Although I ride my bike nearly every day, primarily for fun/exercise, I try to bike commute whenever I can. That said, I find the bike lobby's influence on our city maddening. Based on my research, Minneapolis is one of the most bike-friendly cities in the US, yet we are talking about less than 5% of the population commuting to work (and I am skeptical of that number). I don't think it is necessary to have dedicated bicycle lanes on streets or to redesign commercial districts to be bike-friendly. For most of my life, I have been riding on streets that were designed for cars. Nothing sets my blood boiling more than seeing a street narrowed for a bike lane that seems to be at a 100:1 ratio of cars to bikes. I am all for bike paths like the greenway, but narrowing streets for a micro-minority seems insane. No amount of urban planning is going to turn Minneapolis into Amsterdam.
It's also creating an island effect. Minneapolis is a congested mess for car commuters from outside Minneapolis. Meanwhile, the rest of the metro area suburbs are haphazard at best for bikers, often downright dangerous. Is Minneapolis supposed to be entirely patronized and staffed by Minneapolis residents? Do we close up shop to tourism, out-of-town office workers? Someone from, say, Apple Valley or Blaine, can't be expected to bike to work.
Exactly. I walk downtown several days a week to visit the Y and do errands. Bookoo bucks weres spent to create bike lanes on Hennepin and 3rd Avenue downtown. Yet many bicyclists and scooterists (very often rentals) opt to clog up the sidewalks and bus lanes on nearby Nicollet Avenue. I wish the Bike lobby would do a widespread educational campaign to direct riders to use the lanes that were built for them and to adhere to traffic laws to maixmize safety for all!
We wish the Pedestrian Lobby would educate walkers to use the sidewalks that were built for them and not walk in the above-curb bike lanes on Hennepin, too. Joking aside, I think we all just need to coexist and try not to get our feathers ruffled when people choose different modes of transportation than we do. Except the scooters, I will agree with you those are a scourge on our city. :) Also agree bikes shouldn't be on sidewalks except for short stints on streets that are unsafe to ride in (becoming less and less of a thing in our city).
It feels like people are arguing about this topic as if technology will be static. It won't be.
This seems clear to me: emissions from vehicles will be a non-factor in 20 years. We'll be driving EVs, or rather, they'll be driving us. Battery technology will be far superior to the present. Solid state batteries are due out within a year and will be 2x-3x as energy dense, will fully charge in 10 minutes, and won't be the fire hazards presented by lithium ion batteries. A good percent of us won't even own the EVs. We'll use autonomous-driving rideshare instead. With no driver to pay (or tip!!), cost will be far less than Uber/Lyft today. There will be so many rideshare vehicles floating around that hailing one will take less than a minute. AI will know where to position them. Hailing one will be no more difficult than a simple voice command.
What does this mean for businesses? The need for parking will diminish greatly, if not completely go away. But that won't happen for a couple decades.
Until then, society needs to bridge the gap. I'm old. I'm not riding a bike 20 miles to Savage to see my orthopedic surgeon. I'm also not slinging half a dozen 2x4s over my shoulder as I walk back from the hardware store.
I think you are over-indexing a little bit on the climate angle. As someone who finds the car mode share in Minneapolis to be quite unpleasant, none of that has to do with the climate implications for me. It's really all about the immediate quality of life effects. I can only speak for myself - maybe there are activists for whom the global climate is animating their opposition to cars. But for me, and I suspect many people, a bigger factor is day-to-day quality of life in the city. There's virtually nowhere in the US outside parts of New York City and a few other small pockets of other metros where one can live a particular type of mostly car-free lifestyle. One real problem with cars (at least currently) is that they contribute to global climate change, but bigger problems include: they take up tons of space, altering the geometry of the city, requiring all of our buildings to be farther apart, to contain parking, etc. Those far-apart buildings then become harder to walk or bike to. They make it dangerous for kids to play outside. If you simply don't like driving and don't like being surrounded by cars, and inattentive and dangerous drivers, then that's really annoying. And again, there aren't really any realistic alternatives. Car free living is likely not a majority preference in the US, but it is undersupplied relative to the demand, and Minneapolis has an opportunity to improve quality of life for people with those preferences, and attract more of them, and essentially create a competitive advantage compared to places that can't offer that. The problem is that there are many incumbent residents who don't share those preferences. And there isn't a durable compromise that can be reached, because these factions simply want things that are in direct conflict, therefore each infrastructure change has to be fought out. I'm on the anti-car side regardless of the climate impacts.
I also think the technology of self-driving cars has the potential to be either very good or very bad for people with my set of preferences, and I'm curious to see how it plays out. It's possible robotaxis could eliminate the need for street parking and parking ramps. What used to be curbside parking could be repurposed for deliveries and drop-offs, freeing bike lanes from delivery trucks and ubers, etc, and also freeing up land for development. And robotaxis are of course much less likely to run people over. The other scenario is that self-driving just makes long commutes more viable, and people start living on cheaper, farther away land and continue to be ferried everywhere in cars, increasing congestion and to the detriment of the environment for anyone not in a robotaxi.
I'm afraid that we're in a time when we have a sense of so little control of things, that it becomes too easy to become fixated on something that is with grasp and control that results in losing perspective of the bigger picture.
I agree that little things make a difference, but at the same time how can we create solutions that also offer the comforting sense of meaningful impact?
Thank you for the article. I am having some trouble determining how you came up with some of your percentages based upon the Associated Press article and links within it. I would suggest revieiwng local sources such as the Minneapolis Transportation Action Plan, the Met Council and MnDOT.
I have survived many years of bike lash. Yes the cudgel goes both ways. So much so that you give up trying to share viewpoints and figure out other ways to get things done. I look at things locally, and would invite us together to walk, bike and bus both Lyndale, Hennepin and Lake. We can also drive them and compare notes. Maybe we can lessen the grand divide by sharing spaces together with different modes of transportation. I would plan on a couple hours to get a sense of things and adjourn afterwards to a business we can support.
Hi Dan, The high level global number was from the AP article. The Minnesota number was from an article in the Star Tribune, but there are other, lower citations. I used 117 million metric tons, but other sources showed 80 million. These were all part of a Google search. As for the Minneapolis contribution, I took the conservative amount. Some articles showed that Minneapolis is as low as 3% of the state's total emissions. Agriculture and other industry outside of Minneapolis are large contributors. The numbers may be slightly different depending on the year and source, but what I have here are definitely within a standard deviation.
Terry, I only have a marginal understanding of greenhouse emissions in Minneapolis and Minnesota. That said, the following Minneapolis, Met Coucil and MnDOT links provide additional details and graphs that may or may not support your viewpoint. You can go down the rabbit hole quickly, but I find these local sources worth reviewing, I brush against these numbers related to health related issues for people living near 94, 35W, Olson Memorial, University and Central.
Another great article, Terry! I appreciate you highlighting something most of us probably haven’t considered regarding our global impact. It might also be worth mentioning, or at least discussing, that not everything that looks green truly is. For instance, I’ve seen studies suggesting that the energy a windmill produces over its lifetime may never fully offset the energy required to build and maintain it, which likely came from sources other than clean energy.
Thanks for the post. It's a good discussion for the community to have.
New infrastructure is an investment 30-50 years into the future. If you're seeing cars that far out, then I guess you do. I don't. I think the biggest problem in all levels of politics is that there is no vision for the future, mostly because (a) people don't know; they only know that today will not be our tomorrow, and (b) people are uncomfortable talking about decline.
But as we can all see with the boundary waters, easy access to resources simply isn't there anymore. We've entered the realm of tradeoffs. Strictly speaking, those tradeoffs were always there, they just weren't in our own country or affecting our own health.
Sorry for the downer on a sunny day, but please keep up the local posting of issues!
If you weren't at the meeting, the issue (apparently) isn't the classic bike lanes vs parking debate. Parking will be maintained, although spaces will be narrower. I'd describe the business concern as being over the quite different street design and the risk that it improves bike-ped access but increases friction to use Lyndale by car. If Uptown were a healthy commercial district, it might not feel so high stakes. I wish the county didn't feel like they had to do this now. I think the best option would be to look at Hennepin, which has a similar design just completed, for a couple years and see if the business owner concerns are justified or not.
People need to move, to be moved, across and in and out of the city. That's virtually the entire purpose of cities since time immemorial: a place for outsiders to come and do business. What bothers me the most about the cars vs. bikes debate is that it seems to absolve all levels of government from any responsibility to provide affordable reliable public transportation. It's like the bike activists just say, "Okay, this failure is now your individual responsibility. You wanted public transportation, you're not getting it so here's a bicycle." It's neoliberal politics. Meanwhile, there are families with children, people in the trades who have to carry hundreds of pounds of tools, disabled people, elderly people in poor shape, all who are being given the clear message: there's no place for you in this new city we're building.
As many watch helplessly, as we see these small ( but active and vocal) groups pushing for things in Mpls that are truly ruining businesses, and consequently entire neighborhoods ( and along with that the livelihoods for so many), maybe it's time to FORCE a shift away from cars/ transportation and look at other ways...in other cities...and we do that now.
Denver wants to heat and cool buildings without fossil fuels : NPR
It's interesting how the new bike and bus infrastructure over on East Hennepin / 1st Ave in NE hasn't ruined a single business, and the neighborhood seems to be thriving more than ever. What do you think the difference is there?
I live in that exact area of NE, it’s densely populated. Businesses did struggle with the construction. The construction ran from the river to 7th str. a short but very busy area. People here already walk a lot, but there is also a decent amount of parking lots, and good side street parking. Uptown doesn’t/didnt have that parking. Along with a longer physical construction area. As far as bike lanes, why does the city need to add them to every street (it seems), isn’t Bryant ave a bike ave, 2blks off lyndale? I agree with earlier comment, let’s study what happens on Hennepin and uptown for a couple years to really understand the impact.
I've never seen urban planners here do an "after effects" study of anything. It would be really helpful to see if anything they're doing actually works the way it is designed. Occasionally, I see numbers on bicycle commuter rates (though those studies have suspiciously stopped happening after millions of dollars of bike-friendly public works projects got implemented). It seems like bike infrastructure has done virtually nothing to change the % of people who commute to work via bike.
You're absolutely right. When there are reports about services, such as behavioral crisis center calls, we only hear about them when they serve to bolster the opinion of those who created the program in the first place.
It's a subtly manipulative way of conducting business. I once asked my Park Board commissioner about updating an underused park in my neighborhood; his reply was that there was no data that anyone desired any updates. I thought that was an amazingly cunning and dishonest answer. The fact that his organization never even looked into an issue means the issue does not exist, meanwhile any pet project or whim that strikes his fancy elsewhere gets a carefully crafted study to get the exact result they want.
More of an active and interested party, as to what the impact has been in S Mpls, those business corridors, so I can't say about NE, but maybe others can speak on that, those comparisons.
As someone who doesn't own a car in Minneapolis and bike commutes year-round, just want to say that I care about the environment but it's not really why I do it. Burning calories instead of money (and gas) makes a big impact on one's savings and waistline. It's also pretty darn fun and good for mental health
Agree on all, but most/many businesses in Mpls and in St Paul depend on people from OUTSIDE of the Cities, in order to survive, to be able to be here/stay here, and to be available for the locals.
Although I ride my bike nearly every day, primarily for fun/exercise, I try to bike commute whenever I can. That said, I find the bike lobby's influence on our city maddening. Based on my research, Minneapolis is one of the most bike-friendly cities in the US, yet we are talking about less than 5% of the population commuting to work (and I am skeptical of that number). I don't think it is necessary to have dedicated bicycle lanes on streets or to redesign commercial districts to be bike-friendly. For most of my life, I have been riding on streets that were designed for cars. Nothing sets my blood boiling more than seeing a street narrowed for a bike lane that seems to be at a 100:1 ratio of cars to bikes. I am all for bike paths like the greenway, but narrowing streets for a micro-minority seems insane. No amount of urban planning is going to turn Minneapolis into Amsterdam.
It's also creating an island effect. Minneapolis is a congested mess for car commuters from outside Minneapolis. Meanwhile, the rest of the metro area suburbs are haphazard at best for bikers, often downright dangerous. Is Minneapolis supposed to be entirely patronized and staffed by Minneapolis residents? Do we close up shop to tourism, out-of-town office workers? Someone from, say, Apple Valley or Blaine, can't be expected to bike to work.
Some roads here are difficult to drive even for residents. I'm thinking of Bryant and Blaisdell.
Bike Lanes - by Jim Welby - Catchgroove Gets Political
https://catchgroove.substack.com/p/bike-lanes?utm_medium=email&triggerShare=true
Exactly. I walk downtown several days a week to visit the Y and do errands. Bookoo bucks weres spent to create bike lanes on Hennepin and 3rd Avenue downtown. Yet many bicyclists and scooterists (very often rentals) opt to clog up the sidewalks and bus lanes on nearby Nicollet Avenue. I wish the Bike lobby would do a widespread educational campaign to direct riders to use the lanes that were built for them and to adhere to traffic laws to maixmize safety for all!
We wish the Pedestrian Lobby would educate walkers to use the sidewalks that were built for them and not walk in the above-curb bike lanes on Hennepin, too. Joking aside, I think we all just need to coexist and try not to get our feathers ruffled when people choose different modes of transportation than we do. Except the scooters, I will agree with you those are a scourge on our city. :) Also agree bikes shouldn't be on sidewalks except for short stints on streets that are unsafe to ride in (becoming less and less of a thing in our city).
It feels like people are arguing about this topic as if technology will be static. It won't be.
This seems clear to me: emissions from vehicles will be a non-factor in 20 years. We'll be driving EVs, or rather, they'll be driving us. Battery technology will be far superior to the present. Solid state batteries are due out within a year and will be 2x-3x as energy dense, will fully charge in 10 minutes, and won't be the fire hazards presented by lithium ion batteries. A good percent of us won't even own the EVs. We'll use autonomous-driving rideshare instead. With no driver to pay (or tip!!), cost will be far less than Uber/Lyft today. There will be so many rideshare vehicles floating around that hailing one will take less than a minute. AI will know where to position them. Hailing one will be no more difficult than a simple voice command.
What does this mean for businesses? The need for parking will diminish greatly, if not completely go away. But that won't happen for a couple decades.
Until then, society needs to bridge the gap. I'm old. I'm not riding a bike 20 miles to Savage to see my orthopedic surgeon. I'm also not slinging half a dozen 2x4s over my shoulder as I walk back from the hardware store.
I look forward to my single person electric helicopter that shuttles me around.
I think you are over-indexing a little bit on the climate angle. As someone who finds the car mode share in Minneapolis to be quite unpleasant, none of that has to do with the climate implications for me. It's really all about the immediate quality of life effects. I can only speak for myself - maybe there are activists for whom the global climate is animating their opposition to cars. But for me, and I suspect many people, a bigger factor is day-to-day quality of life in the city. There's virtually nowhere in the US outside parts of New York City and a few other small pockets of other metros where one can live a particular type of mostly car-free lifestyle. One real problem with cars (at least currently) is that they contribute to global climate change, but bigger problems include: they take up tons of space, altering the geometry of the city, requiring all of our buildings to be farther apart, to contain parking, etc. Those far-apart buildings then become harder to walk or bike to. They make it dangerous for kids to play outside. If you simply don't like driving and don't like being surrounded by cars, and inattentive and dangerous drivers, then that's really annoying. And again, there aren't really any realistic alternatives. Car free living is likely not a majority preference in the US, but it is undersupplied relative to the demand, and Minneapolis has an opportunity to improve quality of life for people with those preferences, and attract more of them, and essentially create a competitive advantage compared to places that can't offer that. The problem is that there are many incumbent residents who don't share those preferences. And there isn't a durable compromise that can be reached, because these factions simply want things that are in direct conflict, therefore each infrastructure change has to be fought out. I'm on the anti-car side regardless of the climate impacts.
I also think the technology of self-driving cars has the potential to be either very good or very bad for people with my set of preferences, and I'm curious to see how it plays out. It's possible robotaxis could eliminate the need for street parking and parking ramps. What used to be curbside parking could be repurposed for deliveries and drop-offs, freeing bike lanes from delivery trucks and ubers, etc, and also freeing up land for development. And robotaxis are of course much less likely to run people over. The other scenario is that self-driving just makes long commutes more viable, and people start living on cheaper, farther away land and continue to be ferried everywhere in cars, increasing congestion and to the detriment of the environment for anyone not in a robotaxi.
I'm afraid that we're in a time when we have a sense of so little control of things, that it becomes too easy to become fixated on something that is with grasp and control that results in losing perspective of the bigger picture.
I agree that little things make a difference, but at the same time how can we create solutions that also offer the comforting sense of meaningful impact?
God bless you Terry for another well done article especially on this topic!
Thank you for the article. I am having some trouble determining how you came up with some of your percentages based upon the Associated Press article and links within it. I would suggest revieiwng local sources such as the Minneapolis Transportation Action Plan, the Met Council and MnDOT.
I have survived many years of bike lash. Yes the cudgel goes both ways. So much so that you give up trying to share viewpoints and figure out other ways to get things done. I look at things locally, and would invite us together to walk, bike and bus both Lyndale, Hennepin and Lake. We can also drive them and compare notes. Maybe we can lessen the grand divide by sharing spaces together with different modes of transportation. I would plan on a couple hours to get a sense of things and adjourn afterwards to a business we can support.
Hi Dan, The high level global number was from the AP article. The Minnesota number was from an article in the Star Tribune, but there are other, lower citations. I used 117 million metric tons, but other sources showed 80 million. These were all part of a Google search. As for the Minneapolis contribution, I took the conservative amount. Some articles showed that Minneapolis is as low as 3% of the state's total emissions. Agriculture and other industry outside of Minneapolis are large contributors. The numbers may be slightly different depending on the year and source, but what I have here are definitely within a standard deviation.
Terry, I only have a marginal understanding of greenhouse emissions in Minneapolis and Minnesota. That said, the following Minneapolis, Met Coucil and MnDOT links provide additional details and graphs that may or may not support your viewpoint. You can go down the rabbit hole quickly, but I find these local sources worth reviewing, I brush against these numbers related to health related issues for people living near 94, 35W, Olson Memorial, University and Central.
https://www.minneapolismn.gov/government/government-data/datasource/greenhouse-gas-emissions/
https://metrocouncil.org/Planning/Climate/Climate-Action-Work-Plan.aspx
https://www.dot.state.mn.us/measures/greenhouse-gas-emissions.html
Excellent job, in making all of this easier to see, analyze, and absorb.
This piece will become a very important reference, along with the insightful and spot on comments.
Another great article, Terry! I appreciate you highlighting something most of us probably haven’t considered regarding our global impact. It might also be worth mentioning, or at least discussing, that not everything that looks green truly is. For instance, I’ve seen studies suggesting that the energy a windmill produces over its lifetime may never fully offset the energy required to build and maintain it, which likely came from sources other than clean energy.
yes.
Thanks for the post. It's a good discussion for the community to have.
New infrastructure is an investment 30-50 years into the future. If you're seeing cars that far out, then I guess you do. I don't. I think the biggest problem in all levels of politics is that there is no vision for the future, mostly because (a) people don't know; they only know that today will not be our tomorrow, and (b) people are uncomfortable talking about decline.
But as we can all see with the boundary waters, easy access to resources simply isn't there anymore. We've entered the realm of tradeoffs. Strictly speaking, those tradeoffs were always there, they just weren't in our own country or affecting our own health.
Sorry for the downer on a sunny day, but please keep up the local posting of issues!
If you weren't at the meeting, the issue (apparently) isn't the classic bike lanes vs parking debate. Parking will be maintained, although spaces will be narrower. I'd describe the business concern as being over the quite different street design and the risk that it improves bike-ped access but increases friction to use Lyndale by car. If Uptown were a healthy commercial district, it might not feel so high stakes. I wish the county didn't feel like they had to do this now. I think the best option would be to look at Hennepin, which has a similar design just completed, for a couple years and see if the business owner concerns are justified or not.
People need to move, to be moved, across and in and out of the city. That's virtually the entire purpose of cities since time immemorial: a place for outsiders to come and do business. What bothers me the most about the cars vs. bikes debate is that it seems to absolve all levels of government from any responsibility to provide affordable reliable public transportation. It's like the bike activists just say, "Okay, this failure is now your individual responsibility. You wanted public transportation, you're not getting it so here's a bicycle." It's neoliberal politics. Meanwhile, there are families with children, people in the trades who have to carry hundreds of pounds of tools, disabled people, elderly people in poor shape, all who are being given the clear message: there's no place for you in this new city we're building.
As many watch helplessly, as we see these small ( but active and vocal) groups pushing for things in Mpls that are truly ruining businesses, and consequently entire neighborhoods ( and along with that the livelihoods for so many), maybe it's time to FORCE a shift away from cars/ transportation and look at other ways...in other cities...and we do that now.
Denver wants to heat and cool buildings without fossil fuels : NPR
https://www.npr.org/2026/05/20/nx-s1-5734477/denver-geothermal-network-sewage
It's interesting how the new bike and bus infrastructure over on East Hennepin / 1st Ave in NE hasn't ruined a single business, and the neighborhood seems to be thriving more than ever. What do you think the difference is there?
I live in that exact area of NE, it’s densely populated. Businesses did struggle with the construction. The construction ran from the river to 7th str. a short but very busy area. People here already walk a lot, but there is also a decent amount of parking lots, and good side street parking. Uptown doesn’t/didnt have that parking. Along with a longer physical construction area. As far as bike lanes, why does the city need to add them to every street (it seems), isn’t Bryant ave a bike ave, 2blks off lyndale? I agree with earlier comment, let’s study what happens on Hennepin and uptown for a couple years to really understand the impact.
I've never seen urban planners here do an "after effects" study of anything. It would be really helpful to see if anything they're doing actually works the way it is designed. Occasionally, I see numbers on bicycle commuter rates (though those studies have suspiciously stopped happening after millions of dollars of bike-friendly public works projects got implemented). It seems like bike infrastructure has done virtually nothing to change the % of people who commute to work via bike.
You're absolutely right. When there are reports about services, such as behavioral crisis center calls, we only hear about them when they serve to bolster the opinion of those who created the program in the first place.
It's a subtly manipulative way of conducting business. I once asked my Park Board commissioner about updating an underused park in my neighborhood; his reply was that there was no data that anyone desired any updates. I thought that was an amazingly cunning and dishonest answer. The fact that his organization never even looked into an issue means the issue does not exist, meanwhile any pet project or whim that strikes his fancy elsewhere gets a carefully crafted study to get the exact result they want.
More of an active and interested party, as to what the impact has been in S Mpls, those business corridors, so I can't say about NE, but maybe others can speak on that, those comparisons.
As someone who doesn't own a car in Minneapolis and bike commutes year-round, just want to say that I care about the environment but it's not really why I do it. Burning calories instead of money (and gas) makes a big impact on one's savings and waistline. It's also pretty darn fun and good for mental health
Agree on all, but most/many businesses in Mpls and in St Paul depend on people from OUTSIDE of the Cities, in order to survive, to be able to be here/stay here, and to be available for the locals.