I've become convinced that one of the biggest obstacles to better road design in commercial areas is well-off business owners who drive their BMW to work every day and find it impossible to imagine a customer who uses any other mode of conveyance to arrive at the shop.
I love it when a coffee shop owner insists that the one parking space the city is gonna remove will tank their business and if you study the space it turns over max 4-5 times a day. If your coffee shop is gonna fail over 5 potential customers you don’t have a business.
The 4-5x a day is only 1 or 2 during the times a coffee chop is open.
Our grocery store has literally zero dedicated parking spaces. Zero. There’s maybe 20 out front within a block that are shared with a dozen other businesses.
If they relied on car traffic they wouldn’t have existed for 40 years.
Recently a business community opponent of the Boylston bike lanes was quoted talking about the “92 parking spaces” that would be lost. We are talking about a street full of luxury shops and restaurants. Thousands of transactions up and down that street all day.
Years back, business owners killed bike lanes on a stretch of bars/shops/restaurants in NE PDX cause ‘parking’ (maybe 40 spots?). Then during COVID, city shut down 2 adjacent blocks and there’s easily 100 people there every day who came on bike/transit/walking
I don't even think they are imagining customers using the same mode. They are only thinking about their own parking options and are using hypothetical customers as rhetorical cover for what is simply their own desire.
Whenever you want to put in a bike lane, it's important to do eighteen months of community outreach to find these guys who drive to their businesses from the suburbs and let them have input.
That is the entire origin story of the NYC metro area under the influence of Robert Moses. Riding around with his driver wishing roads were “parkways”. Never rode mass transit never even drove himself, had an in car office, so even disconnected from the impact of bad traffic.
There are a bunch of studies on this — the Graz study in Austria was the first — and business owners vastly overestimate how far their customers travel and the number who use cars.
This Literally-Literally happened in Columbus as the owner of Studio 35 (think wanna be alamo draft) railroaded a real bike lane from happening in central Columbus bc of his 6 parking spots
Speaking of that type of person: I worked as an admin at a nonprofit and the COO drove a BMW. He requires the company to rent *two spaces* in downtown Minneapolis so his dumbass car could have extra room.
“Is donor money used to fund personal employee car parking in a city with transit in a climate crisis?” Seems like a good vetting question for donating $$$ to a cause
Even worse: the nonprofit was to help adults with disabilities get and keep jobs. Not sure the bosses' fancy boy car should even be in the top fifty concerns.
We are finding this exact thing in trying to convert an ugly, small, impossible-to-use carpark in an otherwise lovely and heavily used high street, into a town square. The shoppers - love the idea. It would actively encourage them to come out more. Shop owners - it’s Armageddon.
