Bike lanes are good for business, but store owners still hate them
Businesses hate bike lanes. Sure, they reduce pollution, slow the pace
of climate change, cut traffic fatalities, and make cities healthier and
more pleasant. But they also take away parking spaces, which makes it
tougher for shoppers to load up their cars with piles of stuff.
Freaked-out business
owners
have been fighting bike
lanes
coast to coast, in cities from San Diego to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
They worry — not unreasonably — that anything that makes it harder for
customers to get to their stops will eat into their already precarious
margins.
“As someone whose family had a small business when I was growing up, I
know how invested you get in it,” says Joseph Poirier, a senior
researcher at the urban-planning consultancy Nelson Nygaard. “It’s your
whole life. Anything you think could threaten that, even if the
government and their consultants tell you it’s not going to be a
problem, is very scary. It makes sense.”
It’s also wrong. Four decades’ worth of research proves it. I know this
because I’ve read every study and report I could find that looked
specifically at the economics of bike lanes since 1984 — 32 research
articles, to be exact. The results show that making streets friendlier
for
bikes
— and sidewalks friendlier for pedestrians — is actually good for
business. The rise of “complete streets” and “road
diets,”
as urban planners call them, has been a huge boon to businesses in
cities.
I won’t walk you through every study, because most of them actually use
survey data. Do you think bike lanes discourage shopping? How much do
you spend when you ride your bike here? Surveys aren’t the most
reliable way to look at this question. People lie, they misremember,
they get stuff wrong. And anecdotal experience tends to loom too large.
One angry customer who complains about not being able to find
parking
trumps the 10 who rode their bikes to your shop and didn’t say boo.
More confoundingly, survey after survey has shown that business owners
overestimate how many of their customers
drive
to their stores, versus walking or biking. In a study of the effects of
street improvements on a shopping corridor in Los
Angeles published
in 2012, more than half of the store owners on the bike-laned part of
the boulevard thought most of their customers drove. The actual number
was 15%.
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.
That cuts the number of useful studies to just about half a dozen. Here,
in brief, is what they tell us.
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.
Was the spike in business because more cyclists came to shop? Rowe, a
careful researcher, declines to make that leap. “It would be logical to
assume that more bicyclists were coming to the NBD because of the new
facility,” he writes, “but no conclusion can be made to connect mode
choice to economic performance.” Still, there’s no mistaking the data:
Adding bike lanes certainly didn’t hurt sales — and may have boosted
them dramatically.
A year later, the New York City Department of Transportation conducted
the same kind of study on a larger scale, examining sales-tax data in
seven retail-heavy
neighborhoods.
A few were plaza-type hubs; the others were more linear retail
corridors. All had been through the kind of extensive changes to
pedestrian access, mass transit, traffic calming, landscaping, and bike
paths that New York was pushing at the time. The results were striking.
Compared with the overall business climate in each borough, sales in the
bike-friendly areas soared by 84 percentage points in Brooklyn, 9
percentage points in Manhattan, and 32 percentage points in the Bronx.
“Better streets,” the report concludes, “provide benefits to businesses
in all types of neighborhoods,” from “lower-income neighborhoods with
‘mom & pop’ retail” to “glitzier areas with sky-high rents.”
The next couple of studies got even more specific. In 2018, Joseph
Poirier, the urban planner I quoted earlier, looked at sales data from
three retail neighborhoods in San
Francisco
with newly installed bike lanes. Drawing on everything from industry
coding conventions to map data, he was able to draw detailed
distinctions among hundreds of businesses: what they sold (retail versus
restaurants), where they were located (right next to a bike lane versus
a few blocks away), and who their customers were (coffee shops serving
locals, say, versus a furniture store serving the entire city).
The results were mixed. In two of the three districts, shops and
restaurants serving locals did way better than places serving a wider
area. In the other district, sales tanked relative to the number of
people a shop employed, suggesting that bike lanes gave an advantage to
smaller businesses. “The takeaway is that it’s probably a minimal effect
on businesses when you put in a bike lane,” Poirer says. “That actually
makes a lot of sense. If you think of a busy downtown district, there’s
not that many parking spaces relative to the number of people who come
to the business.” In this case, bike lanes didn’t seem to help
businesses much. But overall, it didn’t hurt them.
In 2019 Poirer was on a team that did another study of San Francisco.
They looked at businesses directly
adjacent to
two kinds of bike infrastructure — Class II, which creates dedicated
bike lanes denoted by a paint stripe, and Class III, where signs
instruct cars and bikes to share the street. (Either way, blocks with
the new lanes lost an average of three parking spaces.) Once again, the
results were mixed. On Class II lanes, bars and barber shops and banks
enjoyed increases in sales, while furniture stores and gas stations were
more likely to experience decreases. Older businesses tended to decline
more than new ones. Overall, in the year after the bike infrastructure
went in, businesses on Class II streets lost a median of $27,921
compared with $19,390 for those on Class III lanes. But similar shops
that weren’t on a bike lane lost $25,296. When it came to bike lanes,
there were lots and lots of winners. But there were some losers, too.
The most definitive study, to my eye, came in 2020. Jenny Liu and Wei
Shi, researchers at Portland State University in Oregon produced a
260-page report looking at neighborhoods that got bike lanes and other
street improvements in
Portland, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Memphis. The team
cross-referenced financial information like sales taxes with geographic
data, so they could tell exactly where businesses were in relation to
the street improvements. They ran three kinds of econometric analyses on
each site. And they looked not only at revenue but also at the number of
employees — per business and in total — in each study area. “I was
really trying to be rigorous methodologically, to provide the kind of
evidence that people can use to talk to their communities,” says Liu,
the director of the Center for Urban Studies at Portland State.
Bike lanes don't hurt the shops next to them. They usually help bring in
customers.
Like Poirier, Liu and Shi found that in many cases, only certain kinds
of businesses benefited from the bike lanes and street improvements.
Food and beverage did better; retail did worse. And just slapping a bike
lane on a hectic thoroughfare didn’t do anyone any good. “On really
large streets with high traffic volumes or speeds, even if you add a
bike lane or pedestrian improvements, it still isn’t really inviting,”
Liu says. “Just having street calming doesn’t always have positive
results.”
But overall, Liu’s team found, retail areas benefited from better
streets. Sometimes nothing changed, but more often the areas near bike
lanes wound up with more employees and more revenue. That was true in
Portland, at two sites in San Francisco, one site in Minneapolis (at the
other, retail did better than food), and one site in Memphis (at the
other, food did a bit better than retail). Across the country, again and
again, the numbers told the same story: Either “business activity
remained pretty much constant,” Liu says, or “certain types of
businesses became much more prosperous.”
Back in the 1960s, when the advent of suburban flight and
climate-controlled malls began to draw business away from America’s once
thriving downtowns, cities tried to stanch the flow by banning cars on
shopping streets. It was called, not exactly trippingly,
“pedestrianization,”
and it was a disaster. Pedestrian-only plazas couldn’t compete with the
Golden Age of the Automobile, and many downtowns turned into boarded-up
wastelands. That extinction event is still encoded in the genetic
memories of today’s retailers and restaurateurs.
But things have changed. Nowadays, online retail is crushing
brick-and-mortar worse than any half-assed pedestrian plaza ever could.
What’s more, demand for new homes means lots of cities are putting them
downtown, trading daytime workers for all-the-time residents close
enough to ride a bike. COVID showed
us
it’s worth giving up parking spaces for outdoor restaurants. America’s
cities are undergoing nothing short of a total rethink of what and
whom downtowns are
for.
You can pack way more bikes than cars into a small space — and that
means way more shoppers.
Nationwide numbers
of bike lanes are tough to come by. By one count, there are nearly
20,000
miles
of bike-ready paths in the United States, but that includes rural routes
and trails. Still, city after city is working to create European-style
streets.
Portland
has over 430 miles of bike lanes, about the same as
Chicago;
New York
City
has more than 1,500; Los Angeles has
added
almost 1,000 miles since 2010. And every new mile of bike lane per
square mile of city increases the number of
cyclists by 1%. The
training wheels are about to come off the “complete street” movement.
Now, advocates and policymakers should be honest about all this. Even if
bike lanes boost revenues and employment overall, some individual
businesses are going to win and some are going to lose. An older
business selling heavier goods, or drawing from a wider watershed for
its customer base, might well be in trouble. “Newer businesses who are
thrilled with density and development around them are pivoting to a
customer who’s younger, who’s arriving on a scooter or a bike,” says
Larisa Ortiz, a managing director at the urban-planning consultancy
Streetsense. “But this process of evolution toward bike lanes and
mobility does not come without loss.”
One way I’d propose to help businesses adjust to the total remaking of
the urban landscape is the most American solution of all: Just hand them
some money. All you’d have to do is build funds into the budgets for
street-improvement projects to compensate adjacent businesses for any
sales they wind up losing. If your business takes a hit from all the
bikes, you get a pay-out.
The most effective way to deal with opposition from local businesses is
to just get the bike lanes built. Before-and-after surveys tend to show
that in the long run, everyone winds up satisfied. “It’s a political
question, and oftentimes it’s a very divided community when it comes to
these types of projects,” Poirier says. “But once a street is changed,
generally speaking, after six months or a year, nobody remembers what it
used to look like. It’s the new normal.” All the data in the world may
prove that bike lanes are good for business. But nothing beats
experiencing them.