The word that matters in that headline is 'protected'. A painted lane on a street with delivery vans double-parked from seven in the morning is a suggestion. A curb or a row of posts changes who's willing to ride there.

I live two blocks off Water Street. The delivery vans are the real question. Without a loading zone plan the vans will park in the new lane, and then we're back to paint with extra steps.

That's where I'd expect the real fight to be. Not the vote, but the loading zone plan once someone has to draw it.

6–3 is closer than I'd have guessed for something that's been studied this long. Does anyone know what the three were objecting to? Cost, parking, or the street itself?

From the public comments I sat through, mostly parking. Which is a real concern for some of the shops at the north end, to be fair. A few of them depend on people pulling up for five minutes.

Every city I've lived in went through the same cycle: years of argument, a narrow vote, construction that everyone hates, and then two years later nobody can remember the street ever looking any other way.

And the shops that feared losing parking mostly did fine, in the studies I've read. I'd still be careful generalising from one city's numbers to another's.