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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

#161

Post by dghlsakjg »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #91
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.

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…

This seems like such a convoluted way of measuring what happened.

There are very easy and very concrete ways to measure if businesses saw a drop in spending. You could look at tax receipts for the area, for one.

Instead they chose to ask peoples feelings about sales numbers...

Re: Investigating the effects of bike lanes in Minneapolis

#162

Post by gernb »

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…

getting rid of the car doesn't get rid of the commute. Plently of countries in the world where most people commute by train/bus/subway but it's still 40 minutes or more on average to commute.

Re: Investigating the effects of bike lanes in Minneapolis

#163

Post by mckeed »

cmonagle wrote: post #158
dionidium wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 overesti…

Doesn't that study say that the merchants properly reported an increase in customers? So applying that to the NYC example, it's a reason to doubt the expectations before the change, but not necessarily the reports after.

Re: Investigating the effects of bike lanes in Minneapolis

#164

Post by rayiner »

ir123 wrote: post #102
rayiner wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oil and car companies just sell a product that people want to buy. Toyota didn’t hold a gun to my head to get me to buy an SUV that gets 15 miles a gallon. Attacking them is an out to avoid confronting the real issue, which is that you don’t like the life choices most other Americans are making.

How come europe is not that car dependent?

Europe has lots of car companies and oil companies too, so that framing would seem to support the idea that they’re not the cause.

What’s different about Europe is virtually everything else. See my sibling post on this issue. In a nutshell, an immigrant nation with a long tradition of migration for opportunity and to get away from others places a higher value on unrestricted mobility. Culture is extremely sticky.

Additionally, Europe is very old and that affects patterns of development. Even rural Germany is dotted with towns that are hundreds of years old, and mid-sized cities that anchor regions, like Ulm, are over a thousand years old. Meanwhile, the vast majority of America was developed during the railroad age (leading to cities that are far apart) or the car age (leading to low-density residential development).

Then there’s population growth. Germany’s population only grew about 20% since 1939. That means that the housing areas for most of the population were already built up by the car age. The US population has increased by 150% since 1939. That’s 200 million more people that needed residential areas built for them during the car age.

Re: Investigating the effects of bike lanes in Minneapolis

#165

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

gernb wrote: post #162
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…

getting rid of the car doesn't get rid of the commute. Plently of countries in the world where most people commute by train/bus/subway but it's still 40 minutes or more on average to commute.

There's a massive difference between a 40 minute commute by public transit and one where you're driving. If your commute is by car, you can't do anything else while commuting. If you are on a bus, you don't have to be focused on your commute the whole time.

Re: Investigating the effects of bike lanes in Minneapolis

#166

Post by thegrim33 »

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…

"We're literally making ourselves poor trying to do this." I guess you'd need to explain why we've had this infrastructure for the entire history of our country, and it didn't "make us poor" before. You're implying it so obviously doesn't work, yet it's been the default setup for every city in the country for a long time now. It very obviously has worked in the past.

Re: Investigating the effects of bike lanes in Minneapolis

#167

Post by [deleted] »

s0rce wrote: post #160
Cederfjard wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Investigating the effects of bike lanes in Minneapolis

#168

Post by WkndTriathlete »

pwenzel wrote: post #8

Minneapolis resident here. Biking is pretty serious in our city, even in the winter. Many of the bike lanes and paths are plowed with the same priority as car traffic. We also have the Grand Rounds, which is almost 80 miles of paths that circle the lakes in Minneapolis and further into St. Paul. It's pretty amazing.

Additionally, a lot of the county highways around Minneapolis have car-width shoulders. It's not all of them, but it's enough to ride 60-80-100 miles pretty easily without having to worry too much about getting picked off by a vehicle straying over the right lane line a little.

Fat bike in the winter; road bike in the summer; fat bike/mountain bike on lots of mountain bike trails in the metro and outstate all year. It's pretty great.

Re: Investigating the effects of bike lanes in Minneapolis

#169

Post by WkndTriathlete »

reidjs wrote: post #156
vel0city wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Riding when the temperature is 42C is "uncomfortable", rather than "not a problem", if you're seriously road riding. I suppose it's only "not a problem" if you're slowly tooling around on a cruiser...

Re: Investigating the effects of bike lanes in Minneapolis

#170

Post by bliteben »

s0rce wrote: post #160
Cederfjard wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where did you get this insane idea that subsidizing actual farming and agriculture is a bad idea? Do you not like eating or being alive? I agree the subsidies are probably not 100% efficient but the intent is to keep you alive in times of famine or worldwide catastrophe.

We don't live in a planned society and many many people have made mistakes about where to farm / raise livestock in the US. The good news is they usually eventually give up if the place is unsuitable, sometimes there are outsize subsidies that allow bad practices to go on forever, but in general it does correct itself. That land eventually (especially in non desert areas) returns back to its norm, where badly planned cities will take a much longer timescale to return back to nature.

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