FABB Blog

NYC DOT found that protected bikeways had a significant positive impact on local business strength. After the construction of a protected bicycle lane on 9th Avenue, local businesses saw a 49% increase in retail sales. In comparison, local businesses throughout Manhattan only saw a 3% increase in retail sales.

In many ways, these data come as no surprise. We know that when towns invest in bicycle infrastructure, people will ride more — the number of people traveling by bicycle increases when there is infrastructure to make traveling by bike safe and easy.

We also know that people who travel along a street by bicycle have fewer barriers to stopping at a local business than people who travel along the same street by car. It's very easy to hop off a bicycle and find a place to secure the bike; not so with finding parking for an automobile. In fact, a recent study suggest that bicycle riders tend to spend more at local businesses over the course of a month.

City officials say the nation's largest bike-sharing system will begin sometime this month with 6,000 bikes at 330 stations in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, with plans to expand eventually to 10,000 bikes and 600 docking stations in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.

"When you talk about scale, no other U.S. city comes close," says Jon Orcutt, policy director at the city's Department of Transportation, which is overseeing the launch of the program.

Officials hope the privately funded bike-sharing program, dubbed Citi Bike after a $41 million sponsorship from Citibank and an additional $6.5 million from MasterCard, will add riders to the more than 700 miles of bike lanes throughout New York and will be used by one-way commuters and round-trip tourists alike.

The research will provide weighty evidence for advocates of dedicated bike infrastructure precisely because transportation engineers have long believed the exact opposite to be true. For years, they’ve counter-intuitively argued that you’re actually better off learning to ride alongside cars than having your own bike lane.

"That became a very often repeated philosophy," says Kay Teschke, a professor at the University of British Columbia and the lead author of the new study. She traces it back to a guy named John Forester, who popularized the idea of "vehicular cycling" 40 years ago. Forester famously argued against separated bike lanes in Palo Alto, on the grounds that bikers should learn instead to behave like drivers.

Some spotty research followed on this topic that seemed to reinforce Forester’s idea: Biking in traffic did appear to be safer than many of its alternatives. But the alternatives that researchers had to examine in North America were unpaved routes, sidewalks, off-road and even mountain bike trails. At the time, we had little of the dedicated commuter bike infrastructure many cities are just creating now.

"I think a little bit of what happened was [engineers] knew this was counterintuitive, they knew the few studies out there were not particularly well controlled or appropriate," Teschke says. "But it just further entrenched them."

So along comes this new study. Teschke and her colleagues worked with five hospitals in Toronto and Vancouver to identify adult bikers who were treated in an emergency room within 24 hours of a bike accident. Over an 18-month period between summer of 2008 and fall of 2009, they identified 2,335 injured cyclists. Of that group, 690 were considered eligible for the study and agreed to participate.

In the end, Teschke was still concerned about one other question: Are the safest routes the same routes that bikers actually want to use? Several years ago, she conducted another study into this question of preferences, using the same 14 route designations employed in the latest research.

"We were told in advance that young males and people who are experienced riders would tell you they’d rather ride on major streets without bike infrastructure," she recalls. "It turned out not to be true. Everyone had the same order or preferences."

So how did those preferences line up with this latest injury data?

"When my statistician finally finished doing the analysis for the injury study, I can remember sitting at the desk, and my heart was just pounding because I thought 'what am I going to do if the injury results are the opposite of the preference results?'" Teschke says. How can anyone advocate for safer bike infrastructure if no one wants to use it? “Isn’t that going to be just awful for the present situation?” Teschke was relieved (bike advocates more broadly should be, too). Here the results of the two studies are plotted on a single graph (above).