I agree with what you are saying about perception from the businesses, though based on my own experience riding nearly everyday in this town that last 5 years, I’d say they are not accurate. Even though there is data out there to support traffic calming as positive for business, the data is limited, and this will be a first for Austin. This requires businesses in some sense to take a leap of faith. That’s just part of owning your own business in my experience, but I can see how those with lower risk thresholds or who are less visionary would be nervous (that is not meant as a insult to those owners.)

Bike boulevards are supposed to make public space so that everyday citizens, not the fringe or early adopters, will see the bike as a valid transportation choice. So we’ll not change the demographics of those biking, whether it is actual or perceived, unless we create such facilities.

1. Obviously there are some non-lower-income people who would be riding the corridor – I would have been one of them had arthritis not intervened – but the aggregate income of “bicycle riders” in this town is not going to excite a business owner on this corridor, especially when you consider how many of those non-lower-income cyclists are just out riding for fun in their racing plumage and wouldn’t be inclined to stop. In other words, I was a transportation cyclist with a job that’d look legit to those businesses, but I was heavily outnumbered by the juvenile anarchists, students, and poor folks; even if I wish that weren’t the case.

2. Even if #1 weren’t true, it’s the perception among the public, and so, the effective fact on the ground for those business owners. (You’re not going to convince them, in the middle of a discussion like this, that the widely-held public image of bike riders or transit users is incorrect).

The majority of current riders may be lower income. But I believe the purpose of the bike blvd, and other infrastructure improvements, is to get more people from all income levels out there bicycling. If we’re just trying to improve things for the people that are already riding, I think we’re missing the point.

San Francisco and New York might as well be in another solar system for all the relevance they have to Austin. And don’t get me started on Europe (another galaxy).

As much as we might wish otherwise, the fact is that in Austin, people who patronize businesses by transit instead of by driving are almost entirely lower-income folks, unlike the vast swaths of middle and upper income people who do so in SF and especially NY. It is not difficult to understand why these businesses are afraid that their patrons who are turned off by difficulty driving there might not be easily replaced by transit users or cyclists.

It’s important to understand this argument rather than dismissing it with studies that simply aren’t applicable to our environment. Otherwise, you’re talking past each other, and the city will just go with the people making the most sense to them (meaning a 6-1 vote against the bike blvd).

Instead, I’d respond with “your customers will still have access by car; they just won’t have through access for long distances either way; this is no different than (insert large numbers of other sections of downtown where the street grid is discontinuous, for instance; or even go to suburban areas where strip malls don’t connect with each other). This shows that you understand the concern, and then effectively minimize it, rather than relying on the questionable contention that our transportation modeshares among the people with money to spend are anything like SF or NY or will be any time in the near future.

From a tactical/historical perspective, this is similar to how the SCB argument was needlessly complicated by some full-time cyclists’ lack of understanding of why people might want to park in front of their houses (leading to some of those people saying that the residents should just ride their bikes too, rather than the far more effective ‘understand and minimize’ rebuttal of “you can still park right across the street, a restriction just like that on “).