To bike lane or not to bike lane?

In the San Diego region, residents and small-business owners pile into public meetings whenever government officials propose striping their streets with bike lanes and — most controversial of all — removing parking spots to do so.

From Encinitas to Coronado to San Diego, proposals to create dedicated lanes for bicyclists have often hit the skids or significantly shifted to accommodate critics.

Still, a handful of bike-lane blueprints have recently overcome such opposition and started to move forward, including San Diego’s Downtown Mobility Plan and the San Diego Association of Governments’ $200 million bike initiative.


The San Diego County Bicycle Coalition believes the region could begin to see a transformation within the next three to five years.

“San Diego will be a bicycling paradise when these and all of our regional bikeways are built,” said Andy Hanshaw, executive director of the coalition.

The primary objection to bike lanes is that these pathways for pedal pushers take an economic toll on businesses. These opponents argue that any parking spots lost to bike lanes will translate to fewer customers for local eateries, bookstores and other retail shops.

So, is that true? Are regional policy makers turning their backs on local merchants to curry favor with the bicycling lobby and its league of millennial voters?


Before we dig into that issue, we encourage you to send us your thoughts and questions about commuting and the environment to carwars@sduniontribune.com. Thanks for participating.

Now, back to our question for this week.

It’s true that when bike lanes are striped, parking spots are often taken out for such projects. This is especially the case when talking about protected bike lanes. This is where a city moves on-street parking several feet away from the curb to create a lane for bicyclists.

In such circumstances, some parking spaces are routinely eliminated to preserve a safe turning radius for vehicles rounding street corners, allies and driveways.


By comparison, parking spaces aren’t eliminated for so-called sharrows, the white street markings with arrows and a picture of a bike, which are intended to remind drivers to share with the road with cyclists. But this design is widely considered less safe for bicyclists.

The San Diego Association of Governments, the region’s primary transportation and long-range planning agency, said it hasn’t studied the effects of bike lanes on businesses.

However, there’s no shortage of literature on this issue in other cities nationwide — and the findings are pretty consistent: Bike lanes, even when they displace parking spots, make little impact on the numbers of customers for local businesses. If anything, cities have seen positive results overall from promoting cycling in commercial corridors.

In places such as Portland, Austin, San Francisco and New York, studies have found that while bicyclists spend less per visit at local retailers than motorists, they tend to cruise by more often. This might not be great news for furniture stores, but would likely be welcomed news for a bookstore or pizza shop.


The cheaper form of transportation has also been credited with freeing up disposable income to spend on everything from coffee and beer to trips to the movies and, of course, the local bike shop.

In North Carolina, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Colorado, bicycling tourists have been found to generate millions of dollars for those local economies.

Proximity to bike lanes has even been correlated with higher real estate values in a number of cities, such as San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

And here in San Diego, a report by Circulate San Diego, a nonprofit that advocates for “active” transportation and public transportation, notes that sales at 97 businesses in the Bird Rock neighborhood of La Jolla increased 24 percent after changes were made to boost bike and pedestrian safety.


San Diego County could be different from the national experience, but so far, concerns in other cities about the economic harm from bike lanes haven’t proven to be on track.


Twitter: @jemersmith

Phone: (619) 293-2234

Email: joshua.smith@sduniontribune.com