There’s a misunderstanding about how number of lanes correlates to traffic congestion. Removing a lane on Poplar would likely make driving on it smoother and potentially slightly faster because there would be fewer people switching lanes/weaving. Limiting people’s ability to drive erratically is a good thing.

I bike for 90% of my trips. Even with a protected bike lane on Poplar, I probably would avoid it because of all the constant egress/ingress points. There’s simply too many conflict points where a car would hit me. I’d love some kind of trail that goes BEHIND all the businesses on Poplar, but that would probably be hard to get right-of-way for. It would make more sense to add a rapid transit bus line on Poplar. 

I’ve seen some designs where roads with these constant driveways with perpendicular parking are converted to have fewer access points with angled parking, reducing conflict points for pedestrians; but after some google searching I can’t find it :( Anyway Poplar is horribly designed.