Word on the Streets

Minneapolis BAC December meeting

At the December 17 Minneapolis Bicycle Advisory Committee (BAC) meeting, the committee reviewed recent bikeway decisions, suggested better signage for bike detours, and looked forward to 2014.

Review

Hennepin County approved the plan to reconstruct Washington Avenue with a protected bike lane (Ethan Fawley provided the details). The first phase of the project, from Hennepin to 5th, will break ground in 2015. Nearby areas will be improved, too — county and city leaders have proposed extending bike lanes north on Washington to Plymouth Avenue, and southeast to the bridge over I-35W. Steve Cramer, CEO of the Minneapolis Downtown Council, said he "enthusiastically supports Hennepin County’s plans to reconstruct Washington Avenue and transform it into a model urban artery designed for 21st Century Minneapolis."

Minneapolis City Council voted to approve the county's plan to reconstruct Minnehaha Avenue with a buffered bike lane, not a protected one.

Detours

The BAC recommended that the city stop using ambiguous "share the road" signs during bike detours, and suggested that they use "bikes may use full lane" instead. The Hiawatha LRT trail is set to open on January 14, 2014, according to Metro Transit.

The Midtown Greenway ramp at Bryant Avenue (the eastbound one) is set to open soon, also. The ramp has been closed for well over a year, and the city hasn't collected any fees from the developers for obstructing the 300-foot ramp. The standard rate for obstructing a bike lane is $1 25 cents* per linear foot per day, which gives obstructors an disincentive to infinite obstruction. The city "really wants to prevent it from happening again."

The future

If you thought we were done talking about Minnehaha, you were wrong. The county's long-range plan is to close a tiny part of the street, between Franklin Avenue and Cedar Avenue in Seward. There's a Taco Bell there right now. You might recall from the city's report on bike-car crashes (PDF) that the intersection of Cedar and Franklin has the highest volume of bike crashes in the city, so it's really great that they're rebuilding the intersection to be safer.

Open Streets is coming back in 2014, bigger and better than ever. The city has budgeted for five or six events, and Ethan Fawley said they'd like to "spread the love" to new areas of the city. Here are some routes in consideration:

Nicollet Mall

Franklin Avenue in Seward

Chicago Avenue South

Nicollet Avenue South

North Minneapolis Greenway (Humboldt and Irving avenues North)

Lowry Avenue North

Hennepin Avenue (Downtown)

Central Avenue Northeast

*Thanks to a friend of the coalition who has access to lane closure billings and was able to give the usual rate for closing a bike lane.

posted by | December 29, 2013

Bikeways for Everyone December Work Group Recap

Thank you to everyone who attended our Bikeways for Everyone Work Group meeting on December 16th! For those who were unable to make it, here’s a short recap of what we accomplished.

Between last month’s meeting and this meeting, a small group of volunteers met to discuss the ongoing structure of the Bikeways for Everyone work group. The December meeting was our first meeting using the new format and we think it was a success.

After the welcome and introductions, the work group looked at an organizational chart of the Minneapolis Bicycle Coalition in order to better understand where we fit in to the larger picture. Bikeways for Everyone (B4E) is a campaign within the Minneapolis Bicycle coalition and our goals are focused on protected bike lanes (formerly known as cycletracks). Bikeways for Everyone is a partnership between the Minneapolis Bicycle Coalition and other businesses and non-profits such as Spokes, Sea Salt, Nice Ride, Sierra Club, and others. The work group meets monthly as a whole group, and as of this month, we are also split into three sub-groups: Outreach (partnership building, tabling, community outreach), Events (kickoff events, press events, happy hours, house parties, phone banking), and Communications (materials to support outreach, media content, social media, advertising).

At last Monday's meeting, we spent some time hearing general bicycle coalition updates from Ethan, our executive director:

• Bikeways for Everyone now has 16 partners!

• Hennepin County board of commissioners passed a plan for Washington Ave that will include protected bike lanes- yay!

• The Minneapolis City Council passed the plan for the redesign of Minnehaha and it did not include protected bike lanes.

• Minneapolis will be re-doing 26th and 28th streets, 36th St W, Broadway, and 26th Ave North and at least some of these streets are expected to have “bollard” protected bike lanes.

• Minneapolis is applying to the Green Lane Project which, if the city is selected, will help build the momentum towards protected bike lanes and help the city gain outside expertise in their design and implementation.

Third, we started what we hope will be a monthly tradition of having a short “educational” component to work-group meetings. Scott shared some research he has been doing on Seattle’s new Master Bike Plan which includes plans for an extensive network of protected bike lanes. It was really interesting to hear what Seattle is up to and it makes us realize that while we love biking in Minneapolis, our city is falling behind—other cities are building bike infrastructure at a much faster pace than we are. A blog post with more about Seattle will be forthcoming.

Fourth, we split into the three subgroups mentioned above: Outreach, Events, and Communications. The idea is for each work-group member to choose one of those three groups based on their interest. Then, each sub-group will have its own leader, and the sub-groups will come up with ideas, tasks, and strategies to work towards protected bike lanes here in Minneapolis. Each sub-group might meet in between monthly work group meetings or communicate by email or phone. The sub-groups are still in the process of working out their organization and communication strategies but the idea is that the sub-groups will communicate with people within their group who were not able to attend the monthly meeting to make sure that those people can still contribute.

Come to our next Bikeways for Everyone Work Group meeting at our office at 6pm on Tuesday, January 21, 2014 in order to learn more about the sub-groups and to find your “home” sub-group. Or, if you can’t attend, feel free to email us at [email protected] and we will get you started!

(photo cred: crosscut.com)

posted by | December 22, 2013

Minnehaha Avenue: The final result and lessons learned

After nearly two years of discussions, outreach, and education, the general layout for Minnehaha Avenue is approved. It's not all of what we'd hoped for, but it will be a nice improvement and we have a lot of other positives to take away from the effort.

Details on the decision

December 13, on an 11-1 vote, the Minneapolis City Council approved Hennepin County’s layout for Minnehaha Avenue south of Lake Street. Disappointingly, despite more than a thousand postcards, supportive comments at public meetings, and the positions of the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committees and the local neighborhood group, the layout did not include a protected bike lane.The plan the County is advancing will be one of the best on-street bike lanes in the state and a significant step up from what is there today. But it is certaily a missed opportunity for a transformative improvement for the area.

Letter to move on and highlight ways we can improve the process

Bicycle Advisory Committee (BAC) Chair Nick Mason, Joshua Houdek with the Sierra Club, and I reluctantly sent a letter supporting this approval. We continue to believe that a protected bike lane would be a safer and more attractive type of facility than the buffered bike lanes proposed by Hennepin County, but it was clear that Hennepin County staff weren't going to support that and it was time to move on. We also want to build positive working relationships with County staff and elected officials for future planning and projects. This joint etter was quoted extensively by outgoing Transportation and Public Works committee chair Sandy Colvin Roy, and Council Member Lilligren cited it as his reason for voting yes.

But the letter didn’t just support granting local approval for a Minnehaha without a protected bike lane – it also laid out the problems with the process that ended up creating this disappointing result. Specifically, it called out three aspects of the process that must be improved on future roadway projects:

• Goals to increase bicycling. The City and County both have goals to increase the number of people riding bikes. But these goals had no meaningful effect on the design for Minnehaha. Though everyone – even County staff – agreed that a protected bikeway would increase ridership, that was not a consideration in the final decision. And though Minneapolis has clearly shown that one of the best ways to increase bicyclist safety is to increase the number of bicyclists, that was not part of the County’s safety analysis.

• Public process. There simply was not a meaningful opportunity provided for members of the public to impact the decisions made about Minnehaha. The process led to a lack of community buy-in and delays for the project—which could have been avoided with more collaborative and meaningful public engagement from the beginning. We hope to see future community input processes more like the approach used for Washington Avenue reconstruction project.

• Poor protected bikeway design. The protected bikeway (or “cycle track”) design created by County staff was not in line with the best national standards for protected bikeways, including the NACTO guidelines that have recently been approved by the Federal Highway Administration for nationwide use. This led to greater impacts on street trees and parking and less safe intersections than should have been designed. Most of the public comments critical of the protected bikeway design focused on these unnecessary impacts. But the County never corrected the protected bikeway design despite strong public and local stakeholder interest in doing so.

These concerns were cited by Council Member Cam Gordon, the lone vote on the Council against the layout approval, as some of his reasons for voting no. He also made clear that he views this decision as a huge missed opportunity. A few years from now, he said, when it becomes even clearer than it is today that protected bikeways are safer and better than unprotected bike lanes, we will all look back and regret that Minnehaha was not constructed with a protected bike lane.

What we can take away

There are certainly many positives to take away from the work on Minnehaha. Because of the public pressure for a better biking environment on Minnehaha, the design will include many of the safety features commonly associated with protected bikeways, such as green paint where appropriate at intersections and two-stage left turns. It is also important to note that the County will be greatly improving the walking environment on Minnehaha, adding new greenspace and creative stormwater features, eliminating the unnecessary extra southbound traffic lane near Lake Street, and narrowing the street and many intersections to reduce speeds (and better protect street trees). There is honestly a lot of good overall in this project even though we are frustrated on the steadfast resistance on the protected bike lane.

We hope that with the challenges of this public process--including delays and rough meetings--lead to some meaningful improvements in the County's and City's public process for future projects. We've already seen strong evidence of that with several other projects. City and County staff, bike advocates and the community at large have learned a lot about protected bikeways – we now have much more evidence that protected bikeways are safer and more attractive than we did before the Minnehaha project.

The buffered bike lanes that will be installed on Minnehaha in 2015.

Our work on Minnehaha is having real results elsewhere. Hennepin County has now decided to install protected bikeways on Washington Avenue in downtown and the Franklin Avenue bridge. Minneapolis is applying for support to build four protected bikeway projects around town in 2014 alone.

Minnehaha is a loss for the biking community in Minneapolis and especially the hundreds of families in the area we talk with who were genuinely excited by the prospect of a design that would invite them to bike more with their kids. Thank you for everyone who engaged in this effort. But our advocacy has been strengthened immeasurably by the work on this project, and we will continue to fight for a network of protected bikeways in Minneapolis – bikeways that work for everyone.

posted by | December 19, 2013