u/mysummerstorm

I’ve been reading with interest the recent articles reminding drivers of laws regarding sharing the road with cyclists, as well as a recent opinion piece regarding some of the controversy about bike lanes on Lyndale Avenue (“Bike lane fight misses real issue,” June 23, and “Great, more empty bike lanes,” Readers Write, June 23).

Rather than go on and give my two cents about the benefits of bike infrastructure, as a 20-plus-year resident of Minneapolis who commutes to work in St. Paul by bike as often as schedule and weather allow, I’m going to share a story about this past Saturday:

My husband and I live in the Nokomis neighborhood of south Minneapolis and were invited to an event at Alma, located in northeast Minneapolis. We had planned to drive until a friend attending the event alerted us that because of the Stone Arch Bridge Festival nearby, parking would be tough, so we should plan accordingly. We shrugged and decided to bike there, no problem. Thanks to the dedicated paths along West River Road, the Franklin Avenue Bridge, East River Road and University Avenue, we had a safe and easy trip there and back. As an added bonus, we had some positive interactions with participants in the Special Olympics while waiting at a stop light, and even got to ride alongside the torch bearers on East River Road on the way home! It was downright amazing to be in close proximity with these incredible athletes for such an inspiring event, and we cheered them on while I rang my bike bell for good measure.

The takeaway: Beyond the convenience of not needing to worry about parking and getting a little extra exercise on a beautiful Saturday morning, we were able to experience human interaction that would not have taken place from inside a car. While riding my bike to work, I have exchanged hellos with the same elder gentleman on his morning walk countless times and smiles with other cyclists passing in the opposite direction. It’s a great way to start the day!

And for those of you reading this thinking, “Well, that must be nice for you, but I live too far/physically can’t/etc.,” think of it this way: When those of us who are able to bike take advantage of those paths and do it, we are giving you extra room on the road, and an extra parking spot. You still get to benefit, too.

Kara Greshwalk, Minneapolis

•••

The column about the battle over a bike lane on Lyndale misses the real problem (“Bike lane fight misses real issue”). It’s no longer about the bikes but about opposition to the businesses that depend on parking for customers.

I’m proud that Minneapolis is a bike-friendly city. But unlike the column writer, a fit, youngish male, I’m an elderly, fit-ish female, and while I bike when I can, I cannot use a bike as my primary mode of transportation. In fact, data shows that only 3% of city residents do, a number that has barely budged in years despite the investment in bike-friendly infrastructure.

The real problem is that for some this argument is no longer about bikes, but part of the anti-business agenda that is currently in vogue with those aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America. At the VFW meeting that the column writer attended, when Ryan Knox, owner of Knox Jewelry on Lyndale, said he was worried he might lose his 40-year-old family business due to the coming construction and loss of parking due to bus and bike lanes, many of the bike lane advocates cheered.

Minneapolis will always need sensible parking for customers to access small, local businesses and the local workers they hire.

The writer argues that the city government should help these businesses, when in fact what the businesses need, and want, is customers.

Susan Lenfestey, Minneapolis

by Eric Roper

I used to think the Minneapolis bike lane debates of yesteryear were over — and thankfully, the bike lanes had won.

The bike lane issue was so hot a decade ago that an online prank spawned a real-life protest near Uptown featuring signs like “Mafia Lane,” as though reclaiming space from cars in the middle of a city was some sort of racket driven by hipsters packing brass knuckles.

But over time it has become standard operating procedure to reconstruct major local roads with separated areas for biking, along with extra attention for walking and transit. And these days, as I pedal down the beefy bicycle infrastructure popping up all over town, it’s easy to see why international rankings consider Minneapolis the second-most bike-friendly city in America.

Hey, we’re known for something that doesn’t involve government violence!

Yet, a fiery meeting about Lyndale Avenue recently showed that people are not done duking it out over this issue, even in the most dense parts of Minneapolis. It also raised a question that deserves more attention: How will government help businesses survive through major construction projects?

I attended this cage match after receiving a mysterious email blast inviting me to a “special community meeting with Mayor Jacob Frey” to discuss Hennepin County’s 2028 reconstruction of the road, which includes a bike lane.

After biking to the Uptown VFW from downtown — and navigating some hellish conditions on Lyndale — I settled in for what became essentially an anti-bike lane rally emceed by Andrea Corbin, a flower shop owner and founder of the group “Vibrant Lyndale.” Corbin is most known as president of the Uptown Association business group.

The bike lane advocates filled in the back of the room, many of them holding signs promoting non-car transportation. And as speaker after speaker slammed the county’s plan for Lyndale Avenue, portions of the crowd grew incensed and began talking back. It was uncomfortable, but the entirely predictable outcome of orchestrating a one-sided public meeting.

Sitting awkwardly in the middle of it all was Frey, who later told the room that this was “not the meeting that I thought that I was walking into.”

Lyndale is one of those busy county roads where the speed of cars has always felt out of step with the dense, eclectic neighborhood around it. It was so dangerous, in fact, that the county converted Lyndale several years ago from four lanes of traffic to two — with a turn lane between them.

But much of the street hasn’t been rebuilt in a century, so a reconstruction is needed north of Lake Street. The county’s plan adds a two-way protected bike lane to the mix for much of the stretch, as well as a bus lane for several blocks. Drivers will lose a modicum of parking (about a quarter of the spots), while some of the turn-lane area will be converted to medians.

The new Lyndale might be a bit slower to drive through. But that’s an attribute of most great public spaces. People travel across the world to linger in quaint, walkable commercial districts, then have trouble imagining something similar in their own backyard.

The temperature on the Lyndale fight is ramped up in part because the county waffled on the design after a yearslong public engagement process that largely benefited consultants — who, you’ve got to imagine, light a cigar with a $100 bill every time local planners call another community meeting.

After two years of seeking feedback on three options for Lyndale, the county proposed a doomed idea last summer to merge pedestrians and bicyclists into a “shared use” path. It was a recipe for someone to get hurt, which led to an outpouring of opposition. The county then presented a 2.0 design earlier this year that included the bike lane, drawing heat from Vibrant Lyndale.

The meeting at the VFW was a last-ditch effort to change a plan that’s now almost certainly a done deal. The last major hurdle is the city’s approval next month, hence the group’s focus on Frey.

A number of speakers at the meeting said bicyclists should stick to nearby Bryant Avenue, which recently got a dreamy bike lane south of Lake Street. But Bryant north of Lake Street remains merely a “bicycle boulevard,” which is a euphemism for a neighborhood street with some speed bumps and bicycle symbols on the pavement.

The city’s bicycle and pedestrian coordinator told me that extending the new Bryant bike infrastructure toward downtown isn’t feasible, in part because the roadway is narrower.

More importantly, though, people want to visit destinations on Lyndale. We wouldn’t tell drivers to stay off a major street, so why shouldn’t bicyclists have safe access, too?

The specter of Hennepin Avenue, a nearby street that was just rebuilt with a protected bike lane, loomed over much of the meeting. Several speakers argued, convincingly, that the construction on Hennepin was disastrous to the bottom lines of businesses there.

It’s worth noting that the Hennepin redesign eliminated dramatically more parking than what is being proposed for Lyndale.

But the design of the street is a separate issue from helping small businesses survive multiyear construction projects, a cause I hope everyone can get behind. The state recently pitched in to help St. Paul’s Arcade Street businesses weather construction, for example, and similar assistance is factored into light rail projects.

So, I can’t shake the fact that the Minneapolis City Council allocated $900,000 in the 2025 budget to help businesses harmed by construction on Hennepin, Lowry Avenue and Lake Street. Yet, the city’s Economic Development Department never doled out the money because it needed to make budget cuts and decided to target programs “that did not have guidelines in place,” according to city spokesperson Jess Olstad.

I asked the mayor’s office what happened. In a statement, his communications staff argued that “the challenge with a program like this is figuring out how to distribute a relatively limited amount of funding across a large number of businesses that are impacted in very different ways.”

This was not an insurmountable hurdle. I’m sure struggling Hennepin businesses would have appreciated a shot in the arm, even if the funding paled in comparison to their losses.

At the VFW meeting, Frey set up a bit of a straw-man argument by saying the city can’t save every business: “I want to give you the reality on paying for substantial subsidies through construction. … We don’t have the money to do that in a large format that would just allow for the continuity of every single business no matter what*.*”

Unfortunately, Hennepin County spokesman Colin Cox said that the county also does not provide direct grants to businesses affected by road construction.

This is an area that deserves more prioritization and experimentation from local policymakers.

I’m excited for the new Lyndale. Bike lanes are making Minneapolis into a city that feels natural to traverse on two wheels. And nobody in the Mafia told me to say that.

hell of a commute

Juneteenth Slow Roll: Black Collective Economics — Black to the Future
📅 Saturday, June 20, 2026
📍 Starting at Venture Bikes & Coffee · 2834 10th Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55407
🏁 Finishing at Midtown Global Market · 920 E. Lake St., Minneapolis, MN 55407
🚲 Approximately 3.5 miles · Flat · Paved · Accessible
💰 Free and open to the public

positive press about public transit in this economy?? you love to see it.

This includes areas like Richfield, Columbia Heights, Edina, Roseville, Falcon Heights, Mendota Heights, St. Louis Park, Golden Valley, Robbinsdale, and Brooklyn Center, Maple Wood.

Other coverage: FOX 9 | KSTP

>Crash rates for cyclists have dropped even as commuting numbers tripled — because of infrastructure, and because more people came to understand that cyclists belong on the road. That progress came from people who took the slow, boring work of changing the environment seriously, and didn’t waste their best energy on someone who was already gone. It is shocking, compared to somewhere like Rochester, to do bike advocacy work in Minneapolis and find that essentially no major local candidates openly oppose the idea of bike infrastructure investments as being worthwhile. 

I wanted to share this well-written piece about an experience that most of us are familiar with when it comes to vehicles obstructing bike lanes.

I hate this crosswalk. I used to live very close and took the 54 on the other side of that crosswalk almost daily. Cars going to the Details Barbershop constantly park in the crosswalk. My two young children and I have been almost hit multiple times because cars can't see us or we can't see them because of the illegally parked cars. Not to mention that it seems that nobody follows the 30mph speed limit. I have reported this to the city multiple times and nothing has been done and now a predictable and avoidable tragedy has happened. And yeah, they weren't in the crosswalk, I'm not either sometimes because of the cars blocking the crosswalk makes it impossible to use the ramp with a stroller.