BIKE JOBS: More Bikes, More Jobs, Recreating The Wheel?

A few years ago, a bunch of bike savvy friends noticed something about Falls Road—the street just below the North Howard Street bridge near Penn Station.  Nearly, invisible from nearby North Avenue, the road had become a major corridor for people biking to and from work.  And so, the friends wrote a business plan, and scraped some money together.   Three years later, bike commuters on Falls Road now cycle past Baltimore Bicycle Works.

The shop is home to rows of bikes, and will soon have its own frame-building workshop.  Behind the counter is Tommy Nash, but, he won't call himself a manager.

“ ...I'm one of the worker-owners of Baltimore Bicycle Works.  We're a workers cooperative. This is our shop.”

And, voila. Six new jobs created—and because of their business model, all of them here, management-level.

This is precisely the argument of a new study about bike infrastructure and job creation in Baltimore.  The Political Economy Research Institute, a Massachusetts-based think tank, published the study last December.  Their findings suggest that between 11 and 14 jobs are created for every million dollars that Baltimore puts towards bike infrastructure — things like bike lanes, and signs alerting motorists about bike lanes.

Tommy Nash told WYPR who to talk to next.

“Nate Evans is the actual czar of cycling in the city.  I don't know if that's actually his title.”

The quickest way to get to his downtown office is by bike, so Nash rents me one.

Nate Evans is standing Outside of his office at the Department of Transportation on East Redwood Street, bicycle in hand.  Evans, a Baltimore County native, has been involved with developing bike pathways through the city — he also provided the data for the study on bike infrastructure and job creation.  And he's not afraid of a mid-day bike ride in a suit and tie.

“I can show you a recent lanes we just put in, I think they'll be in use where we're going.”

Biking from his downtown office is a little touch-and-go until we reach the Inner Harbor.  It could be the frigid weather, or that it's lunchtime on a weekday, but there don't seem to be too many other cyclists out.  Evans, though, is undeterred, and he points out some recent developments that he says makes the city more bike friendly.

All of these are a boon for local jobs — the city has to pay construction workers, and buy paint for roads and aluminum for signage, and so on.  There are also “indirect” jobs that result from bikes, like Baltimore Bicycle Works and the three other bike shops that have opened up in the city within the past two years.  Evans goes on to say that there are also further economic benefits for the city of getting people out of cars.

“Another correlation we see is that people that are walking and biking are more likely that are going to stop at local businesses, because they don't have to worry about parking...There's no limit to the benefit that bikes have on us as human beings, on our environment, and on our pocket versus cars.”

The Massachusetts study also compared jobs created through bikes against jobs created through cars.  According to their findings, a million dollars put into roadways only created about half as many jobs as when put towards improving bicycle infrastructure.

So far, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake hasn't said whether she'll incorporate these findings into her new plan for job creation in the city.

I’m Sam Greenspan, reporting in Baltimore, for 88.1, WYPR.