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Comment by dionidium | Hacker News Reader

The belief that the opposite is true is so entrenched that business owners in Manhattan vehemently opposed banning cars on 14th St for fear that it would devastate their businesses. Of course, nothing of the sort happened. The cars were banned and nothing happened except that the street got a lot quieter and safer.

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Based on feedback from local businesses in early 2020 (pre-Covid), ~40% of food and beverage businesses reported that business had become either "worse" or "much worse" since the changes. Reports from "dry retail" businesses are slightly better and service businesses slightly worse.

This is compared with <20% of businesses that reported any kind of improvement in business conditions.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5bc63eb90b77bd20c50c5... (page 21)

Traffic also increased substantially on some of the nearby streets, as expected.

A reasonable discussion on the impact of these kinds of changes can be had; but not if we're going to make up statements about what the impact of the changes was.

That depends on one's perspective. Certainly the businesses seem to have suffered, but who in NYC really cares about street-level businesses? NYC is all about high-end residential real estate. Emptying that street of makes all those apartments slightly more desirable, slightly more expensive. That in turn has a net benefit to the city's bottom line. And I would not be surprised if there were more people employed in constructing new high-end apartment buildings that there are working street-level retail.

There is an old saying that nobody who "works" in NYC can afford to live in NYC. You need passive family/investment income to support living there. The new saying might be that nobody who lives in new your can afford to live there. It is a place for people rich enough to maintain residences in multiple cities, a place for luxury crashpads servicing weekend benders. Nobody rich enough to owns a NYC apartment actually spends much time in NYC.

sort of kind of, I think you arbitrarily mix renting with owning and that changes a lot

I've lived in all of the expensive cities in the US, never interested in saving for a downpayment so its a much larger budget that worked okay with whatever job I was doing

We're at a bit of an impasse here because I simply don't find those self-reports credible. These folks are salty about the changes. They're not going to tell people that it's going swimmingly. Does it pass any kind of smell test that most of the traffic in these shops arrived by automobile? We don't need to ask them, anyway. I feel like it'd be pretty easy to set up a test to simply observe how people arrive at shops on neighboring streets.

Agreed. This is one of the most transit dense areas of ny and the country. The amount of available street parking was minuscule compared to the amount of people walking/biking/transiting on 14th.

It's not just about street parking; it's also about e.g. ability to get a taxi - taxis can't ply for hire on 14th St - and also about being able to pick-up goods from out the front of stores.

e.g. https://thevillagesun.com/busway-is-a-bust-for-stores-along-...

It would be very interesting to see more comparisons between merchant's perceptions of mobility and reality, but this[1] Toronto study is the only one I'm aware of. As expected, merchants were proven to not be credible sources.

> • 72% of visitors to the Study Area usually arrive by active transportation (by bicycle or walking). Only 4% report that driving is their usual mode of transportation.

> • Merchants overestimated the number of their customers who arrived by car. 42% of merchants estimated that more than 25% of their customers usually arrived by car.

Similarly, Toronto compared credit card transaction volume by mode in evaluating the Bloor bike lane. The area with the new bike lane saw increased card transaction volume, by slightly more than the control areas [2]. Merchants did report an increase in customers at this time.

[1] https://www.tcat.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Bike-Lanes-On...

[2] https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2017/pw/bgrd/backgroundf... (Page 15 for Moneris data).

Doesn't that study say that the merchants properly reported an increase in customers? So applying that to the NYC example, it's a reason to doubt the expectations before the change, but not necessarily the reports after.

This reads as "I don't believe it's a problem and I don't believe it when people tell me it's a problem". Why exactly do you think these merchants are salty about the changes? What reason do they have to misreport on this stuff?

Because they themselves drive down those streets.

I think it's pretty easy to think of reasons:

1. They drive to work and erroneously assume their customers also arrive by car

2. They're more likely to be old and dedicated to a car-centric society

3. They're more likely to live in outer boroughs and don't care much about neighborhood walkability

4. They heavily protested the changes and are invested in the idea that it wouldn't work

5. The minority of their customers who do drive are very loud. They hear them complain whenever they come in and so erroneously assume they're representative.

6. Self-reports are generally unreliable and inferior to actual measurement

I think I could probably think of more, if I had to.

This seems like such a convoluted way of measuring what happened.

There are very easy and very concrete ways to measure if businesses saw a drop in spending. You could look at tax receipts for the area, for one.

Instead they chose to ask peoples feelings about sales numbers...

Way WAY too many "studies" are done this way - the famous "50% can't afford a $500 unexpected expense" study for example is a survey asking people if they could spend $500 without worry.

It's cheaper, but it's not better. True investigations watch results over time and compare actual items (that still have to be determined to be significant).

This attitude is common in my city as well. So many people seem to think that if you cannot park directly in front of a business then that business will fail.

The list of businesses directly affected by proximity to traffic consists of:

1. Gas stations

Everything else does better when the storefront is nearer the road, assuming all things else are equal (ie., rear parking vs front parking). However, to do this right you often need two entrances for the business, which can complicate things.

Typical seat-of-the-pants, non-data-driven business thinking. Knee jerk pablum.

Well, maybe if I can't park my bike directly in front of it. But there's never enough space for all the cars of all the customers; car drivers are used to having to walk the last bit.

Considering the number of food-delivery cars constantly double parked along the restaurant-dense streets of my area, the restaurants would probably lose a fair bit of business if cars couldn't access them.

why can't all those trips be done by e-bike?

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