There’s an increasing amount of data that shows installing bike lanes and making streets more pedestrian-friendly boosts the economic fortunes of a place. But local businesses owners simply aren’t convinced. Will political fights over bike lanes ever end?
Mom-and-pop shops are usually pretty nimble at recognizing situations that will help their bottom lines . So why the blind spot here? Perhaps it’s that attention gravitates to horror stories—andI spoke to Cindy Hughes, a co-owner of the hair salon Fast Phil’s in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She said business plummeted 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.
, will come out next May. 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. Tooling around town in a car is so normal to them that cycling seems weird and unusual—despiteAnd there’s a negativity bias.
Psychology trumps all! Who knew, right? The snarling divide between store owners and bike-lane advocates seems apiece with 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 of bike lanes—and got ferocious blowback from residents and business owners who furiously claimed there weren’t enough cyclists to warrant installing lanes. Now, she notes wryly, the lanes are so bustling with activity that opponents have flipped to claiming the problem is the opposite: There are too many cyclists getting in the way of cars.
Maybe bike lanes will always be fraught, until enough of the public is finally in a true lather about climate change—and it seems reckless toCrises, 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.
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