The Battle Over Bike Lanes Needs a Mindset Shift
Five years ago, the city of Queens, New York, announced that it would be putting bike lanes onto a stretch of Skillman Ave — and removing 116 parking spots. Cyclists loved the plan, but local business owners got very angry. Taking out those parking spots, as they argued at protests and in letters to the city council, would ruin stores and restaurants along Skillman. "Parking here is already a nightmare," one shouted at a protest rally.
But the bike lanes were a done deal, and soon they were in place. Early this year, Jesse Coburn — an investigative writer with Streetsblog New York — wondered whether those predictions of economic collapse came true. So he asked the city's Department of Finance to give him a few years' worth of sales figures for that stretch of Skillman Ave. How had the businesses on that street fared?
Quite well, it turns out. In the year after the bike lanes arrived, businesses on Skillman saw sales rise by 12 percent, compared to 3 percent for Queens in general. What's more, that section of road saw new businesses open, while Queens overall had a net loss.
The thing is, the actual merchants along Skillman? They didn't believe it. When Coburn spoke to them and described what he'd found, only a few store owners admitted the lanes had helped. Many still insisted the lanes were killing their part of the city. And emotions ran hot: Someone scattered tacks(大头钉) on the bike lane.
This little story turns out to be a fascinating glimpse at the challenges cities face as they try to update their urban infrastructure — to clean up the air, reduce greenhouse emissions, and speed up travel by making towns more bike-friendly. There's a rising amount of data showing that installing bike lanes and making streets more pedestrian-friendly boosts the economic fortunes of a place. Removing cars and parking spots works. But the folks who run local businesses simply aren't convinced, even when their own street performs. Given that sort of mess, can political fights over bike lanes ever end?
In 2013, researchers at New York City's Department of Transportation studied seven stretches of road that had installed bike lanes or created pedestrian-friendly areas. The city analyzed the data for businesses along those routes and found that by the third year, sales grew faster on five of the streets than in the district overall, on average — up to five times faster, in fact.
Beyond New York, a survey of research from 23 cities found that bike lanes and pedestrian-friendly design didn't hurt local retail and food stores. ("Fears of disastrous consequences for local businesses are unfounded," the researchers concluded.) More recent work has shown roughly the same.
The truth is that in fairly dense areas, bikes are more efficient at moving people around. You might lose one car driver's business — but you gain shoppers who now can arrive more easily on bikes. "Cyclists and pedestrians are consumers too," notes Professor Susan Handy. Plus, streets redesigned for bikes and pedestrians tend to become more pleasant places to hang around, so "in a lot of cases, that's created much nicer environments that are really good for those businesses."
Mom-and-pop shops are usually pretty quick at recognizing situations that will help their bottom lines. So why the blind spot here? Perhaps it's that attention focuses on horror stories — and some merchants do get hit when bike lanes come in.
I spoke to Cindy Hughes, a hairdresser(理发师) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She said business fell by at least 40 percent when the city removed nearby parking to put in a bike lane. The majority of her customers drive, with many coming from nearby towns. Only a very few have shifted to cycling, and even those almost certainly won't cycle in Boston's snowy winters. So while Hughes supports bike lanes — "cyclists deserve to be safe" — she sees the parking loss as an existential risk. "Look, 90 percent of my customers drive," she told me. "For our business, the bike lanes are way worse than Covid was."
For others, the pushback is cultural, says Henry Grabar, a writer for the Slate Magazine. Small business owners are frequently drivers who commute from other parts of the city by car, Grabar points out. They're also often longtime locals. "They tend to be people with deep roots in the city, who have hung around since before the neighborhood became what it is today," he adds. Driving around town in a car is so normal to them that cycling seems weird and unusual — despite its boost from Covid, when bike sales exploded by 75 percent.
Psychology beats all! Who knew, right? The fierce divide between store owners and bike-lane advocates seems similar to our larger culture wars over climate change. If we've learned anything about culture wars, it's that data isn't much good at changing minds.
When Janette Sadik-Khan was the head of New York City's Transportation Department back in the early 2000s, she oversaw a rollout(推出) of bike lanes — and got angry blowback from residents and business owners who claimed there weren't enough cyclists to justify installing lanes. Now, she notes ironically, the lanes are so full of activity that opponents have turned to claiming the problem is the opposite: There are too many cyclists getting in the way of cars.
Maybe bike lanes will always be charged with emotion, until enough of the public is finally concerned about climate change — and it seems reckless(鲁莽的) to not have them.
Crises, after all, have a way of opening people's eyes to possibilities. During Covid, restaurants and cafés lost so much business that cities nationwide began allowing them to build curbside seating areas where people could sit, safely, in the open air. It greatly reduced parking — but because, well, shop owners didn't see any way around it. Customers loved the outdoor seating so much that cities are making it permanent: A New York City study of several streets closed during Covid found storeowners making more than before, and diners enjoying the outdoor lifestyle. If data won't change minds, customers might.