2025.12四级真题第1套【可复制可检索】

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The battle over bike lanes needs a mindset shift A) Five years ago, the city of Queens, New York, announced that it would be putting bike lanes onto a stretch of Skillman Ave—and removing 116 parking spots. Cyclists loved the plan, but local business owners got very angry. Taking out those parking spots, as they argued at protests and in letters to the city council, would ruin stores and restaurants along Skillman. "Parking here is already a nightmare," one shouted at a protest rally. B) But the bike lanes were a done deal, and soon they were in place. Early this year, Jesse Coburn—an investigative writer with Streetsblog New York—wondered whether those predictions of economic collapse came true. So he asked the city's Department of Finance to give him a few years' worth of sales figures for that stretch of Skillman Ave. How had the businesses on that street fared? C) Quite well, it turns out. In the year after the bike lanes arrived, businesses on Skillman saw sales rise by 12 percent, compared to 3 percent for Queens in general. What's more, that section of road saw new businesses open, while Queens overall had a net loss. D) The thing is, the actual merchants along Skillman? They didn't believe it. When Coburn spoke to them and described what he'd found, only a few store owners admitted the lanes had helped. Many still insisted the lanes were killing their part of the city. And emotions ran hot: Someone scattered tacks (大头钉) on the bike lane. E) This little story turns out to be a fascinating glimpse at the challenges cities face as they try to update their urban infrastructure—to clean up the air, reduce greenhouse emissions, and speed up travel by making towns more bike-friendly. There's a rising amount of data showing that installing bike lanes and making streets more pedestrian-friendly boosts the economic fortunes of a place. Removing cars and parking spots works. But the folks who run local businesses simply aren't convinced, even when their own street performs. Given that sort of mess, can political fights over bike lanes ever end? F) In 2013, researchers at New York City's Department of Transportation studied seven stretches of road that had installed bike lanes or created pedestrian-friendly areas. The city analyzed the data for businesses along those routes and found that by the third year, sales grew faster on five of the streets than in the district overall, on average—up to five times faster, in fact. G) Beyond New York, a survey of research from 23 cities found that bike lanes and pedestrian-friendly design didn't hurt local retail and food stores. ("Fears of disastrous consequences for local businesses are unfounded," the researchers concluded.) More recent work has shown roughly the same. H) The truth is that in fairly dense areas, bikes are more efficient at moving people around. You might lose one car driver's business—but you gain shoppers who now can arrive more easily on bikes. "Cyclists and pedestrians are consumers too," notes Professor Susan Handy. Plus, streets redesigned for bikes and pedestrians tend to become more pleasant places to hang around, so "in a lot of cases, that's created much nicer environments that are really good for those businesses." I) Mom-and-pop shops are usually pretty quick at recognizing situations that will help their bottom lines. So why the blind spot here? Perhaps it's that attention focuses on horror stories—and some merchants do get hit when bike lanes come in. J) I spoke to Cindy Hughes, a hairdresser (理发师) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She said business fell by at least 40 percent when the city removed nearby parking to put in a bike lane. The majority of her customers drive, with many coming from nearby towns. Only a very few have shifted to cycling, and even those almost certainly won't cycle in Boston's snowy winters. So while Hughes supports bike lanes—"cyclists deserve to be safe"—she sees the parking loss as an existential risk. "Look, 90 percent of my customers drive," she told me. "For our business, the bike lanes are way worse than Covid was." K) For others, the pushback is cultural, says Henry Grabar, a writer for the Slate Magazine. Small business owners are frequently drivers who commute from other parts of the city by car, Grabar points out. They're【缺少答案,请补充】