On a lot of streets, won't the only way to do this be to eliminate parking on one side of the street? Should be interesting.
If you are not a resident the majority of non-metered parking is not legal for you to park in.
The metered parking has strict maximum time limits and they enforce parking aggressively. It can be very hard to find a parking space at all.
If you need to travel in for business/pleasure in a car you basically are forced to either go to a subway/train station with a parking lot and then park there and take the subway/train/bus into Cambridge, or you will need to go in and have a parking garage ($$) to park at, and then walk a long way.
It is seriously stressful to use a car in Cambridge and Somerville.
It's already so dense & hard to use cars that the retail businesses don't really have anything they can complain about. By locating their business their they already decided to be hostile to customers who want to use a car.
It sounds like they are not charging enough for parking, if that's the case.
Overall it's pretty clearly been a net gain, but there's definitely some short term pain there.
The complaints are likely a combination of general aversion to change, the fact that most retailers are likely drivers and identify as such and look at bike improvements as an attack on their group, and media reporting that focuses on those who lie on the extremes.
I feel like these bike-centric arguments do well in very dense cities like NYC but don't translate as well to places like Boston where there's just as much reason to go into Boston as there is to go out of Boston.
That generalization is vague to the point of uselessness. It really depends on the nature of the business in question.
I fully support the law, but given that the proprietors treat us very well and know my wife by name, I haven't tried too hard to change their mind.