Bikenomics by Blue Elly;

Author:Blue, Elly;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Microcosm Publishing
Published: 2013-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

Bike Lanes on Main Street

9

Magnolia Street in Fort Worth, Texas’s newly hip Near Southside, is the sort of story that urban planners dream of.

In 2008, this retail, office, and apartment-lined street was re-striped. The street had been two lanes in each direction, both of which had been mainly used by cars, plus a few fast and fearless cyclists. In its new incarnation it still had four lanes, one in each direction for cars, and one for bicycles.168 “It was the first ‘road diet’ of its kind in Fort Worth, and has been a genuine success,” Kevin Buchanan, a local musician and author of the Fort Worthology blog, told me.

The best measure of this success was in the bottom line: After the road was rearranged, restaurant revenues along the street went up a combined total of 179%.

“Not to imply causality,” Buchanan added, “but clearly removing car lanes and replacing them with bike lanes had no ill effects on businesses, and of course it can be argued that the safer, slower street and better cycling/walking environment helped business.”

The effort to revitalize the street included adding lots of new parking. A 320 space car parking garage went up in the heart of the district; shortly afterward, bicycle parking staples were bolted into the concrete in front of every business, providing spaces for 160 bikes.

The total cost for the parking garage was over 5 million dollars. The total for buying and installing all the bicycle parking came to just over $12,000—less than the cost of a single space in the garage.

On the spring weekend I visited Magnolia Street in 2012, the garage was nearly empty, but bike staples outside neighborhood restaurants and bars were overflowing. A coffeeshop on the street, needing yet more capacity, had built their own bike corral, a row of bike staples drilled into the public right of way. The new spaces more than doubled the shop’s previous parking capacity.

By all measures, these improvements were an excellent investment. So much so that other Fort Worth streets were slated to get the same treatment—replacing car capacity with bicycle capacity both on and off the road.

What does a bike-friendly community actually look like? It certainly does not look like anyone’s fantasy of a pedestrian or agricultural past. Distances have become too great, cities are too sprawling, and we are all too deeply invested in lives that are spread out across a landscape that has been designed to suit the automobile. Transit is important, but can only take us so far in this dispersed landscape without massive and costly redevelopment of the built environment that is not always done in a way that proves useful and attractive.

This is the genius of the bicycle. Most bike trips are less than 30 minutes. When people ride to get in shape, they tend to go farther,178 and people who already commute by bike seem content to ride greater, on average, distances to and from work. But for all of the errands of daily life we want easy transportation.

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