A few things Minneapolis has that we don’t – Updated

portland has been “humiliated”? really?
does it know this?
is there really a need for such contrived drama?

Having grown up in Mpls and one it’s outlying suburbs(Burnsville) most of the nountain bike trails can be found in the suburbs. Most of the city and county parks have trails for cross country skiing that get converted to mtn biking in the summer. During the mtn bike boom of the early nineties some cities saw the light and created mtn bike specific trails just to keep the peace between hikers and mtn bikes. Burnsville was one of those cities. A mtn bike trail system was created just for Mtn bikes in 1993 in Terrace Oaks. I know as I helped to build it.

On the down side trying to commute into Mpls can be a challenge from the south suburbs as there is currently only one bike path across the Minnesota river (I494) the other one (Cedar ave) was shut down by the DNR as the old bridge that was used is no loger considered safe. My dad says there’s plans to build a new bridge but that’s years off. Cars have four bridges to get across the river between Shakopee and Eagan that’s about 30 miles width that no one can get across by bike.

The suburbs actuall have more bike lanes than Mpls does. Cities such as Burnsville, Savage, Apple Valley and Eagan have had bike lanes since the ’80s. The big reason why is lots of land. They just eat up farmland at huge rates and the sad part is the suburbs keep growing outward. I have family who now live out as far as Jordon, Mn and commute into Mpls, that’s about 35 miles one way. It’s just crazy. They have one lightrail line and it took them 20 years to get it in due to people fighting it. Now that they finally got it they want more. Mpls is great for families out for a ride but not so great for commuting to work.

off-street bike trails like the Midtown Greenway are great. for getting robbed. wonder if the survey took that into account?

at one point this past year, it seemed someone was getting robbed there on a daily, and why wouldn’t a robber want to take advantage of a lovely off-street, out-of-sight trail to assault and rob and terrorize people? the midtown greenway makes minneapolis seem like oakland – Crime City USA.

more off-street bike paths for any town that wants to up its crime rate!

@matt #8 — Don’t be so sure. We can easily turn streets into MUPs by making them carfree. Portland doesn’t have the sort of leadership required to do this yet, but we will.

Think big!

Peter Smith #16; I take it you’ve never ridden the Springwater Corridor trail then? I commute on it daily, and it probably shaves 30% off of my commute time because I don’t have to stop for lights or stop signs the length of my commute. Despite the fact that it’s offroad and dark, I’ve never had a problem any of the times I’ve ridden (as early as 6am, as late as midnight).

Lived in MPLS for 15 years. I never gazed at a 12,000 foot tall majestic volcanic mountain while mountain biking, commuting or road riding. PDX wins in a landslide for topography, climate and natural beauty! But you are right, Jonathan, that MPLS has us beat (at least currently) when it comes to close-in mtn bike trails and off-street paved bike routes. I was shocked when I first moved to PDX to learn that Forest Park had no “legit” mtn bike trails.

Well we have something that Minnesota doesn’t.. Michelle Poyourow… oh wait, we don’t have that either… 🙁

I think competition is great for us, and we should look to improve so that we can be number one again next year!

Peter Smith #16; I take it you’ve never ridden the Springwater Corridor trail then?

correct. and it doesn’t matter. the “you haven’t ridden some route the way I have” argument is not meaningful.

there are myriad things i have and have not done in the world that i’m happy to support or not support based on the best available evidence — e.g. the building of a highway through a city — i’ve never participated in that, but i know i don’t like it, i don’t support it, and i don’t need to experience it to know that it’s not a good idea.

that said, i take your word that Springwater is a very nice trail, but the question is, do you support building it, or more trails like it, instead of building an on-street bike path network?

you _could_, if you so chose, argue something like, “Springwater is not as dangerous as Midtown because…” or “Springwater is not as dangerous as On-Street Bike Route X because…” or whatever — then we can have a real discussion.

I commute on it daily, and it probably shaves 30% off of my commute time because I don’t have to stop for lights or stop signs the length of my commute.

as for stopping at red lights and stop signs, to each their own.

i honestly don’t worry about commute time — i’d much rather have a leisurely ride to work, not be terrorized by motor traffic, and i want an interesting ride, which for me, means a ride through the city on the city’s streets, not riding on a bike trail/path.

once we get past personal preferences, though, we can start asking, “What is the best way forward?” — i.e. “What do people want?” and/or “What do people deserve?”

I think people deserve to be able to travel through their city, on their city’s streets, and be free from the terror of motorized traffic. That’s it, basically. We bikers can figure out how to add meaning to our own lives — all we want, generally speaking, is an all-day/everyday ciclovia — and i think it’s possible, and i think we should aim for that — getting rid of cars completely should be our end goal. if, over the next decade or two, cars can be shown to peacefully coexist with humans, then we can talk about keeping them around, but unless and until that happens, we have to remove them from the immediate vicinity of humans. we bikers are not against cars, but they seem to be against us.

If there’s some actual demand for off-street paths, or ‘nature’, or whatever it is these off-street paths might represent for people, then i’m open to talk about it, of course — i just think the best way forward is demanding freedom from terror while utilizing our existing infrastructure.

my guess is that folks who really prefer off-street bike paths do so mainly because it frees them from being terrorized by motorized traffic, if only temporarily, and that’s a worthy goal, but i live in the city for a reason — to experience the city through its most important public spaces — its streets — i just don’t care about off-street paths that much. i have a feeling most people agree with me — that is, if we could be freed from motorized terror, then we’d rather stay on the city’s streets and have the most direct routes from Point A to Point B.

admittedly, there’s going to be plenty of ambiguity/confusion about what exactly constitutes and on-street vs. off-street path, but my goal personally, and to the extent that i advocate for bikes, is to be able to ride where people are — following Jane Jacobs’ advice about ‘Eyes on the Street’ providing the best available physical/psychological security for people. Or if you read David Hembrow, what he likes to call ‘subjective safety’.

Despite the fact that it’s offroad and dark, I’ve never had a problem any of the times I’ve ridden (as early as 6am, as late as midnight).

i’ve never been pepper-sprayed, robbed, and beaten like the people of Minneapolis have on their Midtown Greenway, and i, too, have ridden bike paths in the pitch black, in the dead of night, all alone, etc. etc., and i still don’t support off-road/off-street bike paths instead of on-street bike lanes/paths/infrastructure. we bikers should never be subjected to being alone in unlighted and inherently insecure places. if i wouldn’t send my loved ones out on a path at night — my girlfriend/wife/daughter/son — then it’s not an acceptable resource to use at night, so we need a different solution. and the truth is that i would _not_ send my loved one out on many of the paths i’ve ridden at night — no way jose.

if some town happens to get a zillion dollars to build a network of off-street paths, fine – have at it. but when it comes to deciding using money for on-street vs. off-street bicycle infrastructure, just realize the inherent weaknesses of off-street paths (security, longer distances, don’t go directly where you want to go, etc.).

so i wouldn’t actively oppose off-street paths, but i might if they took away resources from on-street paths/infrastructure.

i am also from mpls and can vouch for the dangers of riding the midtown greenway. i’ve heard far worse and more frequent stories about issues with riding along the greenway than i have about the springwater corridor- despite the fact that i’ve lived in pdx for the last eight years. also, i commuted in mpls in the winter and it wasn’t that bad-once you get used to it (kinda like portland).
overall, portland has better infrastructure, but i have found that mpls is catching up in infrastructure as well as bike culture.

Don’t pass up the chance to build separated bike trails because of fear of crime. A busy trail polices itself.

Yes, there have been a few robberies on the Minneapolis Midtown Greenway and the major route that feeds it, and cyclists do have to be cautious riding there near midnight. Although it runs through a neighborhood that timid cyclists would avoid even in daytime, the Greenway is disproportionately safe. And there is one less robber around since last year, when someone picked the wrong victim and ended up stabbed to death. The “Happy Slappers” who posted their Greenway attack (and other attacks elsewhere) on YouTube were promptly arrested thanks in part to local cyclists. Gentrification — thanks to the Greenway’s popularity — is changing the demographics and will probably eliminate most of the petty crime.

Thank you for that tome, Peter. I’m happy that you are keeping it real experiencing the city as you think it should be experienced whilst espousing a 1950’s patriarchal approach to protecting the weaker women folk from the exceedingly vast population of predators that haunt our nation’s bike paths.

not sure the reason for the nasty tone — that’s your call.

as for whether or not i’m being ‘patriarchal’ in my approach to ‘subjective safety’ and paying particular attention to the comfort and safety of women, perceived and otherwise, i guess that’s open for debate. i have strong feelings about crime and in particular violent crime, and the causes for it. i don’t think anyone should ever have to be a victim of violent crime, and as such, i think we need to do everything we can to root it out, which includes making it more difficult to commit violent crimes. it’s pretty simple, in theory, but as evidenced by your response, people disagree as to the extent which we should seek to mitigate the risks for violent crime. as for me, i stand by my remarks, and add that i believe, as a society, we have not done anywhere near enough to protect everyone, and in particular women, from violent crime, and i believe the facts back up my claim, and reasonable people, after seeing those facts, will wholeheartedly agree with me. maybe your mind can’t be changed, but i doubt it.

I can’t think of a day that our local media hasn’t lead with “Murder on the MUP!!!”.

i think all you have to do is pay attention to what’s actually going on in the world and you’d know how right i am to focus on the epidemic that is violent crimes against women — beatings, robbery, rape, domestic violence, the all-too-common ‘kidnapped-from-the-trail-and-raped-and-tortured-and-left-to-die’ scenario — you name it. just scan google news for even a single day and see what i see, then come back here and tell me how wrong i am to focus on issues of security, in particular women’s security.

i think some crimes are so extraordinary that we really should not tolerate them as a society, and that means…not tolerating them as a society. ideally, we take the motivation for anti-social behavior completely off the table, but until we get there, i’d be happy with simple crime prevention measures. some of these crimes destroy people’s lives in a single night — a few minutes of inattention, and lives are ruined, families devastated, etc. and that’s just the ‘big stuff’ — we haven’t even talked about street harassment, the creeps following girls home late at night — preventing girls from even stepping outside their doors at night in modern day america in ‘good parts of town’, etc. it’s unjust in the extreme.

Many of want more than sharrows and nicely painted lines on the streets.

i want real on-street bicycle infrastructure, but this stuff is often a good start.

Some of us have time constraints and a need to move via bike quickly.

ditto.

I’m pleased that you have the sort of life that negates the power of the unmerciful clock but alot of people don’t have that luxury.

i’m sure you’re busier and more important than myself and everyone else on this blog, but my record of advocating for ‘the most direct routes from Point A to Point B’ (i.e. ‘the speediest’) is so common it’s blase. in fact, i even wrote exactly that in my first comment, and i’ve made the same exact comment probably dozens of times over the past few years — on the internet, to friends, to politicians, etc. maybe it’s time to get off your high horse?

A truly mixed system of on street amenities and bike “freeways” designed for fast travel would be wonderful.

hey, look at that, even we can agree on some things.

If that’s you thing then good on you, Professor.

it’s not even Monday anymore — why are you so cranky? i can haz smartz like you?

I’m curious as to why you are so obsessed with imagined threats, terror, and fear?

i think i’ve answered this already, but i wouldn’t say i’m obsessed, except when it comes to riding in traffic, and i wouldn’t say the threats, terror, and fear are imagined — i’d say they’re the primary reasons why so few people in Portland and America ride bikes. or maybe it’s just that _most_ people are ‘obsessed’ and ‘imagining’ bad stuff?

Unlike you, however, I can appreciate the benefits of off-street trails, and feel that they play an important role in our overall bike infrastructure.

i appreciate off-street trails — i just don’t think they should be forced to “play an important role in our overall bike infrastructure” — simply put, i think our existing infrastructure should be given over to non-motorized traffic.

As an aside, your focus on terror, danger, and insecurity is almost pathological.

i don’t know what this means, but it doesn’t sound very nice. in any case, i stand by my comments. we need to do more to protect everyone, in particular, women.

I suspect that the vast majority of the folks here bike every day and enjoy themselves doing it.

this does not conflict at all with the goal of reducing violence against everyone, in particular, women.

as for whether or not our end goal should be getting rid of cars or not, you’re very welcome to your opinion, but i’ll tell you that i’m not alone in my opinion, and it’s becoming more and more popular every day. we’ll still have cars for a couple of decades, probably and unfortunately, but their use and importance to everyday use will continue to decline. i hope i get to see the death of cars before my own death. 🙂

Don’t pass up the chance to build separated bike trails because of fear of crime. A busy trail polices itself.

i’m with this.

Peter, how about the children? Don’t we have to protect them, too? Lots of violence on them, too. Think of the children!!!

Hay-zeus! And I thought *I* was long-winded!

guilty as charged.

in my defense, i almost never expect to have to defend basic facts, yet here we are. and inevitably, there will be someone who is _way_ too offended at hearing something they don’t agree with, so the appropriate response is, of course, ‘Prove that the sky is up!’, or ‘But soldiers are dying in the US, too!’.

some people just get very very angry when told something that doesn’t reflect their worldview — i’m used to it. they eventually calm down and come around.

Peter Smith, such a fear monger about crime-ridden off-street paths (MUPs, SUPs, rail-trails)!

fear monger? really? i’m just stating some facts — they’re stubborn things, ya know. i will say that i’m keenly interested in social justice — that’s the main reason i care about all this bike stuff. and when you advocate building MUPs instead of on-street bicycle facilities, you are effectively booting women off those MUPs at night — i’m not cool with that. i think there’s plenty of room for debate, but histrionics is not something i’m generally interested in.

Minneapolis may well have problems in this regard, but let’s you cite some references for all this doom-saying.

never fails. don’t know if i’d call my criticism of off-street paths ‘doom-saying’, but whatever floats your boat.

listen, don’t take my word for it — take the word of people who have lived in Minneapolis:

i am also from mpls and can vouch for the dangers of riding the midtown greenway. i’ve heard far worse and more frequent stories about issues with riding along the greenway than i have about the springwater corridor- despite the fact that i’ve lived in pdx for the last eight years.

go ahead and call that person a liar or a ‘doom-sayer’ or whatever else you like — ad hominem attacks are useful when you have nothing substantial to say.

or maybe the mpls police are just alarmist or ‘doom-sayers’ or maybe all the residents of Minneapolis are just a bunch of wimps prone to getting attacked?

Minneapolis police issued a warning Wednesday after several bikers were robbed — some at knifepoint and one with a gun — on the popular Midtown Greenway and a connecting route.

But that hasn’t prevented about 10 attacks in recent weeks aimed at bikers on the trails. Typically, police said, they involve several men who block the trails and take backpacks, wallets, electronics and purses, but not bikes.

even before the trail was built, there were ‘doom-sayers’ like Peter Smith out there saying, “are you sure it’s a good idea to build a bike trail below grade where users of the trail will be completely out of sight?” maybe if those doom-sayers had been taken seriously, we could have prevented a lot of crime, a lot of trauma, and even saved at least one life.

if you search the google news archives, you’ll see a new article and/or blog post pop up ever few months for the last few years — problems with the Greenway. Citizens patrols, complaints that the cops aren’t doing enough, etc. This is all completely predictable. It all culminated when, as one commenter pointed out, an attacker was stabbed to death by a user of the Greenway who came prepared with a knife because he knew how dangerous the Greenway was.

but you need not get all hot and bothered about Minneapolis — it’s no worse than any other city with off-street paths. if you know anything about bicycle infrastructure, you know that desolate stretches of path and/or roadway make for awesome attack locations. Buffalo, the Orange Line path in LA, Madison, Oakland, the list goes on and on — these MUPs are often inherently dangerous, especially after dark. then there’s the problem of vandalism, which y’all in Portland have seen firsthand. cops are generally powerless to police them because the paths are out in the middle of nowhere and the cops are spread too thin as is and they’re also not on bikes.

why do you think all these bike tunnel paths have lighting and cameras installed? because the paths are inherently dangerous, particularly at night, so the hope is that lighting and videocameras will help deter crime on them. ‘doom-sayers’ like me are starting to be taken seriously.

Good luck with that erasure of private automobiles thing, too.

thank you! we might still need it. we’re just now starting to track car registrations within our cities — they still seem to be growing, unfortunately, but eventually they’ll level off, and then start to shrink. how quickly we can make that happen is up to us. the idea, of course, is to make it so that people don’t have to own a car to get around — we’ll be able to measure our success by mode shares, the number of car registrations (maybe per capita), etc.

wanted to respond to one other statement that slipped by earlier:

To repeat: the on-street bike infrastructure is pretty well built out in the city.

i disagree. when the bike mode share hits around 40%, then i’ll be open to discussing whether or not on-street bike infrastructure is ‘pretty well built out’ or not, but until then it just seems like a bizarre statement to make.

and i agree with this sentiment:

@matt #8 — Don’t be so sure. We can easily turn streets into MUPs by making them carfree. Portland doesn’t have the sort of leadership required to do this yet, but we will.

Think big!

hear, hear! bravo on all counts. this is the kind of stuff i like to see.

off-street paths are a way of ceding our most important rights-of-ways to cars — we shouldn’t work so hard to do that.

we haven’t had a mayor yet propose a ’30-in-10′ for bicycle infrastructure — maybe that happens in Portland?

I’ve lived in Portland for 13 years, but grew up in the Minneapolis suburbs. The above posters who said that PDX can never hope to catch MSP in terms of multi-use trails are absolutely right.

I grew up riding on these trails back in the 1970s and 1980s. There was an extensive network of them in suburbia back then, and new development has continued the tradition. Partly this is (1) as in the Northwest, the community highly values outdoor recreation. (2) Easier terrain (though rolling, not board-flat as many seem to think). (3) As mentioned above, the availability of abandoned rail corridors. (4) A stronger history of turning long river and creek corridors into parks, thanks to the Olmsted brothers’ vision. (5) A tradition of VERY low density development that at least has the upside of leaving lots of room for amenities like bike lanes and paths.

For all the freaking out about the safety of urban MUPs, remember that (1) minneapolis is a much higher-crime city overall than Portland, so MUPs built here won’t necessarily have serious crime problems, and (2) Minneapolis has lots of other greenways that don’t have crime problems because the Midtown has unique design challenges. It’s sunk about 30′ below grade, highly separated from its surroundings and making it hard to police. And it also has underpasses EVERY BLOCK (due to its sunken grade) to allow the street grid to cross it, providing frequent cover for potential criminal activity. And it passes through some moderate-to-high crime rate areas.

Although Minneapolis is far behind Portland in terms of on-street bike lanes in the CITY, they are building a strong network of shared streets (marked with sharrows) and IMO pay more attention to route continuity so you don’t have routes ending abruptly as much as you do here. Also, while the city may lag in bike lanes, Minneapolis’ suburbs do not. Streets have always been built wide, not only because of the lack of density constraints, but also to allow room for snowbanks to pile up without encroaching on the traffic lanes. Thus you have wide shoulders EVERYWHERE that are either rideable as-is or easily converted to bike lanes.

And as far as singletrack mountain biking goes, once again Portland can never hope to catch up. Besides Theodore Wirth, you also have the excellent Battle Creek trail network within city limits, and well over a dozen trail networks within the suburbs, many of them (such as Eagan’s Lebanon Hills) fairly close in. Portland has about 1/4 mile in Forest Park, maybe a couple miles on Powell Butte and absolutely NOTHING in the suburbs.

Overall it’s hard to say which city is “better” for cycling because they are so different from each other. You can easily change your weightings of what you value most, and favor one over the other. Portland is an awesome bike city (well, at least by this country’s standards) and there’s no need to get defensive and thin-skinned just because someone has challenged our supremacy. In particular, getting challenged by a city with such a different cycling situation helps focus attention on what we still DON’T do well. There’s no question things have plateaued a bit here in Portland, and maybe this will prod us to get our tails in gear again.

What we have that you don’t is really this:

http://mplsbikelove.com/forum/index.php

I could totally be biased though 😉

Those ‘happy slappings’ noted above were reported within a few hours of posting their videos on you-tube and arrested within days.

The midtown greenway does have some assaults, but in actual numbers, it’s safer than walking the major 4 lane street two blocks away.

The ‘vigilante’ group mentioned in the article originally grew out of our forum, and is now run by a local non-profit that champions that trail. They’re organized and insured and trained, have matching vests and file reports of each trip, etc. It’s made things a lot safer.

We are also working on getting a commute partners program funded this summer which would send people down this trail and other streets in batches of 3 or more, which would also help safety both from cars and would-be muggers.

Mostly, what is changing in Minneapolis right now is that for the first time we’re actually getting a cohesive and large community. Other cities have had a much harder time and more to fight for to get amenities, it’s resulted in a unified lobbying group.

What we have had in Minneapolis is a very strong network allowing nearly everyone to ride at least recreationally if they want to, and transportationally if they are interested. The cars are friendly, an most of the town has stop signs all over calming auto traffic.

So nobody has really been ‘hey, everybody, we have to go and fight for ______!!!’ This is because we’ve had it very, very good for a very long time.

In the last couple of years, we’ve finally come together as a community and started paying attention to what’s going in, and that’s I think where the tipping point came for Bicycling magazine.

Bicycling (Buycycling) routinely is an advertiser of cars, SUVs, Bud Light, everything carbon $$$ fiber, Rapha, Assos, Giordana, Kendall Jackson wine, etc.

I for one really care what this demographic thinks…

What cyclist @43 said!

Also, where were those facts again, Peter? Never mind. (Seriously, I sometimes jerk my knees too quickly for trolls.)

Minneapolis as portrayed by Jeremy @ #42 (and other positive posters here) sounds great to me. It ain’t Portland (and vice versa!) but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good home, too.

And with all due respect to the rest of the world, I’d take BikePortland’s view over Bicycling Magazine any day, any how.

Excellent and thoughtful blog.

As a proud Minneapolitan who bikes year round, I would just like to respond to comments here that Portland is inherently a better cycling city because of the milder climate. It’s true that Minnesota has harsh winters, but y’all should know that there is a mighty (and growing!) crew of cyclists who ride year round! Winter is a fact of life for all Minnesotans, but I spend much less time being cold when I’m biking as I’m warmed up within 30 seconds of pedaling, as opposed to 10-15 minutes waiting for the car to warm up when it’s -30.

I live in one of the “sketchier” neighborhoods along the Greenway, and I only ride the Greenway during daylight. Along with the history of crimes happening there, it’s just a really vulnerable place to bike alone at night–boxed in the rail corridor, with steep banks on either side. By dark the roads are calm enough to make me personally prefer that to the Greenway.

To the commenter who mentioned a lack of south suburban routes across the river–there is a new bike path alongside 35E in Inver Grove Heights, as well as one along the Mendota Bridge. I use either to get to my parents down in Eagan.

We need two things for sure:

A bicycle path to the West Side, Bearverton, etc. How about following the light rail, and then a route around the point it goes underground. There needs to be a safe route for commuters and weekenders from and to the Beaverton area.

SINGLE TRACK !!! Lets get this one done !! Plenty of room in Forest Park to “Share the road” with others !! Plenty of “shovel ready” volunteers who know how to build trails !!