Bike lanes are good for business | Hacker News Reader

Bike lanes are good for business

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55 pointscainxinth101 comments

Of course. Because cars don't spend money, people do. The more efficiently humans are packed together, the more money-per-square-foot there is available. You could have a drive-thru with six lanes and a mile long driveway, and it still wouldn't do the same numbers as the dingy coffee stand by a bus station at rush hour. That a bicycle is more space efficient than automobiles shouldn't be surprising to anybody.

You find it so obvious to be almost snarky about it. Almost no one in my city thinks like that, most see bikes only as recreational vehicle, or as the last resort for deviants and DUI-convicts. For these people, shopkeepers included, a bikelane is an assault on parking and therefore common sense.

Fascinating that your perspective and 'common sense' is to be the complete opposite to mine. It is high time americans see the great future that is non-car focused but people orientated.

I'm always surprised how emotional people get when dealing with anything that might challenge car supremacy. Supposedly, the market is supposed to make people lean towards what makes them more money, but that only works if the people involved behave rationally.

A local metro area put in a light rail train down through a major city street. It was sold as a way to reduce congestion and bring more people and development opportunities through.

The reality is a lot of small minority owned businesses couldn't survive the years of construction and reduced parking, and the trains didn't bring more shoppers through.

A lot of homes and buildings were sold as taxes went up, but the new development were all luxury style apartments.

The people who benefited were commercial developers and yuppie types, and the lower class, largely minority people who made up most of the area were pushed back into other neighborhoods.

It turns out, judging the effects of an action like development requires a lot of local context, and people can quite rationally be upset that they are going to be sacrificed for someone else's gain.

What town was this in? We are fighting the same type of thing right now. They are trying to put in a light rail to bring in more "equity," while at the same time re-zoning the existing low income housing that they're claiming the rail is for for townhomes.

You should fight for automated light metro. Just put the light rail on elevated viaducts (which wouldn't cost much more), and run the same trains fully automated (normally an option on those trains). The whole thing becomes cheap to run (which is where the costs are in modern cities), and much faster.

One problem is that decent transportation makes areas nicer and more appealing, so more people want to live there, which of course makes the existing housing stock more expensive. This is a consequence of decent transportation being so rare, sadly.

This particular area has had very heavy bus coverage for years. It actually has fewer buses servicing it now, and to get out of the neighborhood you have to switch over to the light rail.

Why did taxes go up? That seems to be separate from the issue of construction causing an inconvenience, but is apparently a decisive factor.

FWIW the Civic Center area of SF used to be the theater district before BART was built through there in an extremely invasive cut and cover way, which led to theaters shuttering and being replaced by ... seedier operations.[0]

[0] Source: I remember reading this somewhere like ten years ago

The taxes were based on land valuation. This was already a relatively low income part of town, and having direct access to the light rail was seen as a value add. It was likely also a secondary effect of the new luxury style apartments that were built.

I lived relatively close to it for a few years (all before the rail was put in and during construction), but definitely wouldn't live there again.

Light rail is the worst of all worlds! Rail should run on its own right-of-way, ideally grade-separated. It shouldn't be sitting in traffic.

The short term effects from installing transit are overall worth the long term benefits, but I fully agree it can be hard if you are seeing the short term ill effects.

New luxury are a good thing - it means there is more housing in your city. Sure the local area looks more expensive, but rich yuppies need to live someplace. The real question is are you building enough that the poor can afford to live someplace, or pushing poor out completely. All housing starts out as luxury housing and then 20-40 years latter becomes were the poor want to live. So if you have a problem with housing costs today the problems are rooted in the decisions of 1985! You cannot correct them overnight. However crying the rich benefit so we do nothing just ensures the problems will remain in 2065.

> I'm always surprised how emotional people get when dealing with anything that might challenge car supremacy.

People don't think "car supremacy is being challenged," they think "my commute is annoying already and now it's about to get a lot more annoying."

I like bike infrastructure and use it frequently and I'm way closer to the yuppie-urbanist edge of the spectrum, but it's important to understand where people are coming from if you want to sell it to them democratically. "Car supremacy is being challenged" sounds to them like "fuck you and how you get around town," and it's unsurprising they react emotionally to that.

I think the frustrating part is that if less people were driving there would be less traffic. Bike lanes won't change the equation as heavily but mass transit sure would.

Also when no working alternative is being offered. Just shutting down car access and offering a bike is difficult to swallow. Add to that a workable public transport network and we may talk. Some people love to drive but having the option to sip your coffee and read the news in a not-overcrowded bus going from across your street to the office building with say only one change in the same time driving requires, is an option quite difficult to beat.

> Some people love to drive but having the option to sip your coffee and read the news in a not-overcrowded bus going from across your street to the office building with say only one change in the same time driving requires,

I don't believe anywhere with mass transit offers this kind of experience during commute hours.

I think this is a fairy tale story about transit that just plain does not and cannot exist for a meaningful amount of time, especially as cities become more and more densely populated.

London UK and a bunch of other European cities have this. Not sure where you got this idea.

No, not really. Public transit is almost always slower than driving[0]. It's just nicer if you can sit and read instead of having to drive.

[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61077-0

This was basically my experience on the Google bus. Probably it’s only feasible when you have well-behaved riders (even the toilet was clean) and you don’t cheap out on capacity.

I've experienced nice commute trips on busses in multiple US cities.

Maybe places you've lived haven't had nice transit or you didn't live in a good place to take advantage of it, but I promise it's out there. It's just hugely underfunded and struggling because of all the concessions we've made to private vehicle ownership.

I ride a public bus from oakland across to SF a couple mornings a week (used to be every morning before covid) and that trip is basically like this. 3/4 full bus, no one standing, good cell coverage most of the way.

The trip home was always way more full though.

Well welcome to the world outside the us. I take the bus in front of my house, take a seat to the train station and read the news while munching a banana, take the commuter train where I can work on my laptop for half an hour, walk 10 minutes (or take another bus) to the office and all in less time than I'd need to drive. It doesn't matter whether you believe it or not, it's just reality.

... but these studies aren't on "shutting down car access" and converting to _only_ bike and pedestrian access. Adding a bike lane still allows cars, just not on that narrow strip of pavement. Frankly, it's not even eroding "car supremacy" in that in urban streets with bike lanes, cars will still take up the majority of the street.

I think we need to start talking about how dedicated bike lanes can benefit _drivers_:

- more people getting around by bike (b/c it feels safe) means fewer cars in front of you

- absence of dedicated / protected bike lanes pushes bikes (and ebikes, scooters) etc into the main part of traffic, which can slow down traffic overall, and makes driving more stressful (b/c drivers have to watch for these). Creating bike infrastructure gives them a safe place to go that isn't directly in front of your car.

- more people arriving to a destination by bike/scooter/whatever means less competition in that area for the street parking that does exist

"Just shutting down car access and offering a bike is difficult to swallow."

Is anyone suggesting that?

From the areas I've lived in, the same people pushing for limiting cars, more bikes are also anti-growth when it comes to housing. Like yeah I'd ride a bike if I lived a mile or two from the office but I can't afford that so have some understanding on the less privileged.

A mile or two? A typical rider can comfortably cover 10km in 30 minutes without very much exertion if it's not particularly hilly.

If you widen the number of people who can bike, you are more likely to include slower cyclists.

A typical urban cyclist in the Netherlands ("not particularly hilly") averages about 15 km/hour. https://holland-cycling.com/blog/260-amsterdam-has-slowest-c... .

Okay, in much of the US even 6 miles from office is still too expensive to live. Point being in the US, many bike and transit activists are also NIMBYs. Good for Europe that it's not that way.

In the area I live, there's a lot of overlap between urbanists and cycling. Cycling is a great complement to to urban, car-free lifestyles.

I can picture a spandex-wearing boomer that likes to hitch his bike to the back of a car and drive several miles away to a recreational bike trail for exercise, then drive home as being a NIMBY. I think that's a totally different kind of person, though, than someone who wants to commute to work and pick up groceries using their bike instead of a car, though. And to be fair, a lot cycling has historically been catering to the spandex recreational cyclists.

"Car supremacy is being challenged" sounds to them like "fuck you and how you get around town," and it's unsurprising they react emotionally to that.

Assuming it is a personal attack is not rational though.

According to the article, there are apparently 40 years of studies showing these business owners that bike lanes are good for business. Business owners are usually trying to make good business. What other selling points do they need?

Why do you assume people aren't behaving rationally?

Even construction of roads takes years--public transit takes longer. Everybody present suffers the effects of the construction for benefits that may or may not materialize in a reasonable timeframe.

As for bike infrastructure, the fundamental problem is that you cannot share car and bike infrastructure. Bikes are simply too vulnerable to cars. That means that bike infrastructure needs to be separated which, by definition, takes space away from cars. If you have a new development, you can do that since nobody has an expectation. However, if you take something away and make life more irritating for people, they're going to naturally complain. Loudly.

Finally, public transit doesn't do any good until it hits a critical mass. Modern cities don't always help that--most US cities don't have a core that everybody works in--where people work is smeared out across a geographic area. You have to reverse that, but those same people are also the people that don't want to commute anyway and want to work from home so you lose a lot of possible users of your system.

> if you take something away and make life more irritating for people

Taking away a car lane in actual reality, doesn't necessarily make driving worse. A single lane can be better for drivers, cars chugging along calmly in single file, and can be more efficient than the reptile brained jostling for position that arises when you have two parallel driving lanes.

Drivers have an adverse reaction to cyclists, specifically them. It is not rational, it is a weird freudian thing. The rational brain rarely comes into it.

> A single lane can be better for drivers, cars chugging along calmly in single file, and can be more efficient than the reptile brained jostling for position that arises when you have two parallel driving lanes.

The only way that happens is if people now refuse to use that road because the capacity has reduced. People who used to drive that road but now are not driving on the road are still pissed off about that bike lane.

Bikes are in conflict with cars. Full stop. Quit trying to bamboozle people about this--they are not fooled, you come off as a liar, and you just piss them off.

And you don't have to lie--car-centric culture is a huge problem. The fact the people need to keep driving long past an age when they should be is a problem. The fact that people need to drive simply to have access to certain goods and services is a problem. Solving these issues and making cars less necessary and less desirable also makes life better for bikes.

When sufficient people can avoid a car such that your two lane road is now underutilized enough that shutting down a lane doesn't matter, no one will care that you put in that bike lane. That should be your goal if you don't want people to oppose you.

I really do disagree here. There's been plenty of road diets in my area where 4 lanes where reduced to 2, and this had no effect on travel time, capacity.

Of course, reality, it's multifaceted etc etc.... but more lanes/more capacity is only true on paper, not in practice.

> There's been plenty of road diets in my area where 4 lanes where reduced to 2, and this had no effect on travel time, capacity.

Sorry. I'm going to ask for a reference.

I'm also going to challenge you because I have dealt with an old city with sections with mostly 2 lane roads and driving through it SUUUUUUCKS (see: Pittsburgh--particularly the areas Wilkinsburg, Squirrel Hill, Shadyside, Bloomfield, etc.).

In all of the places that I have lived (all in the US), roads are expensive enough that they rarely get overbuilt past 2 lanes unless required by capacity (generally) or by law (rarer). A 4 lane road almost always indicates that the original 2 lane road hit 100% capacity at least some hours of the day and was painful enough that somebody, somewhere had enough political pressure to kick off the project to upgrade the number of lanes.

I am trying to think of a 4 lane road anywhere I have lived that could be downgraded to 2 lanes and am really struggling. Maybe Western Pennsylvania, somewhere. Some of the towns where the mills and mines collapsed probably have some overbuilt roads.

It's kind of interesting because I find that this discussion mirrors the people pushing roundabouts in the US without understanding traffic differences. UK traffic is medium speed and medium density for most of the day in most areas where roundabouts work best. The problem is that US traffic tends to be 100+% during a couple of hours in the day and much lower utilization at other times--roundabouts fail really hard in those conditions.

> Bikes are in conflict with cars. Full stop.

No, they aren't. In particular, if you're a driver going from one side of the city to the other (or whatever) if the portion of cars in front of you which are local, short trips without much cargo could instead be converted to (e)bikes alongside you, you'd face less traffic and arrive sooner.

And for the last couple years, I've heard _so many_ people talk about how much they enjoyed riding their ebikes, I think we're really at the point where a bunch more of those shorter trips _can_ convert away from cars. The infrastructure that lets people feel safe without a car around them and _also_ gets them out of traffic (and prevents them from slowing down cars) can be a benefit for both drivers and cyclists in the right context.

Why do you assume people aren't behaving rationally?

Sorry, I thought this was clear from my comment: according the article, bike lanes are good for business. Rational business owners want business to be good.

Bike lanes in the areas studied. That doesn't mean all bike lanes are good for business...

Where I live with have extensive bike lanes. They are good for every bar and ice cream shop along the way: people use those bike lanes on nice Saturdays for a ride to the bars and ice cream shops on the way, and you can see all the bike racks outside of those businesses along the route. However this is bad for businesses not on the bike route as they lose out. It is also neutral for all businesses along the route that are not about alcohol or ice cream - nobody goes to the furniture store on a bike.

I drive by furniture stores in my car, and let me tell ya, nobody's going to furniture stores anymore.

If you really want to spends thousands of dollars on a couch or kitchen table, just ask the store to deliver.

The point is that people who buy furniture drive to the store. The store might deliver or they might take it themselves (if they have a truck they will save the delivery fee). It isn't just furniture - that is just an example. The bike lane is about alcohol and ice cream: nothing else! No clothing, groceries, restaurants, paint, golf simulation, gymnastics, dance, or dollar store gets customers from the bike lane. (I'm thinking of a specific strip mall in my town) Even the local bike store gets most customers by car!

Oh weird, because I biked to my local coffee shop this afternoon to work on my computer. On the way, I stopped at a pharmacy to pick up a prescription, and then the local bakery to pick up a loaf of bread. After I'm done working, I plan to stop at the bike shop and the grocery store on my way home. There's no alcohol or ice cream on the errands list, but that's not a bad idea.

And today is a Thursday even!

I do similiar things- however people like us are outliers.

Cars are the suburban denizen's power armor. They are not a tool, they are an extension of the self. Walk up to a person in a car and lay your hand on the hood - they will likely react as if they felt a stranger's caress on the small of their back

Would you react well to a stranger touching your many-thousand-dollar bike? Or your phone or laptop?

I don't really get what's supposed to be so special about a car that we should feel good about letting others "walk up to and lay a hand on" it.

Those too are sometimes considered extensions of the self, but they're not part of this discussion.

The above was discussing lack of rationality from car drivers.

But what about the reaction is specific to cars? It's a very expensive thing with paint that can be somewhat easily scratched. Unwelcome, uninvited contact by a stranger on literally any other possession would, I think, invite a similar reaction.

A stranger laying a hand on a phone is, based on experience, likely a stranger trying to steal it. It's totally rational there to be jumpy.

Someone touching your bike is a awfully close to touching you. I think it's rational to be a bit suspicious when a stranger gets that close to you, no matter what they are doing, but especially if they are touchy feely.

People touching my car will quite obviously do no damage to it or me. If I'm in the car, I may lock the doors/roll up the windows, if they aren't already. If you want to move the goalposts now and say a stranger isn't merely touching your car, but keying it, that's a different situation, and unrelated to the discussion. I don't know exactly what a rational response is to irrational behaviour. :)

I probably would, even though logically I shouldn't. My phone is unlikely to work in 4 years, so what does it matter if someone touches it (my phone my have private information that lasts longer, but the phone itself is throw away), similar for my laptop though I expect it to last longer. My bike is a tool, don't break it, don't steal it, or otherwise abuse it; but it gets scratch by dirt all the time, I don't care about fingerprints.

I live where road salt destroys cars, not someone touching it. Yet somehow people think it is important to have a nice car even though it won't be nice in a few years no matter what. It isn't even worth the investment in keeping a car nice - regular washes keep the rust away for not very much longer.

I think it’s because automobile transportation defines an entire lifestyle.

The cost of vehicle ownership needs to be offset by suburban real estate to justify it.

When much our our auto infrastructure is operating over capacity at peak times, the idea of doing anything but doubling down on automobile infrastructure means these folks will be doomed to have suboptimal transit for the rest of their lives.

Transportation alternatives only help folks who haven’t built their lives around a car.

Even in NYC, which generally does have pretty good bike coverage in theory, people will still treat them as extra parking. Frustratingly, the most frequent offenders of this appear to be cops.

I used to confront the cops when they did this but I've grown far too lazy for that now.

From a driver's perspective it makes sense: park your car on the bike lane or side walk to avoid blocking car traffic. Never mind blocked cyclists or pedestrians.

I've sometimes considered (but never followed through) parking my bicycle on the car lane. (Ie. Next to a police car.)

As a passive aggressive gesture hoping to be forced to explain to a cop that I was just trying to avoid blocking the bike lane and side walks.

Parking on a sidewalk is a violation of many rules and norms, but the one that matters the most to me is that people in wheelchairs cannot maneuver around these. I tried reporting some in my local neighborhood via 311 but it's pretty much useless (I'm fairly confident the car was an unmarked cop car anyway).

I have yelled (successfully) at ebike riders that go on the sidewalk; they ended up apologizing to me even though I speak no Spanish and they spoke little English. There are tons of kids in my neighborhood and it takes a village etc.

Yeah, I don't have a wheelchair, but I do occasionally have one of those fold-up shopping carts that I use for getting groceries. When cars are parked on the sidewalk, it makes it extremely difficult to do anything, because there's not a ton of twisting I can do to maneuver around them. I often have to awkwardly lift the cart to put on the street, and then lift it again to put it back on the sidewalk. I hadn't even considered how bad it would be for people in wheelchairs.

Or a stroller.

Nice post but “car lane” is automobile propaganda

In Australia this doesn't seem to happen nearly as much. The rules are enforced by the council rather than the police. It'll just be an employee of the council who walks down the street and prints off a fine for everyone parked incorrectly. Which presumably makes money for the council and covers the cost of the worker.

I'm in favor of more bike lane infrastructure, but I think the evidence being cited here doesn't line up with the claims.

The headline is "Bike lane are good for business" and immediately below it says "Study after study proves it" but:

(regarding an SF study)

> The results were mixed.

> In the other district, sales tanked relative to the number of people a shop employed

> “The takeaway is that it’s probably a minimal effect on businesses when you put in a bike lane,”

(regarding another study)

> Once again, the results were mixed.

(regarding "the most definitive study"):

> Like Poirier, Liu and Shi found that in many cases, only certain kinds of businesses benefited from the bike lanes and street improvements.

The top-line the article is trying to draw is that there's some unambiguous evidence that it's "good for business", but really some businesses benefit, some don't, and some projects have little effect. The reports they're drawing on themselves seem biased or sloppy in how they handle evidence. One of the studies cited showed that businesses on the "road diet" being studied had a _lower_ percentage growth in revenue than the "Non-road diet" group (table 4), but the text of the report then decides that absolute sum of revenue growth is more important ... even the road-diet group was substantially larger both in terms of starting revenue and number of businesses.

This kind of deceptive summarizing isn't going to help the bike-infrastructure cause, because the opponents to this kind of project can easily pick it apart.

https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/yorkblvd_mccormick.pdf

> So what we need is financial data. Revenue numbers. Sales taxes. Credit-card receipts. Employment figures. That’s the good stuff. And for methodological rigor, we want to case-match our study areas to similar neighborhoods that didn’t get bike lanes — and to numbers for the city overall, to establish a baseline.

What we need is an identification strategy [0] that identifies some random or as-if-random source of variation in where bike lanes are deployed, and then compares sales data from places that do and do not get them. I'm not an expert on bike lanes, but from a quick look at the research in this article, none really has a convincing approach to this problem.

We also have lots of examples where a big observational literature says one thing, but the first time someone does an RCT, it falls apart, e.g. Vitamin D supplmements [1].

Personally, if I heard business owners saying over and over that bike lanes were hurting their sales, I would assume they knew something that was not captured in studies. (I am a biker who does not own a car, FWIW.)

[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2291629

[1] https://twitter.com/JohnArnoldFndtn/status/17396966434594408...

From what it on the article, only one of the studies even tried to look at different kinds of streets.

Anyway, my guess is this is not much a problem of identification, as it's a problem of determination. Somebody has to go and dictate what kind of business will thrive on what streets exactly, and at the same time, where people will go in their commute, and where they will go when shopping around.

Every street trying to satisfy every need isn't working.

> Personally, if I heard business owners saying over and over that bike lanes were hurting their sales, I would assume they knew something that was not captured in studies.

I live in SF a few blocks from a very controversial new bike lane. The business owners hate it. It came at a time of economic change, with inflation and layoffs etc, so there’s a lot of pressure on small businesses city-wide. The city has said sales data for that neighborhood has dropped less than the city-wide average, and has shown to be more resilient.

I was out getting coffee and overheard someone complain to a business owner about the “bike lane bad” sign. The owner repeatedly said it was bad for business, but couldn’t give an example. It was pretty heated until eventually the owner capitulated and said it was harder for him to park near his work. That was it. He wanted to park closer to work, it had no business outcomes.

Another example of a business very publicly complaining that the bike lane was killing their business was interviewed in the press. In this interview the business owner admitted he struggled to afford the loans to repair his bar after flooding (pre bike lane flooding). The business was already collapsing, and he admitted he didn’t think many people drove and parked at his bar.

The only examples I believe are the furniture and appliance stores. Bikers probably don’t pick up and shop for those items as much as car drivers. But of course I have no data.

> The only examples I believe are the furniture and appliance stores. Bikers probably don’t pick up and shop for those items as much as car drivers. But of course I have no data.

Even though I own a mini van and will happily load it with large purchases, I'm more likely to get a piece of furniture or a large appliance delivered.

That said, I think there's lots of reason to be skeptical of alleged data in general, regardless of whether it suggests a "for" or "against" position on adding bike lanes. I read the article and it often repeated "better streets = good for business", which makes total sense but it also made me realize something:

If better streets = good for business, then a corollary is that bad streets = bad for business. And I've never seen a bike lane added to a bad street without also making general improvements to that street. It stands to reason, therefore, that bike lane vs no bike lane is a hard topic to study while controlling for all other variables. Are we sure that the bike lane itself improved business or could the overall improvements to the area in general be the most significant cause?

And obviously the more important claim is that there is no evidence that bike lanes hurt business. I'm not arguing that I think they do (I have no idea and I'm certainly open to the possibility that bike lanes are good for business), but it seems to me that there are similar methodological challenges when it comes to studying this, since streets that have bike lanes might be in better overall condition than streets without if only because bike lanes in most North American cities are a relatively recent addition and so streets with bike lanes have benefited from maintenance more recently. Local politicians might also be under more pressure to fund and direct the maintenance of streets with bike lanes (maybe those streets have heavier traffic, maybe there are campaign promises to add bike lanes etc.)

In my perfect world:

* there are dedicated bike lanes with barriers, taking away the stress of intermingling with bad drivers

* there is secure public parking nearby that always has open spots, taking away the stress of driving around trying to find a spot

* there are a few assorted accessibility parking spots scattered about, taking away the stress of having to walk/limp/wheelchair a far distance

* there is nearby public transit, taking away the stress of trying to get home if I’m a little messed up

I would be happy.

One of the best ways to ensure there are spots available is to charge appropriately for them, but this has generally met with resistance.

I think a lot of paid parking has a lot of additional stress

* trying to figure out if you are being ripped off, so you keep driving around to make sure there isn’t some much cheaper option

* in some spots, worrying about having to go back and pay additional money if you are taking too long

* worrying about leaving your car overnight

My favorite paid parking area is downtown Pomona, California where there are a ton of city-run parking lots with easy payment with very affordable prices and even an option to extend your time until the morning just in case (and it’s like $2). Zero parking stress whenever I go to see a concert there.

Sure, but charging so little for such valuable land is effectively a subsidy for storing your private property on public land. Ideally there's:

* market-rate parking (ensuring there are always spots)

* a parking benefit district to benefit the area

* No rules forcing people to build parking, instead letting the market decide the best use of land

I would also add: legal code for theft of bikes is analogous to what we have for cars; Law Enforcement takes bike theft seriously and there is a nationwide clearing house of information on stolen bikes/parts.

I don't go exclusive for bikes locally because a) weather and b) theft. A distant third is c) safety but that's because my region has motorists who are generally bike-aware.

Local bikeshare has been a godsend for me. I own like 5 bikes but they're all either fancy or broken, but I can walk a couple blocks, almost always grab a bike immediately, and ride off.

In the city center of my perfect world I'd skip your point 2, making sure that there are easily reachable parking blocks outside the center, big enough and well connected to public transit to about any spot.

Most people going shopping need to bring multiple bags home. How about if you have small kids? What about areas of the country that have winter 6 months out of the year?

It might increase business for a very small and narrow demographic, but I seriously doubt this will be the case overall.

Check out the style of bike called a bakfiets (or any other cargo bike) it's a game changer. I have carried my wife and groceries a couple of times, and also picked up lumber and tools with it.

Granted they're expensive (compared to most bikes), but it costs me about an ebike most of the time that my car goes into the shop, and my e-bakfiets has never needed any repairs that I was not able to do myself (even if you take it some place it's much cheaper).

> Check out the style of bike called a bakfiets (or any other cargo bike) it's a game changer. I have carried my wife and groceries a couple of times, and also picked up lumber and tools with it.

Okay, I did. What is your definition of lumber? The bikes I saw would only be suitable for what I would consider "small sticks".

the lumber load was something like:

- 6 2x4x12, strapped diagonally lengthwise on the top of the bin

- big box of nails

- air framing nailer

- extension and air cords

- pancake air compressor

- other assorted stuff

Have a link to the bin? All the bins I've seen don't look suitable for long lumber or are expensive enough where renting a truck is by far the cheaper route.

There are places in Finland where half the kids cycle to school, even in the winter.

Here is a great video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

Are you sure about that? Quite a few people going shopping are just to pick up a couple of items - they need milk for the kids' breakfast, or forgot to pick up a couple of tomatoes for dinner. There's a 15-items-or-less counter because people use it.

A bike can carry several bags, with a front basket and two side baskets.

In an area not built solely for cars, the purchasing dynamics change a lot. With a bike, you can park in front of the store and be in and out pretty quickly. You end up doing a smaller trips more often rather than large trips. You also end up having more smaller stores nearby, for daily shopping.

You still use the car for the monthly big trips to Costco, but walk or bike to fill in the odds&ends. Also, several grocery stores in our city offer delivery, so that's another option for the bulky items.

I love reading these sort of takes. It really is AND/AND. Yes, have your car, do all the car-things. But it _also_ should be safe and convenient to ride a bike. These things are not in opposition, especially since roads are so wide in most american cities, there is so so much space to really have our cake and eat it. It really pains me, looking at the downtown streets in my city, 4-6 lanes dedicated to cars, barely used, and seeing the odd bicyclist scurrying like a rat, on&off the sidewalk, hoping not to get hit by a car going way too fast, just because of all that wide open buffer space. All it takes is paint and a few bollards. And it's just too much. It takes years, if it does even happen.

> All it takes is paint and a few bollards.

From all that I've heard, an effective change requires far more than that.

For example, the bollards do make it one step higher than a "bike gutter", but how does the city clean leaves and trash, or snow, from the lane if the normal street sweeper and snow plow can't get in due to the bollards? Instead, you'll need specialized equipment for the lane (or bike lanes which are wide enough for cleaning/clearing equipment), and the political will to not prioritize cleaning the car lanes first.

You can't have bollards at intersections, so you'll end up with drivers using the bike lane as a turn lane, and turning across a lane without noticing that a cyclist is there. With a road redesign you can build in affordances which encourage better interactions than you get with mere paint.

For big grocery trips I'll use my car. But I can comfortably carry four bags of groceries using a bike rack and two large pannier bags. My bike is nothing fancy, either. The whole thing (bike, rack, panniers) is under $1000, and just uses leg power.

If someone wants to haul more on a bike, there are solutions out there.

I get that, but then, in actual reality, tens of millions of people, daily, in all weather, again, in the actual real world, in the netherlands, belgium, scandinavia, in wealthier countries than america, some with extreme climates, run errands with their bikes, have kids go to school, get their needs met. All without cars. Daily. In pouring rain, snow. These people do not come home wishing they had a car, which they likely have anyway. They just shrug, ugh, nasty weather, and get cozy as they kick of their shoes

So I don't know, it all feels like arguing from the gut. The gut says bikes don't have a place as a convenient or respectable means of transport in America, and therefore, arguments from geography, climate, ... are marshalled to support that position.

I live in a fairly walkable area. The supermarket is close enough that I can go multiple times a day if I want. I just buy exactly what I want when I need it.

Buying a weeks worth of food and letting half of it rot is just another symptom of car dependency.

I'm a cyclist and totally on board with this way of thinking. But this is simply not believable, and I'd like to see what confounding factors were at play:

> In 2013, a researcher at the University of Washington named Kyle Rowe looked at two shopping districts in Seattle that got put on road diets. Rowe compared sales taxes in these “Neighborhood Business Districts” with those in similar districts in the city that didn’t get bike lanes. In one NBD, which replaced car lanes and three parking spots with two bike lanes, sales closely tracked those in the bike-less areas, both in peaks and troughs. Conclusion: Bike lanes did nothing to reduce business. And in the other NBD, which replaced 12 parking spaces with a bike lane, sales quadrupled

Bike lanes in the US are useless outside of perhaps 3-4 cities (all with exceptional public transportation systems) And they’re really green vanity projects that do not deliver value to urban areas. Utilization is piss poor especially during winter months.

Edit: I am not against bike lanes but they’re really the cheapest way for city planners and politicians to pull a publicity stunt. A proper way to increase bike utilization is to invest in public transportation and actually drive down car ownership. But, this is a very expensive (and might even be impossible) feat in the US. WFH is not helping the trend because it’s facilitating people further out of cities which, you guessed it, increases car ownership.

With this argument no modal change can ever Happen.

If anyone else was wondering, the 4 biggest cities in the USA are

  New York City: ~8.4 million
  Los Angeles: ~3.9 million
  Chicago: ~2.7 million
  Houston: ~2.3 million

And they account for ~ 5% of the total USA population

(17.3 million / 331 million) * 100 = 5.23%

And these aren’t even the cities with great bike infrastructure.

Sounds like we have a long way to go.

Bold statement with no evidence. I can assure you that they're well used in Boston/Cambridge/Somerville during the winter months as well as summer.

I ride bikes in Cambridge. This is not true at all. Bike lane utilization during winter months goes down quite a bit in Cambridge. In many parts, they don’t even build bike lanes with snow removal in mind. It’s not even safe/practical to bike in snow.

Finland and Northern Europe prove this to be false

Keep in mind that winter in the most-populated areas of Scandinavia and surrounding regions can be quite mild compared to cities in North America that are much farther south.

Consider the climates of cities like Ottawa and Montreal in Canada, or Minneapolis in the US, for example. They're at roughly the same latitude as Venice, Italy, yet get rather harsh winters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa#Climate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal#Climate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis#Climate

Compare their climates to those of Helsinki, Oslo, Stockholm, and Saint Petersburg:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki#Climate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo#Climate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm#Climate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Petersburg#Climate

Ottawa, Montreal, and Minneapolis can experience noticeably lower temperatures, more snowfall, and so on.

Montréaler here. A surprising amount of people cycle all winter long; the days where you see no one cycling about are typically days where you wouldn't even want to be outside in a car due to the inclement weather.

Winter cycling is actually popular enough that our bike-share system has started to leave a portion of the sharing infrastructure out during the colder months. They put studded tires on the bikes, put the stations in locations where they aren't in the way of snow plows and the like, and people use them quite a bit! Something like 1,500-5,000 rides per day, just in the shared infrastructure. That doesn't count the even larger number of people here who have their own dedicated winter bike.

Montreal might be an exception because they actually remove the snow from the streets and they have an incredible logistics behind that process.

Yeah, right. Study after study can prove whatever the author wants, but the facts of life are that nobody is going shopping on a bike. On a bus, sure, but a bike? I've lived in 2 cities with beautiful, wide bike lanes that nobody parks in (because of fear, not respect). In one they were never used, I've driven countless miles queuing in traffic next to them only to see 1 person per day (while seeing thousands of cars in the same period).

The only realistic use case was with part of the bike lane being next to a park, so it was used recreationally during weekends, mostly by spandex bros but also a wider audience when the weather was good.

People might say they want to bike more, and they would only if xyz, but actions speak louder than words, so perhaps it's time to accept we're wasting public space and money with all these projects that end up being good for nothing.

> nobody is going shopping on a bike

I regularly go shopping on my bicycle - as much as I can, in fact.

> but the facts of life are that nobody is going shopping on a bike.

I do 99% of my shopping on a bike, even some smaller IKEA/furniture stuff I carry biking, just with a Chrome Cargo backpack.

I think you are extremely biased to your locality... Probably have never lived in a well designed city where biking is not dangerous, is encourage through good urban design, and where cars are also penalised and discouraged by good urban planning.

Like, that's ok, but this take just shows an extreme blidness to how things can be. Just visit the Netherlands, any medium to large city there, and you will be surprised about all the things people can and actually do on a bike.

Also, cargo bikes are a thing. You can carry a lot in one. It's much cheaper to buy and maintain than any car you could imagine.

I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there's a pair of us — don't tell! They'd banish us, you know.

Is this sarcasm?

There's a lot of precedent for people living lives mostly on bike, where I live in the Northeast US the car ownership rate is about 50% among my peer group. I own a car but find it easier to do most errands by bike.

I suspect that there are other issues with your environment that prevent people from successfully using cycling as a normal transit mode, assuming you're from the US or Canada, it's likely that distances are too great, or that despite bike lanes, common trips require biking along highway speed traffic.

I hope you're not one of those people who get angry when they're stuck behind me on a 35mph road without a shoulder or a bike lane.

The linked-to piece isn't only about bikes, but also improved pedestrian use.

> The results show that making streets friendlier for bikes — and sidewalks friendlier for pedestrians — is actually good for business. The rise of “complete streets” and “road diets,” as urban planners call them, has been a huge boon to businesses in cities.

What were the two cities you refer to?

In general, people tend to see the "spandex bros", but not the poorer people who bike due to economic necessity. If we know what cities you refer to we might be able to dig up the relevant traffic studies.

Counterpoint: I live in Montréal, and the city tracks cycling usage via (infrared?) counters on major bike paths.

Last year there were 1.5 _million_ trips on a single section of a dedicated cycling path that runs through a very commercial part of town. We have so much bike traffic that there are bike-only traffic jams and long queues at stop lights (again, all on the dedicated/separated bike path). And you better believe that a lot of people shop on their bikes, myself included.

Try an electric cargo bike, they're very fun and you can carry lots of stuff on them.

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