Check out this Streets.MN interview with Bill Dooley, who is clearly a #FriendOf46thStreet and a friend of biking in Minneapolis. You have suburban engineers come in and the street needs to be milled and overlaid or the street needs to be completely redone. And they basically want to put the street back down the way it was taken up, period. Here’s a prime example of this, they’re going to redo 46th Street from 35W over to Hiawatha. It’s 4 lanes, 2 in each direction. In theory the right lane is supposed to be parking, but nobody parks there because their cars would get trashed or destroyed, so for all intents and purposes it’s two travel lanes in each direction. They want to put it back that way and we are trying to get them to go from a 4 to a 3 with a turning lane in the middle and put a bicycle lane on the right side on each side of the road in opposite directions. But no, this is a Hennepin County road, and they’re actually the worst to work with, we can’t do that because you’re going to take away parking. What parking? People don’t park there. But because it’s laid on their grid plans as parking they’re assuming that it is parking. And there will be a handful of people that will complain, because people want free parking right in front of their house. […] Engineers definitely listen to these folks. And sometimes politicians will, sometimes they won’t, depending upon how vulnerable they think they are to not being reelected. So this 46th street thing we are trying to get them to go from a 4 to a 3 and the people at St. Joan of Arc’s Church, they’re complaining they can’t get across 46th Street to go to worship services, and other churches further East have the same complaints. If you’re a suburban engineer just looking at plans and maps and how it’s laid out for usage and you never drive up and down that street during all times of the day and see that it’s actually a travel lane and not a parking lane, you think you’re losing parking. Those are the battles that we have to fight all the time.
Posted on: Sat, 26 Jul 2014 00:11:38 +0000
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