Here's a measure of how serious Minneapolis is getting about bicycling: the city's draft
Bicycle Master Plan, which is up for public comment this month, might tip you over if you tried to bike with it.
The plan, with accompanying design guidelines, runs to nearly 500 pages of text, tables, photos, and more. Its predecessor, from 2001, was a map.
The new document lays out Minneapolis' policies on bicycling and tells how city government intends to carry them out. If the city council adopts it, the master plan will be the first word--if not necessarily the last--on where biking will take Minneapolis and where Minneapolis will let biking go.
A series of five public meetings starts this week at which people can learn about the plan, express opinions and offer ideas for changes. A comment form, like the master plan itself, is available online.
Even before the meetings, members of the city's active bike community were sizing up the plan online at
Minneapolis Bike Love and the
Minneapolis Bicycle Coalition. Resident Brendon Slotterback sees lots of city-planning documents in his job as Dakota County planner but says this seems like "a big deal." At his blog,
Net Density, Slotterback made a new map to show which improvements actually have the maintenance funding needed to start construction.
Billy Binder, a member of the city's Bicycle Advisory Committee, a lifelong Northside resident, and longtime bicycling advocate, admires the master-plan effort but says the process is moving "way too fast." Guidelines showing 12-foot traffic lanes and 5-foot bike lanes are disappointing, he says, because narrower widths would let bike lanes proliferate even on skinny streets. Binder plans to comment but says he also will directly lobby council members to seek a plan worthy of what Bicycling magazine calls
America's most bike-friendly city.
Sources: Billy Binder, Minneapolis Bicycle Advisory Committee; Brendon Slotterback, Net Density
Writer: Chris Steller