While your average shop keeper “knows” that most of their customers come by car and the most important thing for retail vitality is lots of free car parking, the reality is rather different. Research by TfL, Bartlett School of Planning and others found that people walking, cycling and using public transport can spend 40% more in their neighbourhood shops than do motorists. Just making public realm improvements that help people to walk and cycle can increase retail spend by 30%. This isn’t just adding by cycle lanes; most public realm improvements include things that make people want to stay longer, to sit in cafes or just sit and chat. Things that help include providing shade (trees or shelters), reducing the noise of traffic, making roads easy to cross or having cleaner air. A good public realm improvement can see around 40-50% of people coming for social reasons.

All those parked bikes leading to retail vitality (Konstanz)

But returning to cycling. One early and easy intervention is to provide cycle parking. TfL found that cycle parking delivers 5x the retail spend per unit area than car parking. Not every city finds the same uplift though. In Bern (Switzerland) the increase was only 13% but the car parking in Bern is strictly time limited whereas cycle parking is sufficiently plentiful for people to just leave their bikes in the street.

Biltstraat, Utrecht

A question is: where does that 40% come from? A possibility is that as bikes are cheaper to run than cars there is more household budget left over. But what is more likely is that once you have a car you tend to use suburban/edge of town supermarkets for a “weekly shop” rather than frequently shopping more locally. The cost to the rest of us is that taking much of the retail out of the street experience means the street loses much of the vitality that makes them a pleasure to be in and be willing to spend money.