It reminds me of what happens nearly every time car parking on a busy retail street is removed for bike lanes/bus lanes/better walking.
Business owners universally oppose the change and predict catastrophe, the change goes through, and business/foot traffic goes way up instead.
It seems that business owners' ability to "know their customers" is rather limited; that, or they're just biased by their own need for car/delivery parking.
> It seems that business owners' ability to "know their customers" is rather limited; that, or they're just biased by their own need for car/delivery parking.
I think the latter is often the case. In many case, I don’t even think it’s conscious: many business owners, especially people who started / inherited successful small businesses in city neighborhoods, moved out to the suburbs for bigger houses/schools/etc. and are thus completely car dependent. It’s very human to assume other people live similarly to you in the absence of evidence otherwise and someone who bikes or walks looks just like someone who drove unless they’re carrying a helmet or something. If you’re in most suburbs, there isn’t a great transit/bike option to get to the shop and so they aren’t even in the habit of thinking about alternatives.
There’s an especially funny thing which comes up all of the time when local advocates actually monitor spots: small shops often only have one or two street spots so the person who works there has a completely different view of the convenience because they almost always get a space when they show up at 7:30am but nobody else thinks of it as easy because the spots is taken and so actual customers would spend longer finding another spot and walking to the store than it takes to walk/bike from within the neighborhood.
> In many case, I don’t even think it’s conscious: many business owners, especially people who started / inherited successful small businesses in city neighborhoods, moved out to the suburbs for bigger houses/schools/etc. and are thus completely car dependent.
I don't know if you live in Manhattan, but there's a far more parsimonious explanation than "business owners are suburban car people": in order to operate most kinds of businesses in the city, you need easy access to deliveries, which means easy parking.
Anyone who has ever tried to arrange logistics for any kind of delivery in NYC knows what a nightmare it is. You routinely see cars and trucks double-parked, because there's no alternative. Trucks park illegally, because the risk of the occasional ticket is cheaper than circling the block for hours.
I can easily see how this would be a subject of top-of-mind importance to any business owner in the city.
> I don't know if you live in Manhattan, but there's a far more parsimonious explanation than "business owners are suburban car people": in order to operate most kinds of businesses in the city, you need easy access to deliveries, which means easy parking.
Maybe, but wouldn’t they say deliveries if that’s what they meant? If I had a shop with no rear access, I’d be asking the city to create and enforce a dedicated short term delivery zone because unrestricted parking is going to full of private cars when the delivery driver arrives. It’d be totally reasonable to ask for that but it’s really rare compared to assertions that most customers drive which are obviously false because they need more than 1-2 customers per hour.
This keeps coming up in every area: discouraging private vehicle use in a dense area makes everything better for everyone. It’s safer, healthier with less pollution, more pleasant with less noise, easier for people who need accessibility accommodations, easier for delivery drivers and contractors who actually need trucks, and reduces congestion. Once you stop pretending there’s any way to make one car per person work in a city, there actually is enough space for everyone else.
I think the businesses do kind of know their customers.
This is an exaggeration of what (I think) happens: all of their current customers only ever drive there and park in front of their shop. They say oh with no parking I won't come any more. Then they stop coming. They lost all their customers! Everyone who can now safely walk to the shop (who couldn't / wouldn't before for multiple reasons) starts walking there. There are a lot more people who can now safely walk to and patronize the shop, and they do. The shops foot traffic went up by 10x. They still lost all their customers.
I think it's probably good that it's easy for people to walk / bike / bus to this shop, and the shop owner probably does to, but they still may have lost a lot of old customers.
I think this is basically hitting the nail on the head. My town has closed a lot of street parking in the downtown, and as a result I rarely do shopping or dining there now because I don't want to park in a garage 3-4 blocks away when I used to be able to park on the same block if not right in front of the business. In other words, I had no other reason to be downtown, so making it inconvenient is going to make me less likely to go there.
But I'm sure there are people who are downtown anyway (work there, etc.) and who now don't want to walk back to the garage to get their car and drive somewhere for lunch, so they just walk to someplace close by.
So businesses probably lose some old customers, and gain some new. It might be a net positive for them.
> But I'm sure there are people who are downtown anyway (work there, etc.) and who now don't want to walk back to the garage to get their car and drive somewhere for lunch, so they just walk to someplace close by.
This raises a question: why didn't those people walk to someplace close by before your town closed downtown street parking? Even when their cars were conveniently nearby a short walk to a nearby lunch place should be faster and more convenient than a drive to some distant place.
One explanation that seems plausible is that they did not know of the nearby places. When they are at home and decide to go out for lunch they go to some national or regional chain like Subway or Wendy's or Denny's. There's one of those a reasonable drive from work and so they go there. When the parking change made that a hassle they started paying more attention to non-chain options and noticed the local places.
It would be interesting to try to reintroduce street parking in some form that will again draw in people like you but that would still discourage people who work downtown from just hopping in their cars and driving to a chain restaurant for lunch.
Another possible answer: It sucks to be a pedestrian around cars, so people decide to drive.
As a pedestrian, cars take up space and block your vision when they're parked, they're dangerous, loud, and (can be) smelly when they're moving, and even when the cars themselves aren't around, the space between buildings is dominated by their required, exclusive infrastructure of asphalt.
Usually when parking is removed, it's replaced with planters, seating, and things for people instead of cars, which makes it more attractive to be a pedestrian.
In general, road diets that make things worse for cars typically make things better for other modes of transportation.
People walking and biking are much more sensitive to changes in the urban environment because they're not in a climate controlled metal safety box. Lots of things can change that impact how much people are willing to walk or bike around. Having fewer/slower cars around, for example.
More choices. The places within easy walking distance get boring after a while. Also because it’s cheaper (but they probably aren’t fully considering the cost of the drive)
> Everyone who can now safely walk to the shop (who couldn't / wouldn't before for multiple reasons) starts walking there.
I'm struggling to imagine reasons why a significant number of people will now start walking to these businesses. What are some of these multiple reasons that have now been overcome to an extent as to cause shop traffic to increase ten-fold?
This actually makes a lot of sense to me. My wife is disabled, so I’m probably one of those customers he would lose along with his parking, but there are probably 1.5x as many homes in my neighborhood (of condos) than there are vehicles actively parking here. It would likely be a huge boon for the places I frequent now. It might even have an effect of slightly countering market downturns as people in trouble sell/lose cars and move to public transit temporarily
One extremely promising change I’ve been seeing a lot of lately: the most undesirable parking spaces in large lots are being ripped up and replaced with small businesses. I’ve seen a new coffee shop and gas station with 4 pumps go up in my town so far. Love it!
> Everyone who can now safely walk to the shop (who couldn't / wouldn't before for multiple reasons) starts walking there. There are a lot more people who can now safely walk to and patronize the shop, and they do.
You’re hypothesizing that people are purposefully avoiding these streets because they have cars driving on them?
Yes? Cars are loud, they smell, take up a tremendous amount of space & are gigantic metal boxes that can cause serious injuries even at low speeds.
In Amsterdam there's been countless examples of this exact thing. Businesses booming after they rip out parking and make roads forbidden for cars, and I can anecdotally say I also love whenever they rip out parking near me in the Netherlands.
Vancouver did a study of how people arrived to their shopping destination and found that a small minority drove to their destination. This was in opposition to the assertions of the business owners that claimed drivers were remarkably more dominant and parking critical.
Yeah, I imagine they are often projecting their own frustration over parking onto their customers. Every time a customer comes in and grumbles about parking, it triggers their confirmation bias. Conversely, new customers who only popped in because they were on foot are probably less likely to express that fact.
Given how annoying parking is, I'll bet that there are also many business owners who would trade some profit for their own ease of parking. Especially given that they have the power to squeeze their employees rather than bear the full cost themselves.
> Valencia Street’s controversial center-running bike lane did not harm businesses, as merchants claimed, a new report finds.
> “While businesses along Valencia Street have clearly suffered more than in other parts of the city since the pandemic, the challenges facing the corridor pre-date the construction of the bike improvements, and there is no statistical basis for linking the two,” a City Controller’s Office report published Wednesday found. The report used the city’s taxable sales database to analyze the effect of the bike lane on businesses.
> Merchants along the corridor have waged a war against the city’s transit agency over the bike lane for almost a year. The owner of Amado’s bar, David Quinby, even blamed the lane for closing his business, despite suffering a devastating basement flood some months prior.
> “This finding does not mean that no business was adversely affected by the bike improvements,” the city report added. “It simply means that any negative impacts on individual businesses were offset by positive impacts on others, and there is no net effect on the corridor as a whole.”
Some changes, like having a highway bypass a small city, can be catastrophic to local businesses. A restaurant that might have hundreds of out-of-town cars go by, now has only local residents.
That's a completely different sort of scenario than what I'm talking about. I'm talking about changes to streets that accommodate greater population density.
There were some negative effects at a construction shutdown of a street recently where it temporarily did hurt some business, mostly retail shops but not the restaurants/bars which had a big boost in business. These boutique style shops were more patronized by people from suburbs or far flung parts of the city than actual locals, and their location was based on the owners wanting to live in the city vs their actual customers.
Business owners universally oppose the change and predict catastrophe, the change goes through, and business/foot traffic goes way up instead.
It seems that business owners' ability to "know their customers" is rather limited; that, or they're just biased by their own need for car/delivery parking.