Do Bike Lanes Harm Nearby Businesses? Evidence from NYC Foot Traffic Data
Cities across the United States are investing heavily in bicycle infrastructure to promote sustainable mobility and enhance traffic safety. Yet the economic consequences of reallocating street space remain poorly understood, especially for commercial establishments located along newly installed bike lanes. This paper examines the causal impact of bicycle infrastructure (distinguishing protected Class I, conventional Class II, and shared Class III lanes) on local commercial activity using high-frequency foot traffic data from New York City, covering 95,111 points of interest observed monthly from January 2021 to December 2024. I combine propensity score matching with the Callaway–Sant'Anna (2021) staggered difference-in-differences estimator, supplemented by a parallel street spillover analysis using CSCL directional geometry and a triple difference (DDD) strategy exploiting within-street side variation. The aggregate treatment effect on store visits is positive but small (+4.2%) and subject to residual selection bias that, on closer inspection, partly reflects compositional heterogeneity across POI categories rather than pure unobserved confounding. The restaurant subgroup, which satisfies conditional parallel trends, shows a credible positive effect of 7.8% on monthly visits; grocery stores show 4.7%. These delivery-served categories are precisely those for which bike lanes increasingly function as last-mile logistics infrastructure during the 2022–2024 expansion of commercial e-bike delivery. A mechanism test using pre-installation parking lane counts finds no monotone relationship between parking loss exposure and commercial impact, rejecting the dominant merchant narrative that parking removal is the primary harm channel. These results suggest that bike lane installation does not structurally harm nearby businesses and may modestly benefit foot-traffic-oriented and delivery-served establishments.