Downtown Vancouver business organizations need to move out of denial and recognize that bike lanes are coming and they’re good for business. Yes, the city has to fix loading and passenger zone issues on the proposed Hornby Street protected bike lane (as it is), and some businesses will be negatively affected, but not nearly as many as anticipated in the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) survey (92% worried about losing customers).
“To take an extreme scenario, putting up barriers around the existing bike lanes could bankrupt every business on the street,” said one hysterical CFIB editorial.
Really? Based on what data?
What we learn from other cities is that bike lanes are good for business. Randomly selected merchants in San Francisco’s Mission District were interviewed four years after the Valencia Street bike lanes went in. Two-thirds said the bike lanes had had a positive impact on their businesses.
Car drivers are not the only people who spend money in stores. A recent Toronto study found that only 10% of pedestrians surveyed along the Bloor Annex neighbourhood, where bike lanes are proposed, arrived by car, and those who come on foot or bicycle visited the most often and spent the most money per month.
I think a lot of the resistance to separated bike lanes downtown is a reaction to today’s cyclists. Even though almost twice as many people surveyed by the City of Vancouver on Hornby Street supported the proposed lane as opposed it, I suspect many opponents are choked at the idea of spending $3.2 million to reward scofflaw cyclists whose attitude to cars is expressed in the in-your-face Critical Mass rides.
How else to explain the visceral anger at bike lanes compared with shrugging acceptance when car lanes were closed off on Burrard, Broadway, Seymour and Howe for buses?
These new bike lanes are not for today’s tattooed bike couriers. They’re for the 80-year-old grandmother and the eight-year-old child and the masses of people in-between, people who wouldn’t dare ride downtown today.
Early data from the Dunsmuir bike lanes suggests if you build protected lanes, new cyclists will come: trips along that street have quadrupled. On Copenhagen’s protected bike lanes, where it gets cold and rains as much as here, 37% of all trips are by bike.
The Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association and the Vancouver Board of Trade have one foot on the bus and one foot on the curb on this issue: in favour but not this way at this time.
Why wait?
Parking is really not a problem, with 10,000 off-street stalls within one block of Hornby and street parking still available on one side of the street. These initial projects will provide data for a proper assessment of the role of protected bike lanes in a more comprehensive downtown transportation plan.
Protected bike lanes, especially when they’re fed by a public bike system (a standard green-city amenity and overdue in Vancouver), are a cost-effective way of bringing more people downtown and moving them around. (The Hornby lane costs as much as three new buses, but without the operating costs.)
We simply don’t have room to rely on cars to bring more customers downtown. In the past 13 years, the number of car trips into the city has decreased by 10%, but the total number of trips is up 23% – because of increases in walking, cycling and transit. And that’s with only 1% of the city’s street space dedicated to cyclists.
The city should do an economic impact assessment as part of this trial. What it will find, almost guaranteed, is that most businesses are happy or happier with the protected bike lanes. They make sidewalks safer, bring more people downtown and help them move around when they’re there. That’s all good for business.