Safety is clearly not the priority at Highway 169 and Cedar Lake Road

Sylvie Hyman lives in St. Louis Park, serves on the city’s Planning Commission and the Our Streets board, works as a substitute teacher and leads weekly Monday night bike rides out in Minnetonka. Contact: sylvishawn7@gmail.com Would you allow your child to cross five lanes of traffic with no guarantee that speeding drivers will see them, slow down, or stop? I wouldn’t either, but the engineers at the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) believe that the current 60-foot long crosswalk connecting my street to Park Spanish Immersion Elementary School is suitable for the eight children that live here and attend the school. This summer, MnDOT will be replacing the traffic signals, adding a sidewalk, and repaving the Highway 169 intersection with Cedar Lake Road; a $4.2 million, taxpayer-funded project.

Residents and the city officials with St. Louis Park have fought for years to convince MnDOT to add the planned sidewalk on the highway exit, which, once installed, will allow people walking, rolling, and cycling

Sylvie Hyman

Guest Columnist

— children — to more safely come and go from our dead-end street. Until this construction project is completed, the non-driving residents of West 28th Street and our visitors will continue to share space with speeding cars and trucks entering and exiting Highway 169. Most of us are grateful that MnDOT is finally installing the 5-foot wide sidewalk, but it’s borderline criminal that the plans don’t include a small tweak — a curb bump-out — that could easily shorten the 60-foot long crosswalk, making it exponentially safer for children to cross.

For active transportation advocates like me, to call this story a broken record would be an understatement. Most road construction projects — regardless of whether it’s the city, county, or state DOT calling the shots — result in moderate improvements for non-drivers — a fivefoot wide sidewalk in this case — while speed and convenience for drivers is mostly, if not completely maintained, or even enhanced. There’s a mishmosh of cultural, political, and legal reasons for this strict adherence to the car-dependent status quo, and it will take decades to build and legislate ourselves out of car dependency, but everyday people, like you and me, can make a difference, now.

The next time you drive, think about where you are. How close is the nearest school? Who lives here? Do you think the posted speed limit is appropriate?

Are you obeying the speed limit? You’ll find that even responsible, well-meaning drivers struggle to drive at or below the speed limit due to outdated and obsolete engineering standards and practices that have made many of our neighborhood streets more closely resemble freeways.

The good news is that the Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota is already pursuing legislation (SF2094 and SF2162) that would bring the speed limits in school zones down to 15 mph statewide and allow municipalities to use safer, nationally recognized standards for road building. If this legislation had been implemented already, MnDOT engineers would have been forced to include traffic calming at the intersection in front of Park Spanish Immersion Elementary School. Ongoing work is needed to implement this legislation and organize community support for more safety and livability improvements in our cities. That is why we are officially launching the West Metro Active Transportation Alliance — WMATA, pronounced Wuh-mat-uh — a brandnew chapter of the Minnesota Bicycle Alliance.

WMATA is building power to ensure every road construction project in the West Metro benefits all road users, not just drivers. Check out our website, westmet.org, and sign up for our email list to stay up to date on opportunities to get involved. As a new and growing organization, we are looking for volunteers to help with everything from organizing events to sharing social media posts to speaking at city council meetings. Together, we can make our streets work for all of us.