Alright, enough of the doom and gloom. Stumbled across a study on the impact of changing a four lane road in a retail area down to two lanes plus bike lanes. This sort of change is usually resisted by local businesses, who are scared of losing customers, but someone did a study:
I would have liked to see a study showing what happened to businesses nearby for comparison, but this study is still suggestive. And it’s not just that business was up, it’s that people who walk and cycle spend more:
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Which is to say, if you want to make more business you want more non-drivers and less drivers.
Besides, to point out the obvious, most drivers are going somewhere else. Most people who are walking or cycling live nearby, and people taking public transit have chosen to come to your area specifically.
Cities built for cars are inefficient, ugly and increase pollution massively. Cities built for pedestrians, cyclists and rapid transit are far, far more pleasant, as well as healthier and better for the environment. Part of the problem is the same as trains v.s. roads. When you add in all the costs, trains are cheaper and more efficient, but railroads are expected to pay all their own costs, while road users aren’t.
The other problem is that there are powerful pro-road and car lobbies. It’s well documented that the old streetcar systems in America were dismantled largely because GM engaged in a massive political influence campaign to have them dismantled.
In any case, mass use of cars is something else that will be going away over the next fifty years as civilization collapse and climate change hit, and hit hard. We aren’t going to be able to afford such nonsense. There will still be cars, for sure, but the idea that every family should have one will end.
And like many of the things that are going to go away, this will be good for us, it’s just that like any bad-for-you addiction the ideal is to slowly titrate off, not cold-turkey.
Those cities and states which get ahead of this and make changes now and over the next decade or two will be far better off than those who pretend it will never happen.
Jan Wiklund
What is most strange is that the merchants never learn.
Drottninggatan, the main street in central Stockholm, was made into a pedestrian street in the 60s against merchant protests. And the same thing happened as in your example – sales increased violently. Since then many streets in Sweden has become pedestrian, or slow, or been narrowed down to two lanes – and the merchants protest every time. During 60 years! Don’t they have any business organizations that can tell them that car restrictions work to their advantage?
Nevertheless, the association of merchants in central Stockholm made an investigation some ten years ago about where their customers came from and how. Most went by foot from nearby quarters – and this was enough to make the central business district the biggest retail quarter in Stockholm. Central Stockholm is dense enough for that.
But the dense central Stockholm has only 350.000 inhabitants of total 2 million. The rest is too sprawled to permit car restrictions. So what can one do there? In the countryside they complain about problems of sparsity, but in the cities they create them of their own free will, unnecessarily.
I believe that is one of the things that make western economies go to the dogs. Unnecessary problems of sparsity slash synergies and increase transaction costs, to our peril.
Oh, a tip: Jason R Abel, Ishita Dey & Todd M Gabe: Productivity and the density of human capital, Federal Reserve Bank of New York 2010. Every time you double the area per person you slow down the economy with 3 percent. And Atlanta is 26 times larger than Barcelona, with the same population (or actually, Barcelona’s was slightly more populous when Alain Bertaud caught the figures).
Carborundum
The unfortunate factor is that anti-bike lane politics are polling really, really well right now. Screwing over the residents of ridings that you’re never going to win, to placate those who commute in from ridings you might win or live in the little car-centric affluent pockets (e.g., the Kingsway, Edenbridge, etc.) of the ridings where your donors concentrate is a natural move for a guy like Doug and those around him.
The issue is an excellent example of what you can achieve if you know how to pull the levers of the system. The guys driving the fairly effective opposition to the policies assessed in these studies have built a grassroots-appearing movement that is anything but. (Not too many genuine grassroots movements with Navigator on retainer…) Amazing what you can do if you know how to do things, have a little capital and a little access.
Parenthetically, it really doesn’t help that Toronto has done a poor job of implementation. I’ve met some of the traffic engineers involved – their hearts are in the right place, but they don’t have great insight into good cycling infrastructure design and they’ve been given the marching orders that pedestrian safety trumps everything.
mago
Ironic that when I lived in Boston I got around by public transportation and bicycle, especially after my VW was stolen, but now living the rural US I’m car dependent and have to drive significant distances for basic goods and services.
Waiting for the worm to turn and a true greening.
bruce wilder
street space given over to cars is bad, but parking space destroys cities like a cancer
parking garage space requirements drives up the cost of housing beyond the means of people who cannot afford rent and a car anyway
nobody
Unsurprisingly, people affluent enough to live within biking distance of Bloor St. have more disposable income than the lower-middle class riffraff who have to (gasp) drive from cheaper parts of the city.
Bike lanes would never have been built if they had anything to do with environmentalism. Instead, they are just a conveniently greenwashed mechanism to protect pathological NIMBYs from sharing street space with people who live in different neighborhoods or are slightly less well-off.
If you want an egalitarian solution to car dependency, get rid of single family zoning and build bus lanes instead.
Richard Holsworth
It’s a great idea; but, needs to be a part of a bigger change if we are to survive as a species. The Problem of Tree Inequity: Redlining and its Contribution to Tree Inequity in Low Income Neighborhoods
Many redlined neighborhoods became “cement jungles” with their environments further disrupted by freeways and factories. This led to “increased impervious land cover and decreased tree canopy coverage with worsening HOLC grade.” This inequity cannot be solved by just planting trees. Plus, cities have done a poor job of maintaining existing trees in many neighborhoods.
https://english.umd.edu/research-innovation/journals/interpolations/fall-2022/problem-tree-inequity-redlining-and-its
Richard Holsworth
Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue. A decade or so ago, Columbia professor Vishaan Chakrabarti argued passionately for legislation that would produce “a country of cities.” Chakrabarti expressed his frustration — shared by many in the design community — that Obama and his advisors failed to grapple with the root cause of the crises, which is the American way of life, “our profligate consumption,” the big house and the wide highway and the exurban spread. And he imagines what might have been a “very different first year for the administration,” with the creation of a big new program, the “American Smart Infrastructure Act,” or ASIA. “After the $700-billion TARP bailout, in which banks were said to be too big to fail,” he writes, “we could have been told that the nation and world were, in fact, too big to fail.” Chakrabarti describes his ASIA:
We will build and rebuild infrastructure that lowers greenhouse gas emissions and encourages urban density, emphasizing high-speed rail, transmission grids from alternative energy sources, national internet broadband, and critical roadway maintenance. We will deemphasize all infrastructure that exacerbates emissions, particularly roadway and airport expansion projects.
https://placesjournal.org/article/the-public-works/
the argument against socialist intervention as “not pragmatic” flies in the face of what we see right outside our door. A new pragmatism rooted in awareness that the co-mingled existential threats of which we are in the midst: rapidly accelerating inequality and planetary surface temperature, throws all the old arguments out the window. There are solutions which we must come together and embrace. This author (I’m going to the library to actually read his book) has a keen idea:
“Chakrabarti has written a wonderful book about the potential of America’s cities. He argues convincingly how the country would benefit economically and environmentally if the suburbs started to move back to the cities, and he offers specific policy suggestions to accomplish that objective. Read this book, and you’ll want to live in a city.” –Former US Senator Bill Bradley
A negative review that didn’t age well:
“It is a very well made book but is painfully biased towards market intervention; to the point that the author actually praises public housing projects… And he cherry picks data and figures to support his beliefs while brushing aside those who champion a more free market approach to land development. …So read if you agree with the author of if you wish to know what socialism looks like.”
https://www.amazon.com/Country-Cities-Manifesto-Urban-America/dp/1935202170?dplnkId=1ec0d82a-c30a-43bb-b454-5dd313623fa3&nodl=1
Jan Wiklund
@nobody: I live now in a small town where one is practically an invalid without a car. But there is a main street, and there are parkings some 200 m away from the main street. But believe it or not, merchants protest against taking away parking lots in the main street because they think it would scare away their customers. Apparently they believe the customers wouldn’t walk 200 (or 2 minutes) to get to a car-free, or slow-ride street. Perhaps it’s true; in that case I despair about my townspeoples’ future health…
Carborundum
A couple of points. First and most importantly, oh heck yes – change land-use regulations and approvals and planning procedures so building higher density housing in close-in neighbourhoods currently dominated by detached and semi-detached single family housing is simpler, more predicable and ultimately cheaper. If we don’t have to move people as far, most transportation problems become easier. The challenge is that the city talks about gentle densification, but it doesn’t actually do gentle densification.
Second, the environmental part of this is actually a significant driver. The city isn’t talking publicly about it because they fear it will turn into a huge lightning rod, but emissions reduction is actually a significant part of this. It’s been mentioned numerous times in passing to me in conversations with city staff and others on this issue set. That traffic is bottlenecked is for them a feature and not a bug. They knew that traffic volumes would decrease and they were quite okay with it. It’s worth noting, as well, that a big chunk of the bottlenecking – I suspect maybe even most – is actually due to intersection changes related to pedestrian safety and not bike lanes.
Third, the issue isn’t people coming from elsewhere in the city having less to spend. The issue is that people from elsewhere in the city pass through and don’t stop to spend. What those transiting the area want everyone to believe is that their ability to pass through in a single occupancy vehicle at peak rush as expeditiously as possible trumps the desires of the people who live around the route to have a pleasant place to live. I think that’s just nuts. As it happens, I’ve spent my entire adult life living in the neighbourhoods referenced in these studies and the traffic and access issues, narrowly defined, don’t seem to be NIMBY driven. It seems to me that everyone lives here to a significant degree *because* they’re magnet areas and realizes that without the external carriage trade the small businesses we frequent would dry up and blow away – like they have in most other areas of the city. That said, if you’re viewing NIMBYism related to housing as a central driver, then I would definitely have to agree.
The big issue here, I think unspoken, is that historically somewhere between 80 to 90% of the traffic on the corridor has travelled by subway. It only takes a small substitution effect – such as when folks with access to personal vehicles become concerned about catching COVID in a packed subway – for surface traffic to be significantly affected.
John9
Hate to say it but there is plenty of doom and gloom in the sordid, corrupt history of US public transportation in the 20th century.
The irony is that the inability of capitalistic masters of the universe to understand how cheap efficient and dense public transportation supports a thriving economy is another gift to China.
The Chinese do understand this and have built out their amazing public transportation system.
StewartM
But for the ‘locals’ to visit the shops in the downtowns, you have to crush rents/housing costs.
I would also add the health benefits. In Taipei, which is a pedestrian-friendly city with awesome public transit, despite all the great food and everyone eating you ask “Where are the 300-pounders?” (Or, 140 kg-ers for those using the metric system). That’s because when you substitute bikes and walking for automobiles, the amount of exercise you get goes up dramatically. As a work friend who has gone to Asia says “If your pedometer only says you went 10,000 steps (roughly 8 km) that’s an easy day”, as Ive put on 13,000, 15,000, even 20,000 steps just walking around in Taipei.
And you’re right–pedestrian friendly cities are the best. In Taipei, often certain roads can be closed on weekends and you see street performers doing amazing things.
Jefferson Hamilton
The car is one of the worst inventions in history, maybe worse than nuclear weapons, and it’s an absolutely perfect symbol of American sloth and selfishness.
Joan
My husband and I live car-free in a car-centric city near the Canadian border that has winters as severe as it gets in the continental US. We save nearly $10k for each of us annually by not owning a car. We put the extra $20k each year into additional retirement and extra payments on the mortgage principal. If we’d needed to pay off student loan debt, going car-free would have taken care of that. Harder to calculate, but I also save money on my health because I do a lot of walking.
mago
Not that it matters outside personal history, but man, I walked those Boston streets more than I drove or bicycled them.
From the Commons to the North End; from the Commons to Newbury Street to Mass Ave and across the bridge past MIT to Central Square and then to Harvard Square.
It’s true. That happened. Also Storrow Drive. Brookline cowpath streets as well.
There were eatery visits along the way. A croissant here, a bagel there, a slice of quiche elsewhere.
Just talking a stroll down memory lane here from Boston days.
I’ll forego the Seattle years.
Forecasting Intelligence
Great article.
I also love cycling and walking.
More of this please Ian and less of the Middle East politics shitshow.
mago
And, oh yeah, I lingered in bookstores along the way.