We’re well past the point where it’s a known fact that putting in bike lanes, even if you remove parking to do it, is incredibly beneficial for local businesses. Unfortunately business owners tend not to be that smart about matters outside the day-to-day running of their own business, and so they buy into fearmongering about the idea that removing parking will kill their business.
The average business has a street frontage of like 2 car parks, and when studies have been done it’s very common for those parks to be taken up for hours at a time. If your business relied on people driving to it (and isn’t in a large shopping centre with a massive parking garage), it would be completely non-viable and go out of business by the end of the month.
The latest episode of The Urbanist Agenda podcast, entitled “Some Business Owners REALLY Hate Bike Lanes (with Bike Curious)” (available on Nebula now, to the public from tomorrow or Saturday, not sure how the time zones work out—show notes, including sources, available already on Nebula without signing in), has some great discussion about this. They have some interesting theorising that part of the issue is that owners tend not to actually live near the store, while customers do. So owners are driving in to their business, and because their day-to-day experience relies on driving, the assume that must be how it is for everyone.
When the new bike lanes went in in the CBD, business owners on the affected streets estimated 43% of their customers came to them by car. In fact only 19% did. Boundary Street in West End would be another great site for this kind of infrastructure.
Add comment