There are many more local benefits of the bike economy, from lowering families’ health care costs to reducing a business’s need to invest in costly parking spaces for staff and customers. As a business model, it’s a natural response to a population that craves cheap lunch, prefers not to travel far, and doesn’t need a 7′ x 20′ piece of real estate to park on. Then there’s the food cart boom that’s overtaken Portland - every previously vacant alley and parking lot, many along major bike routes, seems to have spawned a semi-permanent pod of them. One local grocery store recently opened a location with more parking for bicycles than for cars. In Portland, businesses impatiently line up to replace their car parking with on-street bike racks. Preferably along routes that don’t include riding on highways or having to zip anxiously across them.īicycle parking is the indicator species of this new economy, with a business’s enthusiasm for its two-wheeled clientele being easy to gauge by the quantity of bike racks out front. Despite the media attention given to mega-mileage supercommuters, for most people who depend on bikes for transportation, life works best with all these necessities in reasonable biking distance - say, less than five miles - from their home. People who ride, just like people who drive, buy groceries, visit the doctor, need a new shirt sometimes, and enjoy dinner and a movie. To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. Bicycle tourism is another huge boon to regions that can attract it - in 2010, Wisconsin bragged of a yearly $1.5 billion bike economy. A 2008 study in Portland clocked bicycle-related industry alone as contributing $90 million to the local economy every year. One thing is guaranteed: it includes a lot of new bike shops like this one on a bikeway in Baltimore - one of five new bike shops to have opened in the last two years in that city.

It’s already emerging along urban, low-traffic bikeway networks nationwide. What will this new bicycle economy look like? It’s amazing how much money can stay in your community when it isn’t being pumped into the gas tank, big insurance, and the auto market. In the many North American cities where two-wheeled transportation is taking off, a new bicycle economy is emerging. But if you’re one of those who lives in a bike-friendlier place, you’ll be doing your local business community a good turn and padding Uncle Sam’s pockets as well as your own if you trade four wheels for two. Communities designed exclusively for motor vehicles impose a major financial penalty on those who are compelled to take on the expense of driving. Sounds like a teabagger’s wet dream, but it’s actually a conservative estimate of how much you’d save by ditching your car, or even just one of your cars - and getting on a bicycle instead.Ĭar-centric conditions don’t always make it easy to choose the bicycle.

Bikenomics by elly blue