The Downtown Bike Lane Is Working. Don't Rip It Out.

MILLBROOK, Ind. — A year ago this month, I stood up at a city council meeting and asked the council to reconsider the protected bike lane the city had just painted down the west side of Court Street, in front of my gift shop. I lost eleven parking spots along my block, and I said so, loudly, to anyone who would listen for most of last November.

I want to publicly say something I didn’t expect to say a year later: I was wrong about how this would go, and I think the council should leave the bike lane exactly where it is.

This isn’t a position I’ve arrived at out of civic good feeling. It’s a position I’ve arrived at by looking at my own point-of-sale numbers, which is the only kind of evidence a small business owner really trusts. My foot traffic on Court Street is up compared to this time last year, not down, and several of my regulars now tell me they bike in from the Thornfield side rather than drive and look for parking they used to complain was already too scarce before the lane went in.

I know I’m one shop owner with one register, and one year of data from one unusually mild construction season isn’t proof of anything citywide. But I’ve talked to enough of my neighbors on this block to believe my experience isn’t unique, and I think it’s worth saying plainly, in print, because I was just as plain a year ago when I said the opposite.

What I Got Wrong

My original objection wasn’t irrational. Eleven parking spots is eleven parking spots, and in a downtown that already felt tight on a Saturday afternoon, losing any of them felt like a direct threat to the kind of customer who parks, pops in for twenty minutes, and leaves. What I didn’t account for was how many of my customers were never driving two blocks to begin with, and how many more might start arriving some other way if the city made that way feel safe.

The city’s own count, released this summer, found average daily bike traffic on that stretch of Court Street has grown from roughly 40 riders a day before the lane to more than 210 a day this past August, the kind of number that’s easy to dismiss from a council podium and much harder to dismiss when you’re the one watching it pull up to your bike rack.

The Parking Problem Didn't Disappear. It Moved.

I don’t want to oversell this. The parking complaints on this block didn’t vanish, they moved half a block over to the Elm Street lot, which is a real and legitimate frustration, and one reason I supported Tuesday’s council vote to finally build a parking garage there. A bike lane and a parking garage aren’t opposites. Downtown needs both, and pretending this was ever an either-or choice is part of what made last year’s fight angrier than it needed to be, myself very much included.

What the Council Should Actually Debate

There are real, fair questions left about the bike lane that I’d rather the council spend its time on than relitigating whether it should exist. The intersection at Court and Fifth still has no dedicated bike signal phase, and I’ve watched two near-misses there myself this fall. Snow removal on the lane was inconsistent last winter, which pushed cyclists back into traffic on the exact mornings it mattered most. Those are fixable problems. Ripping out a lane that’s carrying 210 riders a day to solve them would not fix anything; it would just move the danger back onto the sidewalk and the traffic lane.

• Add a protected bike signal phase at Court and Fifth, the lane's most-cited near-miss location.
• Commit, in writing, to the same snow-clearing schedule for the bike lane as for the adjacent traffic lane.
• Move forward with the Elm Street garage, which the council approved this week, to address parking directly rather than through the bike lane.
• Publish the bike-count data annually so this debate can happen with numbers instead of just opinions, including mine from last year.

Why I'm Writing This at All

I’m not writing this because I think one shop owner changing her mind should settle a policy debate. I’m writing it because I spent a very public year being the loudest voice against this lane, and I think owning that loudly and publicly, now that my own evidence points the other way, matters more than quietly moving on and hoping nobody remembers what I said at that council meeting.

I’ve talked to a handful of other merchants on this block who felt the way I did a year ago, and most of them, off the record, admit the same thing I’m admitting here: the disruption they feared mostly didn’t show up, or showed up in a smaller, more manageable form than the parking spot count suggested it would. Not all of them are ready to say so publicly, and I understand why — it is uncomfortable to say your loudest public argument of the year turned out to be wrong. I decided it was more uncomfortable to stay quiet about it.

The bike lane cost me eleven parking spots. A year later, I don’t think it cost me anything else, and I think it’s brought some things to this block I didn’t expect to value. I’d rather the council spend its energy fixing the intersection at Fifth Street than reopening a fight I started and no longer think I was right to start.