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Investigating the effects of bike lanes in Minneapolis

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Re: Investigating the effects of bike lanes in Minneapolis

#151

Post by notacoward »

ericmay wrote: post #11
aBioGuy wrote: post #6

If you make it pleasant to ride a bike - people will do it. Where I live, there is an off-street bike path that was completed about 10 years ago. Since then many new businesses have opened along the path. The economic impact of pulling people OUT OF A CAR and INTO THEIR environment is perhaps under-appreciated.

> The economic impact of pulling people OUT OF A CAR and INTO THEIR environment is perhaps under-appreciated. All you have to do is stop and take a look at pictures where you see lots of people riding bikes or walking near businesses and then contrast that with a 4-lane road to get an idea of how much more economic activity is generated locally for a business. If you don't have an automobile industry (and even if you…

> taking thousands of dollars from families and forcing them to send it to far away places

Not sure if it's what you meant, but that phrasing reverses cause and effect. The arrangement of homes, offices, and retail precedes most individual housing choices. In other words, people chose to live in places, already knowing what the transport implications would be. They weren't yanked out of their car-free utopia and forced to live a car-centric lifestyle.

I agree that the car-centric way we do transit and urban planning is absolutely disastrous and needs to change, but part of making that happen is not simply dismissing people's revealed preferences as something imposed from above. It's the solution that's likely to be imposed from above, and I'm OK with that personally, but in the political real world it pits a whole bunch of noble principles against the hyper-individualist anti-government attitudes prevalent especially in the US. That's how you end up with "ban all cars" on one side and "rolling coal" on the other. The trick is to understand and accommodate the reasons why people choose to live as they do, while still moving toward a better future.

Re: Investigating the effects of bike lanes in Minneapolis

#152

Post by closeparen »

jader201 wrote: post #127
ericmay wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The economic impact of pulling people OUT OF A CAR and INTO THEIR environment is perhaps under-appreciated. All you have to do is stop and take a look at pictures where you see lots of people riding bikes or walking near businesses and then contrast that with a 4-lane road to get an idea of how much more economic activity is generated locally for a business. If you don't have an automobile industry (and even if you…

> It's fucking crazy that we do this. I don't know how much more emphasis I can put on it. I usually jump on a soapbox whenever I see so much support for getting rid of cars on HN, so here goes: Not everyone lives in a city. I’m 100% in agreement for all of these arguments, with the precondition that you live in the city . But many prefer and enjoy distance from neighbors, commerce/industry, and enjoy being surrounde…

Almost no one is actually surrounded by a natural environment. The suburbia that pervades in America is surrounded by deeply un-natural roadway, parking, gas stations, strip malls, and big box stores. For most people, any time you're outside your home you're in a thoroughly human-crafted world. The question is to what ends that craft is directed. Too many places are optimized for the convenient operation of cars above all other concerns. In an increasingly remote world, we should be less willing to sacrifice other goods on the altar of transportation.

Even supposing that your surroundings are already very pleasant to you, wouldn't you be better able to revel in their pleasantness without the enclosure of a car or the urgency of a highway?

Re: Investigating the effects of bike lanes in Minneapolis

#153

Post by bjustin »

jader201 wrote: post #127
ericmay wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The economic impact of pulling people OUT OF A CAR and INTO THEIR environment is perhaps under-appreciated. All you have to do is stop and take a look at pictures where you see lots of people riding bikes or walking near businesses and then contrast that with a 4-lane road to get an idea of how much more economic activity is generated locally for a business. If you don't have an automobile industry (and even if you…

> It's fucking crazy that we do this. I don't know how much more emphasis I can put on it. I usually jump on a soapbox whenever I see so much support for getting rid of cars on HN, so here goes: Not everyone lives in a city. I’m 100% in agreement for all of these arguments, with the precondition that you live in the city . But many prefer and enjoy distance from neighbors, commerce/industry, and enjoy being surrounde…

Large networks of large roads are not financially sustainable [1]. I can only assume this is more the case the more rural you get. Asking for more of the current American style of car infrastructure may not even work, depending on the specifics.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0

Re: Investigating the effects of bike lanes in Minneapolis

#154

Post by yieldcrv »

sandworm101 wrote: post #126
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on feedback from local businesses in early 2020 (pre-Covid), ~40% of food and beverage businesses reported that business had become either "worse" or "much worse" since the changes. Reports from "dry retail" businesses are slightly better and service businesses slightly worse. This is compared with https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5bc63eb90b77bd20c50c5... (page 21) Traffic also increased substantially on…

That depends on one's perspective. Certainly the businesses seem to have suffered, but who in NYC really cares about street-level businesses? NYC is all about high-end residential real estate. Emptying that street of makes all those apartments slightly more desirable, slightly more expensive. That in turn has a net benefit to the city's bottom line. And I would not be surprised if there were more people employed in c…

sort of kind of, I think you arbitrarily mix renting with owning and that changes a lot

I've lived in all of the expensive cities in the US, never interested in saving for a downpayment so its a much larger budget that worked okay with whatever job I was doing

Re: Investigating the effects of bike lanes in Minneapolis

#155

Post by diordiderot »

Paianni wrote: post #94
alangibson wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right in your criticism of the study. Luckily the Netherlands has already proven that for bike infrastructure, if you build it they will come.

According to Figure 6 from the study linked below, the trend in cycling levels in the Netherlands was essentially flat from the mid-80s to the mid-2000s. I recall (but cannot find) a source with statistics that suggest a minor increase since then, but much of the current infrastructure was in place 15 years ago. http://web.archive.org/web/20150211090849/http://www.policy....

They built their cycle infrastructure through the 60s and 70s tho so that would make sense

Re: Investigating the effects of bike lanes in Minneapolis

#156

Post by reidjs »

vel0city wrote: post #89
alistairSH wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if weather permits Reminds me of an old cycling adage (possibly predates modern cycling, not sure): There's no such thing as poor weather, only poor clothing choices. I hate to come across as a Nordic fetishist, but there are several cold northern cities known for their year-round cycling. Bike paths are plowed and/or heated. And people just layer up. Oulu, Finland comes to mind - paths are designed to drain well so…

> There's no such thing as poor weather, only poor clothing choices. Where I live the heat index is supposed to be 108F with almost no cloud coverage. Riding a bike a few miles in the middle of the day is definitely risking heat stroke. It is without a doubt poor weather for riding.

If you are in good condition and wearing light clothes, sunscreen, and drinking plenty of water, hot weather is not a problem for bicyclists. Admittedly it takes a bit of work to get there, though, and most people are not willing to put in the work.

Re: Investigating the effects of bike lanes in Minneapolis

#157

Post by skrbjc »

colpabar wrote: post #46
dionidium wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The belief that the opposite is true is so entrenched that business owners in Manhattan vehemently opposed banning cars on 14th St for fear that it would devastate their businesses. Of course, nothing of the sort happened. The cars were banned and nothing happened except that the street got a lot quieter and safer.

This attitude is common in my city as well. So many people seem to think that if you cannot park directly in front of a business then that business will fail.

Considering the number of food-delivery cars constantly double parked along the restaurant-dense streets of my area, the restaurants would probably lose a fair bit of business if cars couldn't access them.

Re: Investigating the effects of bike lanes in Minneapolis

#158

Post by cmonagle »

dionidium wrote: post #136
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on feedback from local businesses in early 2020 (pre-Covid), ~40% of food and beverage businesses reported that business had become either "worse" or "much worse" since the changes. Reports from "dry retail" businesses are slightly better and service businesses slightly worse. This is compared with https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5bc63eb90b77bd20c50c5... (page 21) Traffic also increased substantially on…

We're at a bit of an impasse here because I simply don't find those self-reports credible. These folks are salty about the changes. They're not going to tell people that it's going swimmingly. Does it pass any kind of smell test that most of the traffic in these shops arrived by automobile? We don't need to ask them, anyway. I feel like it'd be pretty easy to set up a test to simply observe how people arrive at shops…

It would be very interesting to see more comparisons between merchant's perceptions of mobility and reality, but this[1] Toronto study is the only one I'm aware of. As expected, merchants were proven to not be credible sources.

> • 72% of visitors to the Study Area usually arrive by active transportation (by bicycle or walking). Only 4% report that driving is their usual mode of transportation.

> • Merchants overestimated the number of their customers who arrived by car. 42% of merchants estimated that more than 25% of their customers usually arrived by car.

Similarly, Toronto compared credit card transaction volume by mode in evaluating the Bloor bike lane. The area with the new bike lane saw increased card transaction volume, by slightly more than the control areas [2]. Merchants did report an increase in customers at this time.

[1] https://www.tcat.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Bike-Lanes-On...

[2] https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2017/pw/bgrd/backgroundf... (Page 15 for Moneris data).

Re: Investigating the effects of bike lanes in Minneapolis

#159

Post by overbyplants »

SeanLuke wrote: post #60

This was a case study with no control group. Case studies are, IMHO, close to useless. Having read the study, I'm not impressed. No attempt was made to compare Minneapolis with peer cities as controls, that is, ones which did not increase bike infrastructure. A limited model was attempted regarding climate impacts, but beyond this little was done to control for external factors. Thus we have no idea if the change in…

I'm a cyclist in Minneapolis, and I'd love to see even more dedicated bike and multiuse trails everywhere. I think it's critical for all sorts of reasons, and have personal investments in it at some level.

I had a sort of similar reaction as you to the study though. It's better than nothing, it provides some numbers that are consistent with one interpretation, and I believe that interpretation, but there are other interpretations.

One issue is that dedicated bike paths in the Twin Cities don't get put in random places. The money and municipal planning involved in them is focused on pathways that are of critical infrastructural importance, or where studies have already shown that they're likely to see a lot of use. They get put in places where the city and county wants to increase nonvehicular transportation as much as possible, to increase access to something (e.g., light rail, some kind of hub) or to connect two or more places.

So showing that bike use is higher in places that a lot of city, county, park, and DoT planners have decided there's a demand for, based on years of study, isn't entirely surprising. It would be like if five companies did a multiyear study of demand for product X versus Y, concluded people would prefer X, made product X, and showed that it sold better than Y.

On the other hand, you could go full circle and interpret this as just meaning the municipal planning studies are usually right, and people do like dedicated bike lanes, especially in the places their studies suggest.

Re: Investigating the effects of bike lanes in Minneapolis

#160

Post by s0rce »

Cederfjard wrote: post #141
jader201 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's fucking crazy that we do this. I don't know how much more emphasis I can put on it. I usually jump on a soapbox whenever I see so much support for getting rid of cars on HN, so here goes: Not everyone lives in a city. I’m 100% in agreement for all of these arguments, with the precondition that you live in the city . But many prefer and enjoy distance from neighbors, commerce/industry, and enjoy being surrounde…

As we figure out how to live sustainably with ten billion people (or wherever the population will cap out) with higher and higher standards, perhaps certain people’s preferences isn’t what we should optimize for. Maybe if you want to live far away from others, you’ll have to bear the true cost of the externalities associated with that. So yes, you can live in the sticks, but running that car of yours is going to cost…

I'm tired of subsidizing rural people, the communities are unsutainable, particularly in the west where they have extreme fire risk.
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