Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Biking and Business- Part 1

In the last couple of weeks I've been thinking a lot about bicyclists and businesses.

At the rate we're adding bicycle facilities in the Boston/ "Camberville" area, we're going to run out of low-hanging fruit pretty quickly.  We'll add bike lanes where there's plenty of width, and toss sharrows around with abandon,  but soon we'll start to run into places where there's demand for real cycling infrastructure, and to truly make that infrastructure safe there will have to be a reduction in automobile infrastructure.  There is virtually nowhere in this area where the solution is just to add a couple of feet of width to the road.

And increasingly the issue is going to be bicycle space vs car parking spaces.  Parking is at a premium in the Boston region,  especially in the winter, where you regularly hear about fisticuffs breaking out over the poaching of a space laboriously cleared of snow.  Very few urban neighborhoods have much in the way of driveways and garages, and businesses with off-street parking lots are probably a minority, at least in the close-in areas.  Parking garages are expensive, and on-street parking is underpriced,  giving people incentive to circle endlessly looking for a virtually free spot instead of paying $10-$20 or more to park in a garage.  On street car-storage on public streets is a subsidy for automobile drivers,  as each car takes a couple of hundred feet that could dedicated to a wider sidewalk, or a bike lane, or both.  Difficulty in parking does gives people an incentive not to to drive to downtown areas at all,  and a lot of what gives such areas their charm is the pedestrian scale and the hustle and bustle of people in these neighborhoods. When tourists from Dallas come to downtown Boston they're not there to see the parking lots.

But businesses are convinced that parking is an absolute necessity for their survival,  and they will fight anything that potentially limits that parking.  At the meetings I was at for both the Beacon Street reconstruction and the Longwood area/ Brookline Ave bike facilities,  there was a direct tradeoff between parking and bike facilities.  On Brookline Ave, they are taking spots at the Park drive end,  but closer to the hospital, where traffic is worst the bike lane dies away to only sharrows so that there can be 5 parking spots in front of the Dunkin Donuts and the gym.  No matter that my guess is that 95% of the patrons of those businesses arrive there on foot, because they're already in the area.

On Beacon, at rush hour, even without a bike lane, and with crappy cratered pavement, there are as many bicyclists as cars- an amazing statistic.  Beacon is a pipeline between the cheaper residential areas in Somerville and Arlington and the high-tech jobs in Kendall,  and the throughput on that pipeline is enormous.

All those people going down Beacon, whether in cars or bikes, need milk and laundry soap, maybe sometimes a pair of shoes or a birthday card.  They eat dinner in restaurants,  get coffee,  go out for drinks.  Yet we dedicate a huge amount of public space to parking cars near the businesses that provide these things, but very little of that public space to facilities which create a minimum standard of safe access to these businesses for bicyclists.

The question is, how to convince business owners,  in many cases in dense areas, small business owners that reducing street parking is not a negative thing for them?    In Part 2 of this post, I want to address the statistical arguments,  why those arguments are not necessarily helpful,  and open the field to discussion of how bicyclists can be noticed and counted as consumers.







4 comments:

  1. Some loose thoughts:

    In order to "fix" the city and make Boston more walkable and bikeable (and less car-dependent) an entire range of changes is necessary (not necessarily in this order):
    1. Limit car parking spaces and driving into the city and put more focus on public transportation and bicycles.
    2. In order to make this work our "T" HAS TO be more reliable (Why in Berlin, Germany the commuter rail and subway trains can arrive at a station exactly on schedule but our "T" has essentially no schedule at all?)
    3. Add more "T" lines (what happened to the Medford line?) and more bus lines (especially connecting suburbs - why all bus lines go into the city and there are almost none running between the towns around Boston?)
    4. Limit on-street parking. Make it available for residents mostly. This will make people unhappy unless they have some good options of public transportation.
    5. Should we go further and require a deeded space for anyone with a car in certain neighborhoods? This would end hunting for a spot. Maybe a system that wouldn't allow vehicle registration (or penalize it with a much higher fee) if its owner does not own or rent an off-street parking spot?
    6. Close some streets for cars (except delivery vehicles and residents with deeded, off-street parking). Do you really have to park on Newbury St?
    7. Designate dedicated bus lanes that can be shared with bicyclists. Give city busses and bikes priority.
    8. Build buffer-zone parking lots and park&ride facilities (get by car to a certain place, then continue by "T" or Subway bike towards the downtown).
    9. Expand the Subway program, create new bike lanes and paths.
    10. Use existing examples. Learn from cities where living there does not require a car, in fact, it promotes other means of transportation: Berlin, London, Copenhagen.

    Basically, first you have to offer good car alternatives (better public transport, because unfortunately most will prefer "T" than a bicycle), then force cars out of the streets and replace them with bikes. This way people would switch easily. If you ban cars first, without presenting any alternatives, everyone will get pissed.

    ReplyDelete
  2. few responses to bbb's thoughts ... maybe some of my own later.

    2&3 -- agreed. also there has to be better maps/guidance on bus routes so that pedestrians know which buses are appropriate for their destination without having to consult a smartphone or a T official.

    4 -- disagree, this will effectively deter people from the suburbs and/or other side of the river from traveling in the city and will be a net negative on the city. The Metro Boston areais already highly neighborhood-centric (consider how, for many Cantabrigians, JP might as well be the far side of the moon and vice versa) anything that increases this level of provincialism is not desirable, imho.

    5 -- again, disagree. This is more or less how Brookline runs their affairs, and it is -terrible-. Off street parking spots basically become overpriced rare commodities, and it deters people of a certain income bracket from choosing to live in those neighborhoods. Real estate in the city is expensive enough as it is, and will get more expensive if a certain amount of it must be set aside for parking.

    but, generally, I tend to agree with C that the route towards increased bike adoption is better safety. Most folks I know who still drive in Boston\Cambridge tend to indicate that they would bike more often but ...

    1. are scared of riding in the city
    2. don't view it as viable in bad weather
    3. find it less convenient for certain use cases (ie. grocery shopping, fancy dress outings)

    most of them already realize that owning and operating a car in the city is a high maintenance operation and would welcome alternatives. The first concern can be addressed with safer streets, whereas 2 & 3 might continue to effectively deter people from by constant bike riders, moving them to using public transport would be reasonable if such options were more reliable and frequent.

    Paris does shared bus/bike lanes (and I think I recall seeing some of these also being rolled out in New York) and they seem to make a lot of sense both in softening the feeling that car convenience is being 'sacrificed' for a 'few' bike riders and in coupling the idea of bike+public transport as an alternative to automobiles.

    Park and rides already exist in a lot of outlying suburban communities and on the boundaries of the metro area (ie. Alewife, the Needham commuter rail station, Woodland/Riverside, etc.) but again, the main deterrent for folks is the speed and reliability of Green Line and commuter rail from these buffer zones.

    Up until recently another deterrent for folks who were using park and rides was the idea that leaving their car at a boundary spot was constraining if they weren't just planning on doing a point-to-point to a day job (ie. maybe their job involves traveling around the city, or they have plans to go to a restaurant or class after work). If there were a way to pair up CharlieCards with Hubway keys, it would be neat to see if suburban commuters are starting to combine these two methods as an alternative to bringing their car in the city. I'd suspect it's only something in high early adoption, but it would be interesting to imagine how to promote that sort of usage.

    ReplyDelete
  3. few responses to bbb's thoughts ... maybe some of my own later.

    2&3 -- agreed. also there has to be better maps/guidance on bus routes so that pedestrians know which buses are appropriate for their destination without having to consult a smartphone or a T official.

    4 -- disagree, this will effectively deter people from the suburbs and/or other side of the river from traveling in the city and will be a net negative on the city. The Metro Boston areais already highly neighborhood-centric (consider how, for many Cantabrigians, JP might as well be the far side of the moon and vice versa) anything that increases this level of provincialism is not desirable, imho.

    5 -- again, disagree. This is more or less how Brookline runs their affairs, and it is -terrible-. Off street parking spots basically become overpriced rare commodities, and it deters people of a certain income bracket from choosing to live in those neighborhoods. Real estate in the city is expensive enough as it is, and will get more expensive if a certain amount of it must be set aside for parking.

    but, generally, I tend to agree with C that the route towards increased bike adoption is better safety. Most folks I know who still drive in Boston\Cambridge tend to indicate that they would bike more often but ...

    1. are scared of riding in the city
    2. don't view it as viable in bad weather
    3. find it less convenient for certain use cases (ie. grocery shopping, fancy dress outings)

    most of them already realize that owning and operating a car in the city is a high maintenance operation and would welcome alternatives. The first concern can be addressed with safer streets, whereas 2 & 3 might continue to effectively deter people from by constant bike riders, moving them to using public transport would be reasonable if such options were more reliable and frequent.

    Paris does shared bus/bike lanes (and I think I recall seeing some of these also being rolled out in New York) and they seem to make a lot of sense both in softening the feeling that car convenience is being 'sacrificed' for a 'few' bike riders and in coupling the idea of bike+public transport as an alternative to automobiles.

    Park and rides already exist in a lot of outlying suburban communities and on the boundaries of the metro area (ie. Alewife, the Needham commuter rail station, Woodland/Riverside, etc.) but again, the main deterrent for folks is the speed and reliability of Green Line and commuter rail from these buffer zones.

    Up until recently another deterrent for folks who were using park and rides was the idea that leaving their car at a boundary spot was constraining if they weren't just planning on doing a point-to-point to a day job (ie. maybe their job involves traveling around the city, or they have plans to go to a restaurant or class after work). If there were a way to pair up CharlieCards with Hubway keys, it would be neat to see if suburban commuters are starting to combine these two methods as an alternative to bringing their car in the city. I'd suspect it's only something in high early adoption, but it would be interesting to imagine how to promote that sort of usage.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Here's some discussion and links to a couple studies about bike lane impacts to businesses:
    http://flyingpigeon-la.com/2012/10/is-that-all-there-is-to-a-bike-lane/

    ReplyDelete