Here We Go Again With Retailers Hating Bike Lanes

Every time a city proposes taking away street parking for a bike lane, you can count on a chorus of businesses to sing the blues. The refrain is sounding right now in the London borough of Enfield, which just got a £30 million grant from Transport for London’s “Mini-Holland” program to redesign its streets with segregated bike lanes on either side of the road. Over at The Guardian, Nick Mead writes that retailers on the street are crying bloody hell:

It’s natural for a business to worry about … business. But as we showed in our extensive (but not even exhaustive) global literature review from March, there’s no strong evidence that replacing street parking with bike lanes has a ruinous impact on retail sales. At worst, cyclists and drivers end up spending about the same, while everyone in the city gets a nicer street. At best, people on bikes end up spending much more.