urbanMSP

Chicago Ave bicycle lane striping was happening south of Lake St today. They are striping it from Lake to 46th, and then there are already lanes south of 46th a ways.

Chicago Ave bicycle lane striping was happening south of Lake St today. They are striping it from Lake to 46th, and then there are already lanes south of 46th a ways.

YES! I had no idea but this is so needed, yay!

This is just a weeee bit hard for me to believe, but apparently a new U of M study is claiming that non-motorized transport (biking and walking) make up something like 9% of all trips in the 17(!) county metro area. That's double what census estimates claim.

http://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/05/21 ... ng-to-work

3 new bike paths/lanes proposed in St Pauls' bike plan are being heard on tonight. It's funny watching what people are saying. Go to twitter and look at the live feed of #stpbikes if you aren't already.

The 3 are Front, Cleveland and Highland

Felt some palpable tension in those tweets. (On edge of seat!)

I couldn't find the meeting on the St Paul site anywhere. It's very difficult to navigate and I guess I got impatient

Did find these though:

Cleveland: http://stpaul.gov/index.aspx?NID=5690

Front: http://stpaul.gov/index.aspx?NID=5692

Lexington?: http://stpaul.gov/index.aspx?NID=5691

There's a lot of negatives at the moment, but the big positive takeaway I've gotten from tonight is that I'm very, very glad Stark is my councilmember, will happily support him in the election cycle this year, and he is apparently a stronger bike advocate than I realized.

This got delayed. For how long the article doesn't say. Will this mean the city misses its opportunity to do this along with the resurfacing?

http://www.startribune.com/st-paul-coun ... 308032411/

Let's move the bikelanes to Cretin instead. It could use narrower lanes and has less commercial.

This got delayed. For how long the article doesn't say. Will this mean the city misses its opportunity to do this along with the resurfacing?

Yes. There is now very, very little chance of essentially free lanes. Which means the next round of opposition will get to complain about price.

Yep, so this is dead then. The surest way for pols to kill something is repeated study, that way the advocates think they're getting something. Oh well glad I live on the slightly better side of the river.

The studies are going to be far more expensive than the paint and labor spent on lanes.

Yep, so this is dead then. The surest way for pols to kill something is repeated study, that way the advocates think they're getting something. Oh well glad I live on the slightly better side of the river.

Are you here to do anything but complain?

It is true though, there's really no point in studying hypotheticals when all you have to do is paint then collect data. If it doesn't work, repaint and collect more data.

As a U of M student, I'm pretty excited about the Oak St bikeway. I was looking at the layout (found here: http://www.minneapolismn.gov/www/groups ... 140073.pdf) and was still really happy with it. I was also wondering how they were going to handle the transition from the north end of the bikeway to the non-bikeway portion of Oak Street. And the answer is...

Double bike boxes. Yes, I'm serious. I wonder if they actually believe U of M bikers (the least law-abiding of all bikers) will wait through 2+ light cycles to go straight on Oak Street, or if they just need to do this to say they provided a legal way for this movement to occur.

Seriously, though, this isn't going to work.

If they just need to do this to say they provided a legal way for this movement to occur.

Probably this. I don't bike through campus very much now that I've moved, they don't really enforce the bike boxes and uselessly long crosswalk stoplights, on Washington, do they?

Other than that, it looks really good! I'd like to see a three-way stop at the East River Road/Oak St. intersection, since it can take a long time to get a break in the traffic to cross ERR during rush hour, but I'm glad to see the rest of the changes. Hope that the connection to the Dinkytown Greenway happens sooner rather than later.

Hahahahaha that's awful. And why are we accommodating buses on Oak St south of Washington? There are zero buses there.

They should have run it to the stadium because they should have just run it to the damn stadium. But I think that would make the transition out of the bike lane a little easier. You could connect to bike paths on 4th and University, and at least you'd only need one bike box to cross to the other side of the street. Or do some kind of pedestrian scramble at Oak & Washington and let bikes through as well. The lights there are pretty bad right now, I've jaywalked on Oak St many times while a train is going by yet the train is going through so traffic on Oak isn't physically possible.

Signals terrible at the U? Why I never.

First, I should make it clear that I'm still really excited about this route! Even though I'd never use it very much because there's not a whole lot of destinations for me there (aside from The Hub), this is still pretty cool. Hopefully they expand it soon (tier 2 on the bike plan).

As far as why they're not running it to the stadium, I don't think they have enough money to do it all the way there plus they need more time to figure out how to get people across 4th St where it intersects with Oak. Maybe they should've bitten the parking bullet and made it two one-way bikeways. Oh well, too late.

As a St. Paul resident, the biggest obstacle to me shopping in Dinkytown is the lack of a decent connection between the River Road and the greenway/University Ave. that doesn't require either drastic elevation changes or cutting through the Mall area and dodging students around the athletic complex. It's especially frustrating since my favorite bike shop is on the other side of that gulf.

Yep. The current entrance to the Dinkytown Greenway to campus is a nightmare; extremely steep, full of potholes and badly maintained drainage, and often taken by cars or pedestrians. It's even worse going downhill, though, because despite the speed you very quickly pick up, both directions on the Greenway are blind turns.