A collection of street security initiatives in Seattle had no adverse impact on native companies’ backside traces and in lots of circumstances boosted them, based on a brand new examine — undermining the persistent delusion that saving lives will undermine financial progress.
Researchers on the College of Washington discovered that seven roadway websites that had been focused for protected streets interventions reminiscent of street diets, bike lanes and “woonerf”-style road redesigns generated about 5 p.c extra taxable gross sales than comparable comparability websites close by, at the very least within the seven years after the modifications had been made.
The researchers acknowledge that it is not a statistically vital distinction, however even with the small pattern measurement, the examine is of the biggest on the financial impacts of Imaginative and prescient Zero initiatives, offering strong proof that calmer streets actually did not harm Seattle’s native financial system — even when they needed to take away just a few parking areas to get them constructed.
“Business individuals fear — even when they do not actually have any proof — that ‘my favorite customers park in front of my store, and if they won’t be able to do that, they won’t come,’” said Andrew Dannenberg, who co-authored the paper. “The bottom line is, the places that had these interventions had about the same sales revenues as the ones that didn’t have any interventions — and in some cases, it may be that people being able to walk in your store may actually bring more people in than just those who can park there.”
Still, Dannenburg acknowledged that it’s been hard for researchers to quash the assumption that things like bike lanes are unilaterally bad for business — even if skeptics have virtually no hard evidence to prove it.
Part of the problem is data scarcity. The master’s student who conceived of and led the study, Daniel Osterhage, had to complete “a complete vary of paperwork” just to access the sales data necessary to explore the issue, and even then, identifying comparable sites for comparison was a serious challenge, even in a big city like Seattle. (Streetsblog NYC had similar bureaucratic challenges when it compiled a similar study after a controversial bike lane project was completed.)
And the sheer paucity of Imaginative and prescient Zero initiatives in America makes the duty even more durable, since nice comparability research require at the very least a number of street interventions that went in across the identical time and weren’t ripped out in subsequent years.
These types of limitations assist clarify why solely a handful of papers on the financial impacts of protected streets have been printed, and so they’ve tended to deal with remoted initiatives in massive city facilities like New York Metropolis, San Francisco and Toronto.
“It is a matter of curiosity, assets, and entry to information,” Dannenberg explained. “That is an unfunded examine [that started with] a scholar doing a grasp’s thesis, so he is bought the time and he is bought the motivation, as a result of he desires to have the ability to get this diploma. However for a paid researcher to do it, anyone has to wish to put some time and money into taking a look at it. And it simply hadn’t been executed on a bigger scale earlier than.”
Dannenberg hopes that his study will at least cast doubt on the knee-jerk belief that safe streets projects are a death knell for local shops and cafes, and motivate communities to find out if the opposite is true. And once they do, they can shift the conversation towards how to make safe streets a default, rather than constantly balancing them against feared economic “harms” that may not even be actual.
“When they wanted to cut down on smoking in bars, the bar owners said, ‘Oh, if people can’t smoke here, they won’t come drink!’” he added. “But after they banned smoking, the bars did just fine. It’s about being able to defuse an economic argument. … We can make it safer for pedestrians and not do economic harm to the businesses.”
