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.
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