Live the dream. Photo: Mr. Rollers via Ingrid Peterson/Flickr

There’s an interesting piece in today’s Los Angeles Business Journal by Richard Risemberg on the economics of the Bicycle Boulevard and why the city needs to begin installing them immediately . While it’s trues that Risemberg is a bike partisan, he writes the excellent Bicycle Fixation Webzine and is part of the Bike Coalition’s 4th Street Bike Boulevard committee, he deserves bonus points for taking the campaign to a new audience and speaking to them in their language.

Risenberg trys two rhetorical attacks to make his point.  First, he re-frames typical cyclist arguments in economic terms.  For example, he takes the typical argument that car travel lanes are a waste of space and instead argues that they’re a waste of money to build and maintain.

Second, he shows that, across the world, Bike Boulevards are good for business.  In his bulleted points arguing for Boulevards, these two stuck out to me:

• Money in retailers’ pockets. Studies in San Francisco and Toronto
showed that while merchants believed that 70 percent of their customers
came by car, when traffic was counted, it turned out that only 30
percent did so. Cars take up vast amounts of room; a street or
structure filled with cooling metal doesn’t always translate into
hotter sales. Each car, in real life, represents only one shopper. You
can park 12 bicycles in the space of one car.

• Integration with
mass transit, drawing more people to buses and trains. As the
Transportation Research Board found in 2004: “Studies suggest that
developments that incorporate bicycling and walking infrastructure in
proximity with public transportation can reduce fiscal outlays of local
municipalities towards roads and other infrastructure expansion by 25
percent.” This means lower taxes for you.

For the curious, a discussion on the Streetsblog Network mailing list ferreted out some of the information Risemberg mentions.  For starters, our friends at San Francisco Streetsblog have written two stories covering business trends and cycling trends in their city with The Myth of the Urban Driving Shoppers and Only 17% Drive to Shop in Downtown San Francisco.  Transportation Alternatives in New York City also crunched numbers from a lot of different sources for their report Streets to Live By.

Risemberg, naturally, wants to see the city focus on making Fourth Street between the Downtown and Fairfax the first Bicycle Boulevard in city limits.  Anyone interested in joining the LACBC’s Bicycle Boulevard Campaign for Fourth Street can join their mailing list by visiting their "google groups" page.