Key vote Wednesday on St. Paul’s bike plan centers on more off-street lanes

Frederick Melo, Pioneer Press
·7 min read

When St. Paul City Council Member Cheniqua Johnson read through written comments submitted on the proposed St. Paul Bicycle Plan, she was taken aback to find just a handful of emails from her East Side ward, despite public outreach from city staff for more than a year. And by a handful of comments, she means exactly that.

“I pulled out the written comments from Ward 7, and I had a mighty three,” said Johnson during the city council meeting last week, urging East Siders to pick up the phone, submit an email or pen a letter. “Just know that we are reading them. It goes to a real human.”

Nevertheless, said Johnson, many low-income residents do not have cars, one of the reasons she said she likely would vote in favor of the plan this week.

“A lot of our community members bike, sometimes out of necessity,” she said.

City council vote

With carbon emissions goals in mind, the city council is poised to approve on Wednesday the first sweeping write-through of the city’s then-groundbreaking 2015 bicycle plan, a key document that sets the tone and general vision for up to 163 miles of new bike lanes and related amenities in the 16 years ahead.

That’s a 75% increase in St. Paul bikeways by 2040, most of it rolled into what’s being dubbed as a “low-stress network” of off-street bike corridors drawn on paper with young families, hesitant fence-sitters and non-bikers in mind.

“Specifically what this plan hopes to accomplish is to attract new people riding bikes … who haven’t felt comfortable riding,” said Jimmy Shoemaker, senior city planner, addressing the city council last week. In national surveys, 54% of respondents said they were interested in cycling but hesitant, mainly due to safety concerns.

With the goal of making cycling more accessible across all ages and abilities, the 51-page document prioritizes “protected” lanes that are level with the sidewalk over in-street lanes, while still advocating for a range of approaches on different streets. During a public hearing last Wednesday, the plan was praised by cyclers as a model for inviting newcomers into their community.

“Surveys show the biggest barrier to cycling is proximity to cars. Separated bikeways … address this for all ages and abilities, not just people like me,” said Zack Mensinger, chair of the St. Paul Bicycle Coalition, addressing the council. “This forms a network. Too much of our existing bike infrastructure is fragmented and incomplete, meaning from block to block your route might just end.”

Funding, engagement

Two things the bike plan does not lay out are how new bike lanes will be funded, or how to boost greater engagement on the city’s East Side, which has many immigrant and working class corners that appear disconnected from the prospect of long-term planning for bike corridors.

Shoemaker said the bike plan’s priorities were informed by a survey of 1,700 city residents in the fall of 2021, which drew about 10% of its responses from the East Side, an area comprising roughly a fourth or more of the city population.

Recognizing the disparity, city staff later held outreach events at both the Conway and Battle Creek rec centers, as well as Lake Phalen.

Still, Shoemaker acknowledged more input will be key as specific projects move forward.

“This is kind of beginning,” he said. “The bicycle plan is a decades-long vision for St. Paul. Every single one of those lines on the planned bicycle network represents a different project, and with each project will come more public engagement.”

Separated bikeways a common request

In the local surveys, he said, the most common request was for more separated bikeways, which is considered best practice within federal and state road planning circles when daily traffic volumes exceed 6,000 vehicles.

On the East Side, the most immediate question raised by the bike plan is along Maryland Avenue between Johnson Parkway and Ruth Street. City planners are recommending against a bikeway on the Ramsey County-owned road because of competition for space with the future St. Paul-to-White Bear Lake Purple Line, as well as the Como/Maryland H Line bus rapid transit project, which would connect downtown Minneapolis to Maplewood.

“After we spoke with the county, it was ultimately our recommendation to not include a bikeway on that,” Shoemaker said. The Planning Commission and Transportation Committee disagreed, and have asked the city council to keep a line on the bike plan map indicating Maryland Avenue would be considered a potential “bikeway for further study.”

On any particular street, the bike plan does not specify a particular layout, including whether the city would build a two-way bikeway or add a path on either side of the street. Design details get worked out as street reconstruction is plotted. “Because we don’t offer specific designs, it does not offer an estimate for the cost of any single one project,” Shoemaker said.

Nor does the bike plan specify construction or maintenance funding. Most off-street lanes are added as part of street rebuilds and future public transit projects, making them pricier and at times more politically contentious additions than just painting lines on an existing street.

Other questions

Few areas of the city have been as polarized around the concept of off-street lanes as Summit Avenue, where opponents fear a heavy impact on tree canopy.

“What will it cost?” said Tom Darling, president of the Summit Avenue Residential Preservation Association, urging the council last week to hold off on the plan and seek further public engagement and firm cost estimates. “This is going to affect hundreds or thousands of people on specific streets, specific blocks. Why not send each of them a postcard … saying, ‘We’re considering this. The upshot of this is going to be increased property taxes, safety for bicyclists…'”

The city has added 65 miles of bikeways since 2015, including major network additions to the St. Paul Grand Round, Capital City Bikeway and the Highland Bridge development, for a total of 218 miles of bike corridors as of 2023.

Funding for snow and ice removal, signage placements and other maintenance has not grown in step, Shoemaker said, and “this (bike plan) does not identify new sources for maintenance funding.”

Council Member Rebecca Noecker said while she was thrilled with the plan overall, that’s no small concern.

“We cannot keep building without budgeting to maintain,” Noecker said.

Key goals

Among the bike plan’s key goals:

• Separated bikeways, currently 42% of the city’s bike network of bike corridors, would grow to as much as 73% of the network.

• Complete the Capital City Bikeway and Grand Round networks.

• Bikeways should be no more than a half-mile apart, and separated bikeways and paths and
bicycle boulevards should be no more than one mile apart.

• Build bikeways with the city’s new 1% sales tax, which is dedicated to parks and roads improvements.

• Work with railroad companies to build bikeways in or alongside rail corridors.

• Pursue external funding to construct bikeways separate from ongoing street reconstructions.

Public hearing

A public hearing on Wednesday drew a strong showing of support from the cycling community, as well as a few critical comments from plan opponents.

“I would probably be classified as a confident biker, but I’m also an aging biker,” said Deborah Schlick, a West Sider. “I’m getting more fussy about where I bike … and the way people drive in the years since the pandemic has gotten more reckless, more fast, so I almost always seek out a separated bike path.”

Macalester-Groveland resident Alexandra Cunliffe told the council last week that she and her husband share a car, a set-up that’s only made possible by the city’s bike corridors. But there’s still plenty of places she’s hesitant to roll into the street with her four-year-old cycling behind her.

“We’ve just been so thrilled at the increase in bike infrastructure in the city,” said Cunliffe, who urged the council to support more off-street lanes “so as my kids get older, they get to bike like we enjoy so much.”

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