Intro
When a city builds new bicycle lanes, businesses are often the first to oppose them. In fact, when Amsterdam was transforming into the biking city it is today, the strongest opposition came from businesses that sent death threats to reformers and required them to have bodyguards. However, when Amsterdam built the lanes, the city surveyed the businesses to see if they wanted the bike lanes taken away. They said no. Why is this?
The Battle Over Parking Space
The strongest argument is that the businesses who oppose biking lanes argue that they will lose parking. This point is entirely valid for the first months. The priority to bikes will reduce the need for car parking by increasing the number of bikes and reducing the number of cars that need to be parked. Also, a street may have a two-way bike lane on one side and car parking on the other. In addition, there are also side streets and underground parking decks that are – at most – a five-minute walk away. Finally, there are side streets to park your car, side streets with no bike lanes, and vice versa, with bike lanes on the side streets and cars on the main street.
Benefiting Retail Sales
When the parking debate is over, and the bike lanes have been built, the businesses start seeing significant retail sales growth. In 2012, a study found that after the construction of a bike lane on 9th Avenue, businesses found a 49% increase in retail sales, compared to a 3% increase in the rest of Manhattan. A broader study of NYC’s bike lanes in 2014 found a 24% increase in retail sales on streets with protected bike lanes compared to streets without. In Salt Lake City, a 2015 study showed a sales hump for the good that arrived with new bike lanes. Over in San Francisco, new bike lanes were installed. After this, two-thirds of merchants reported that this improved business. Only 4% reported losses.
Boosting Land Value
Bike lanes also increase land value, especially residential land value. In many Canadian cities, bike lanes were included in a neighborhood’s “Livability Index,” and bike lanes could significantly increase land value. In the U.S., scientists are studying how bike lanes can improve land value, and their results say exponentially. According to a 2004 study in Indianapolis, Ind., homes within one kilometer of the city’s Monon Trail sold for 11% more than similar homes farther away. In 2006, a University of Delaware paper collected studies from the past years and found that bike paths do increase home value. The paper said homes within 50 meters of a bike path had at least $8,800 more in value than homes farther away.
Bike Lanes Make Jobs
When you build a bike lane, you use more workers than when you make a road. This creates extra jobs that would have otherwise been lost due to the building of car roads. Bike lanes are also cheaper. A Canadian report 2014 said that bike lanes use as low as $20,000 per/km compared to $1,200,000 per/km for widening a road for cars. In 2011, a U.S. report that analyzed 58 bike projects in 11 cities found that for every million dollars spent on bicycle infrastructure, 11.4 local jobs were created compared to 7.8 jobs for road projects.
Bike Lanes Attract Talented Workers
Richard Florida from the University of Toronto stated that talented workers are likelier to bike. It would help if you built high-quality bike lanes and paths to attract these workers to your city. Across America, cities are investing in bicycle infrastructure that attracts flocks of high-tech workers. If you want evidence, research Amazon’s plans to build a new headquarters. They mention bike lanes twice.
Bicycling is a big part of the future. It has to be. There’s something wrong with a society that drives a car to workout in a gym.
Nye-American Scientist
