Beautiful!

 

The crossing turned out better than I could have imagined. The curb ramp is ten feet wide! And there is a nice wide landing at the bottom of the hill. All that's left to do is write some thank-you letters!

Under construction

A little blurry, but you get the idea. The ramp is wide on both sides of the street. Looking good! Compare to the photo in my first post.

NYC is building physically-separated bicycle lanes

See www.streetsblog.org for a great article on new physically-separated bike lanes in New York City, which was featured in the NY Times on Sunday (9/23/07). The city's presentation on the plan is full of stats, drawings, and photos, and explains that they're doing this to fulfill the idea of having a "complete street": one that serves the needs of all users. Way to go, NYC!

Trivial funding issue threatens to derail project

(Click to enlarge this image)
For a while, it looked as if this project would sail through. Now we're down to crunch time and suddenly we are facing the prospect of the project failing due to lack of funds.

My understanding after our July on-site meeting was that it was basically a done deal. Unfortunately I missed hearing the muffled "if we can get the money allocated" after many heads nodded in agreement about what needed to be done. It would be ridiculous for the intersection to be rebuilt as it was. But the construction is getting closer and closer to completed, and today I learned that the crews will be rebuilding the intersection exactly as it was before within the next couple of weeks if funding is not delivered.

It looks like we'll need some political muscle to get this thing done. Don Pflaum, the city bicycle coordinator, has been trying to scrape up a few thousand dollars to cover the cost of construction for our addition to the project, but is being refused by everyone: Park & Rec (it's their property), the Sidewalks Dept (it's their sidewalk), Hennepin County (it's their construction crew), and Minneapolis Public Works (they are managing the project on the city's end).

At Don Pflaum's request I have been refraining from lobbying elected officials for support, but now the time has come. Today I spoke with Sandy Colvin Roy at the LCC meeting and she was very supportive. Maybe she can pull it off.

We have a plan.

Persistence pays off. On a beautiful Thursday morning in July I met with representatives from the city, county, and park board along with a member of the Longfellow Environment & Transportation Committee who happened to be passing by, at the intersection of West River Pkwy & Lake Street. We stood together and watched how the public hacks their way across the street using a variety of creative routes. It was clear to all present that the crossing needs improvement. Happily, it only took half an hour of discussion to agree upon a two-phased plan:

Phase 1: When East Lake Street is completed in fall of 2007, Hennepin County will rebuild the intersection so that the existing pair of curbcuts are relocated a bit southwards to allow for a more direct line of travel for anyone crossing between the trail on West River Pkwy and the sidewalk going up to Lake Street. County crews will also remove the end of the sidewalk that hooks to the north at the bottom of the hill, where the soon-to-be-obsolete curbcut is currently located. The county engineer said he would add some of those gripper dots that you see at some intersections to the curbcut at the bottom of the hill. I have no idea how helpful those dots are, but I guess they could help a person get traction. The whole package sounds great to me!

This improvement will help anyone who is using the sidewalk on the north corner of this intersection. However, many bicyclists (including myself) get on and off the trail at the middle or southern end of the intersection to access the street rather than the sidewalk. I would like to simply see another curbcut added here, at a point that be easily found by looking where the grass has been worn away by bicycles jumping the curb from the bicycle trail to the street. My very first post has a photo taken from that exact spot.

However, the Park Board frowns on having curbcuts that exit to the street; their curbcuts all seem to be street crossings rather than trail access points. We need to work on that. Which brings us to Phase 2.

Phase 2: Since we couldn't decide on how to handle the second proposed street-access curbcut, we'll defer the discussion until the date when plans get ramped up for repaving the bicycle trail on West River Parkway. Heaven knows the trail needs work; I rarely take it because I find it uncomfortably-verging-on-dangerously bumpy (I have a scar from a bad spill I took while avoiding some of the worst bumps). As I recall it is slated to be repaved in 2010. That sounds like a long ways off, but it gives us plenty of time to think about how we can make the trail work better for our community.

I will continue to follow up with the various staff I've been working with and make sure this is staying on track. I will try to get a copy of the engineering plan for us to see before construction begins, in case any minor adjustments are needed.

This is very exciting! The low-hanging fruit is about to be plucked. It only took about 30 phone calls, 6 months, 1 meeting, and a blog.

Physically-separated bike lanes in Amsterdam

It wasn't until I saw the video below that I could wrap my mind around what I saw in Amsterdam: physically-separated bike lanes. Pedestrians walked next to the buildings, bikes (and in this case, bike parking) were given the next lane over, and parked cars provided the final buffer from motorized traffic. What looks like a traffic jam in the first photo is actually a line of parked cars. The bike lane is the reddish pavement next to the cars, which you can see more clearly in the second photo.

All I knew then is that bicycles rode confidently in their own lanes, and that you needed to be careful to walk on the pedestrian part of the sidewalk or risk getting struck by a bicycle! The number of bicycles blew my mind. On this (typical) street, hundreds of parked bicycles occupied the sturdy racks, and bicycles flowed in a steady stream day and night.

Physically-separated bike lanes

Dream big: Physically-separated bike lanes. Bicycle Paradise, otherwise known as Amsterdam, has built these throughout the city with astonishing beauty and effectiveness. This video, filmed in NYC, shows the drawbacks of painted bike lanes and the advantages of separate lanes for bicycles. How about installing these on Minnehaha Ave? It would transform the street.

The view from uphill

I am facing south, standing on what used to be the sidewalk heading down to West River Road. The sidewalk has been ripped out and replaced with a temporary strip of asphalt that has no curb, just a white line indicating the edge of the road (which the truck is obeying). This allows buses to make wide turns at this corner without hitting a curb. Notice the well-worn path between where I'm standing and the nearest stop sign. It leads to the curbcut. Cyclists use this as a direct route to the road crossing.

Greenway bridge over Mississippi is on ice

I wrote this post a few weeks ago and then pulled it after deciding it was boring and irrelevant. I couldn't have imagined how relevant a story about a bridge could be; the 35W bridge just a mile or two up the river has collapsed, in a sudden horrifying moment during rush hour. Here it the post again with some edits.

Startribune.com's current headline is "Plan for new bridge across Mississippi is put on hold." They must have heard the same report that I did at last night's LCC Environment and Transportation Committee meeting. Hennepin County staff and their consulting engineers presented a report on options for a bicycle/pedestrian bridge crossing the Mississippi River as a continuation of the Midtown Greenway. The original plan was to use the Canadian Pacific railroad bridge just north of Lake Street, but that does not appear to be a viable option any more. I was impressed by the obvious care that the engineers had put into this project, and I trust what they are telling us about the situation.

The main facts that I learned were:
1. The existing Canadian Pacific railroad bridge was built approximately 100-120 years ago using an obsolete "pin" design that is being phased out because it can collapse if a single pin fails.
2. It is very difficult to ascertain the condition of this kind of bridge. The most useful tests are very difficult to do, and would be prohibitively expensive to perform.
3. Modern bridges have a life span similar to humans, which makes this bridge ancient.
4. Canadian Pacific Rail doesn't want to let us use its scary old bridge anyway.

It sounds like the community would be better off replacing the bridge. But that can't happen without the cooperation of the railroad. The rail line is used regularly on a very limited basis (one train a day or week--I forget which), and the railroad is not saying whether it plans to continue using the line or not.

The community could also build a bridge next to the railroad bridge, and engineers presented several design plans for a new bridge. But all of them would require a major jog in the path of travel, and probably a drop in grade. None of them are as elegant as crossing straight over the river at the site of the existing bridge. And apparently there are many obstacles to accomplishing that project: jurisdiction problems as well as concerns from the environmental preservationists about adding a bridge to the river gorge.

If only CP Rail would share its plans for the bridge, the community could move forward with a plan for creating a bicycle/pedestrian crossing over the river. The engineers presented options for building a parallel bridge that might only be a "second" bridge for a short time until the railroad takes down its bridge. Maybe those who want to limit the number of bridges crossing the river would be more comfortable if they knew that the railroad bridge was coming down.

But CP Rail doesn't seem to be talking. The bridge project is not over, but it's on ice indefinitely.

An opportunity at Lake Street & W River Rd

I created this blog because I bicycle-commute along the West River Road in Minneapolis's Longfellow neighborhood, and there is one intersection that has always bugged me as being especially inconvenient and unsafe for bicyclists. It's the intersection of West River Road and Lake Street, on the south side. Here's a picture.

A few months ago I finally decided to make a few phone calls and see what it would take to improve the intersection. By a bizarre coincidence, the very next day a bunch of guys with a front-end loader were tearing up the intersection--the exact spot that is problematic. During the Lake Street reconstruction, they had to re-route buses onto 32nd Street and over to West River Parkway, and they had to widen the access point back up to lake Street. When Lake Street construction is completed, the plan is to rebuild the intersection exactly as it was.

What's the problem?

Here is the view from the bicycle trail along the parkway, facing north. The Lake Street Bridge is ahead of you. To reach the bridge, you turn onto the access road that branches off to your left. The pedestrians in the photo are crossing at the official crosswalk. The crosswalk has curbcuts on either side, so if you're pushing a stroller or rollerblading or bicycling or in a wheelchair, this is the convenient place to cross. Once you reach the other side, the sidewalk hooks around the corner in a J-shaped path, which then leads up to the bridge.

If you're a pedestrian this is fine. For all other forms of conveyance, it's not so good because of the J-hook at the base of the hill. It throws you off balance to go around a hairpin turn like that, and it makes you slow waaaaay down. So a lot of people either avoid the J-hook, or avoid the crossing altogether. In the foreground you can see bare spots on the earth where bicyclists jump the curb and cross into traffic towards Lake Street. Likewise, on the other side (just ahead of the pedestrians in the photo) cyclists often skip the J-hook entirely and create their own cow-path of least resistance, which in this picture is a gravelly gully.

The intersection has already been partially demolished. Rather than rebuilding it as it was before, with all of its flaws, let's rebuild it better. Got any ideas? Submit your comment here. I'll throw out a few ideas in my next post.