Many Hornby Street businesses have closed since the street’s controversial bike lane was completed last year in time for the December shopping season.
Some owners who vigorously opposed the bike lane have sold their businesses; others have changed their product mixes to appeal more to cyclists; and those that have continued to offer the same services or products have suffered reduced sales.
Two restaurants that have been around for decades – Kettle of Fish at the corner of Hornby Street and Pacific Boulevard and Mona’s Fine Lebanese Cuisine half a block north – have closed.
So did the relatively new Milwaukee Market Creamery next door to Mona’s.
“Business is terrible,” said Emil Malak, owner of Bellaggio Café. “The bike lane has not just impacted my business, it’s choked the whole of the city.”
He estimated this year’s sales drop at about 30% compared with last year’s and said he’s had to lay off staff.
Malak said he intends to tough it out. But others have thrown in the towel.
Former Café de France owner Lahten Abassi sold his business to Jennifer Pham in April.
Hair salon owners like Rumours Hair Design’s David Prior and C:EHKO’s Farshad Shafiekhani say the bike lane has hurt sales.
Prior said his annual sales have dropped about 5%. Shafiekhani has turned to Groupon to boost revenue.
Wim Vander Zalm has watched sales increase up to 10% in each of his 17 Art Knapp Plantland and Florist locations, except Hornby Street. Sales there dropped about 20% and forced him to change the store’s product mix to bring in women’s clothes to the front of what has been a garden-supply store for decades.
“Once they started no left turn from Pacific Boulevard onto Hornby, it was a continuum,” Vander Zalm told Business in Vancouver. “They then took away a lane and then they made my block of Hornby a one-way street. They kept hitting us when we were down.”
Appleton Galleries owner Ron Appleton, more precisely described it as being like the city “taking a baseball bat to my head.”
The 67-year-old closed his decades-old art gallery and has moved to a warehouse in Marpole that has no walk-by traffic.
“I had no choice but to downsize and move to something a bit more affordable,” Appleton said. “I was at the point of trying to sell the business as a going concern. I’d been 40 years in downtown Vancouver and made a decent living. [The bike lane has] been harmful to my business, my family and, most important, to my two employees, who I lost when I had to leave.”