Advocacy Posts

At their November 2019 meeting, Pedestrian Work Group members recognized the need to prioritize winter sidewalk maintenance in the 2020 City of Minneapolis budget. We support the additional resources for maintenance in the budget. Ash and Abigail Johnson, chair of the Minneapolis Pedestrian Advisory Committee met Council Member Linnea Palmisano to deliver over 300 postcards supporting improved winter sidewalk maintenance--just a fraction of the over 1,000 postcards we collected. Increased funding for winter sidewalk maintenance will likely remain in the budget--as revealed in the budget mark-up meeting December 6th.

Pedestrian Work Group

The Pedestrian Work Group hosted a Walk & Talk on Lyndale Ave S in September. Folks can watch and read news coverage of the walk on the City Pages website. 

The City of Minneapolis released a draft of their Vision Zero Action Plan on September 17th. This plan will guide traffic safety work on streets in Minneapolis over the next three years. 

What is Vision Zero? 

Vision Zero is an international effort to eliminate traffic related deaths and serious injuries. Minneapolis became a Vision Zero city in September 2017. At that time, the City Council committed to achieving their goal to reach Vision Zero within ten years. Now, the City is in the process of putting together a three year action plan where they will implement projects to eliminate traffic deaths and serious injuries in Minneapolis. 

You can learn more about the Vision Zero Action Plan in our blog post about the plan launch.

Our September meeting was on a soggy night, but we had a solid turnout, with nine folks braving the downpour to join us. Ash kicked off the meeting by recapping some of our successes from this summer: Park & Portland being repainted to have their buffers again, stopping the Federal Reserve parking garage from being built in the North Loop, and getting 26th St to be protected again with plastic bollards.

The Downtown Protected Bikeways work group would like to thank the City of Minneapolis Public Works employees that recently restored the bollards to 26th Street!

Up until a week ago, there were only thirteen plastic bollards designating the bike lane on 26th Street between Blaisdell and Lyndale as protected. On the eight block stretch of 26th Street between Lyndale and Hennepin, there was just a single bollard. Most of the missing bollards were accidentally taken out by last winter’s snowplowing, and had been missing since February. Many of our work group members had stopped riding on 26th Street as a result - 26th Street just didn’t feel protected at all any more.

This blog post is based in part on a presentation Elissa Schufman & Emily Wade gave at the City of Minneapolis Bicycle Advisory Committee meeting held on June 26th, 2019. 

At Our Streets Minneapolis we firmly believe traffic enforcement is not a good strategy to make streets better places to bike, walk, and roll. 

We know that this sets us apart from many local and national advocates who believe law enforcement is key to making streets spaces for everyone. Here in Minneapolis, the idea that we need more police enforcing traffic laws is popular in conversations about blocked bike lanes and the City of Minneapolis Vision Zero Action Plan. 

Given what’s going on with these conversations in our local community, we wanted to explain why we think traffic enforcement is a bad strategy in a bit more detail.

What is the Federal Reserve parking garage? 

The Federal Reserve parking garage is a proposed parking garage that, if built, will have 800 parking spaces and be five stories tall. The parking garage is planned to be built in the North Loop in downtown Minneapolis near the Mississippi River front. 

Come celebrate with us next month! 

Last month we decided to meet in July even though many attendees would be out of town for the July 4th holiday. We decided that we didn’t want to lose our recent momentum - and we didn’t! We have lots of exciting projects that we are working on, some of which we’ll share at a later date.

We started the meeting with introductions, welcoming one new member, and welcoming back one member from a previous era of the Downtown Bikeways work group! We shared some of our favorite biking related memories as an ice breaker.

Open Streets Minneapolis 

Open Streets Lyndale had a record turnout at 58k people, with 45k being the previous record. The Our Streets Minneapolis booth was busy and collected over 100 postcards for winter maintenance. The next Open Streets Minneapolis event is Open Streets Lake + Minnehaha on Sunday, July 21st.

Our June meeting started with everyone sharing their motivations for volunteering with the group, and a recap of our group’s efforts for Twin Cities Bike to Work Day. Read more about that here.