> But was pedestrian traffic up to the same rate as cars were down such that overall traffic was unaffected? No, probably not, because the story says vehicles are down 11% but pedestrian traffic is only up 8%.
Those percentages are only directly comparable if the number of cars and the number of pedestrians is the same, which I'm guessing it's not. Some quick searching doesn't seem to yield an answer to this question, but in a city like NYC I'd venture to guess there is more pedestrian traffic than car traffic, so it's entirely possible that an 8% increase in pedestrian traffic more than makes up for an 11% drop in car traffic.
> So, overall, a negative impact. You can debate the magnitude and whether it is “worth it,” but it’s definitely a negative impact on commerce.
I don't think you can conclude that at all because you're missing some key pieces of information, like whether the average positively impacted businesses had a greater positive impact than the average negatively impacted business had negative impact. You also don't know the long term impacts that might change what types of businesses are in the area of how they attract customers. Businesses that optimize for car traffic (like Costco, at the extreme end of the spectrum) might see an initial decrease in customers, but longer term could either adapt to be more pedestrian friendly or be replaced with pedestrian friendly businesses that might generate even more economic activity.
Also not to put too fine a point on it, but the "business impact" numbers were based off a reporter going to 40 businesses in one neighborhood and asking "people working there" what the impact had been. I'm not sure that's a very scientific way to draw broad conclusions, as the NYT freely admits.
Perhaps pedestrian traffic would make up for it, but nothing said in the article actually shows that.
I agree with you that the article doesn’t contain enough information to make a firm conclusion. In fact, that was my point.
Yes, I’m basing my conclusion on the fact that more than twice the number of businesses said it went down as up. Yes, that’s qualitative at some level, but if it supports any conclusion whatsoever, it supports the conclusion of business being down, not “no impact.”
The article is trying to whitewash the impact. It reports a bunch of numbers but those numbers don’t say much at all, and if they say anything, it’s actually opposite of what the reporter claims they say.
To be clear, I don’t live in NYC and I don’t have an opinion on the policy. I’m just noticing the poor reporting.
Those percentages are only directly comparable if the number of cars and the number of pedestrians is the same, which I'm guessing it's not. Some quick searching doesn't seem to yield an answer to this question, but in a city like NYC I'd venture to guess there is more pedestrian traffic than car traffic, so it's entirely possible that an 8% increase in pedestrian traffic more than makes up for an 11% drop in car traffic.
> So, overall, a negative impact. You can debate the magnitude and whether it is “worth it,” but it’s definitely a negative impact on commerce.
I don't think you can conclude that at all because you're missing some key pieces of information, like whether the average positively impacted businesses had a greater positive impact than the average negatively impacted business had negative impact. You also don't know the long term impacts that might change what types of businesses are in the area of how they attract customers. Businesses that optimize for car traffic (like Costco, at the extreme end of the spectrum) might see an initial decrease in customers, but longer term could either adapt to be more pedestrian friendly or be replaced with pedestrian friendly businesses that might generate even more economic activity.
Also not to put too fine a point on it, but the "business impact" numbers were based off a reporter going to 40 businesses in one neighborhood and asking "people working there" what the impact had been. I'm not sure that's a very scientific way to draw broad conclusions, as the NYT freely admits.