. Box stores 20miles away suffer. I'm okay with that.
The dedicated bicycle infa that does exist (greenway) somewhat mitigates this for me. You can't get everywhere via dedicated bike path - but it's better than most midwestern cities, in my experience.
Nobody lives in those downtown areas anymore. It doesn't make sense to make a walking mall in an area where few people will live in walking distance.
Obviously mass transit can help if it is reliable, cheap, and expansively deployed in the city, but that's not a typical case in the US. Otherwise you're going to have to accommodate cars, and lots of them. That means big fast busy roads that are unfriendly to pedestrians.
Also, it's nothing for me to bike 5 miles to go somewhere by myself, but if I have to bring my 3 year old twins along and then haul several kilos of groceries or other heavy/bulky items back that bike ride starts to look rather impractical.
I lived in a city that made a conscious effort to retrofit a bike network with many dedicated routes over the past decade and it has paid off with a massive increase in riders (mode share has passed 20%). There was a corresponding decline in people traveling by car, despite the city also expanding the road network by twice the amount at the same time (they didn't reduce funding).
Building offices and commercial buildings closer to homes. Most cities are not bikeable because it's just too far to get to anything that isn't a home.
You miss my point. Bus lanes are economic and political non starters in cities without sufficient residential density. Not enough people to use them to justify the cost to the average city official. And all the bike lanes in the world aren’t going to help a business if enough people don’t live within biking distance. Denser housing is key, and it also drives down rents for retail.
The first step to improving bikeability is not closing traffic lanes, it's improving density. For example be taxing parking space appropriately. There is no good reason why supermarkets should be so far apart from each other in a city or why commutes need to be two hours long. Where I live I can reach five supermarkets in less than ten minutes on a bike.
Changing the way cars function inside the city is only part of what would need to change. Near me things just aren't laid out well for pedestrians. It would take me about an hour to walk to the nearest grocery store (not counting corner stores, because all they sell is junk food). Biking should be much shorter, though I can't say I've ever tried. We would need to stop the trend of having a small number of large stores and move back towards having a large number of smaller stores. That comes with it's own trade offs in planning an efficient city.
The other thing worth mentioning is that bikes/pedestrians can go anywhere cars can, but the opposite is not true. If we made streets that were "bike only" cars wouldn't be able to access them. Cars are on a pedestal not only because of convenience and speed, but because they're the lowest common denominator.
I lived in Detroit next to a major corridor (Cass Ave) that got protected bike lanes going both ways and can confirm, it was _awesome_. The biggest differentiator I noticed is that the bar for how "hard core" of a biker you had to be to use the infrastructure went way down. You started to see many more families and women bike than you saw before.
The problem I repeatedly see with public opinion on both bike infrastructure and public transit is that both benefit and suffer from network effects.
When the network is already large, adding a new connection is amazing: the whole network gets access to that new node, and the new node gets access to the whole network.
When the network is tiny - as it is in most American cities - adding a new connection looks pitiful: the connection often looks like a "road to nowhere" that does nothing to solve the broader problem.
I think that one thing that can help this is communicating any improvements within the context of a broader plan, e.g. "This bike lane connects an additional 3,000 residents to the downtown business district. More importantly, it will serve as a central artery in connecting an additional 20,000 residents over the next 5 years."
I was speaking of a specific city that has added extensive bike lanes. No idea of causality. Maybe a lot more people have decided to drive in and out all of a sudden.
I was mostly objecting to the comment up-thread implying that bike lanes are inherently win win. They can be a good idea on net while increasing driving times.
My rust belt city removed main street parking in favor of bike lanes to the same effect but they did it as business was picking back up post-recession. It really pissed people off because all the businesses that folded were the ones that weathered the recession. Our city is somewhat of a commerce destination for the surrounding towns. When they decided to go the bike friendly route all the commerce redistributed itself. The businesses off of main street benefited greatly. They did bring back the prior on-street parking on most of main commercial area of main street and several years later there's a lot less boarded up store fronts.
I think the lesson is that you can't just cave to the bike special interests group or the walk-ability lobby, you have to look at how the economics of your city work and make sure that any changes you make will not shoot it in the foot.
This statement from the article would have me very worried about surviving the next downturn if I were a Toronto business owner.
>Toronto reports business receipts are up along the corridor as well, albeit a tiny 0.3 percent. The rest of the city was up 3.8 percent over the same period.
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