Dedicated volunteers chose to spend a beautiful summer evening indoors at the Dunn Bros. near Loring Park, working to make more downtown bikeways a reality. We began with an ice-breaker question: “What do you adore about summer in Minneapolis?” Not surprisingly, most answers had to do with perfect weather for biking, plus a dash of lake fun.
After recruiting volunteers to serve as photographer, timekeeper, and meeting report writer, we moved on to corridor reports. (You can review May’s meeting report here.)
Lasalle/1st Group
Chrissy shared her notes from the Lakes & Legends event on May 19:
We had a booth inside by the beer and got a lot of people stopping by to chat.
We had 54 people fill out postcards saying that they support protected bikeways on Lasalle Ave and 1st Ave S. 4 people also said they were interested in volunteering with Our Streets Minneapolis.
I asked people that stopped by our table how they got to the event. We had 55 cars/carpools, 38 walkers, 12 cyclists, 3 public transportation riders, and 5 other (Uber/Lyft, skateboard etc.). More people walked, biked, or took public transit than drove of the people that stopped by our table.
Kirsten gave an update on the event we’re currently planning at Lydia Apartments. They’re determining the best way to get feedback from residents on questions such as: How do you travel to shop for groceries? Ideas included a board with options to check: walk, bike, bus, cab/carshare, other.
9th/10th St. Group
Nicky shared that the group had a survey at the Bike to Work event at City Hall. Karen has reached out to the Target employee bike group, and Anna is going to reach out to the Thrivent group. Nicky is promoting the survey within her neighborhood association, as these streets go through the middle of the neighborhood. Tyler is drafting some language to gather input from Our Streets Minneapolis members and supporters via the newsletter. We are planning to survey at a Farmers Market one day in the next month.
July meeting topic and details
In July we’ll do power mapping to understand how bikeway decisions are made, identify key people, and plan how we will reach them.
Come join the fun, learning, and work on July 9. (We’ve pushed our meeting date back from the 1st to the 2nd Monday due to the Fourth of July holiday). We’ll again meet from 6-7:30pm at the Dunn Bros. by Loring Park (329 15th St.).
Bonus resource
Jess brought an interesting article to share. If like stories or data, and you want to learn more about how bike lanes affect the neighborhoods where they’re built. It’s from StrongTowns.org titled, “How Bike Lanes Benefit Businesses.”
