There are many more local benefits of the bike economy, from lowering families’ health care costs to reducing a business’s need to invest in costly parking spaces for staff and customers. And you can’t place a monetary value on happiness.
But as long as our local governments keep hearing strident resistance to rather than support for safe, bikeable and walkable streets, the bicycle economy will continue to be reined in — by inadequate infrastructure, terrible zoning, and giant road expansion projects of the sort that tie up all transportation funding for decades to come.