Safety/use of the trail
cmaw...@hotmail.com
StarTribune) regarding a similar bike trial. This trail transcends
nice suburbs, troubled neighborhoods and ends up downtown (Mpls and
St. Paul). I thought the comments by the users were relevant to our
discussion. Like anything about City life, there are drawbacks but I
believe the benefits outweigh them.
As improvements to Midtown Greenway increase, so do bicyclists
Jim Foti, Star Tribune
There's a major east-west piece of pavement that crosses Minneapolis.
It's got entrance ramps, fast-moving traffic, and even spots of
congestion -- and there's not a car in sight.
With nearly a year of crosstown service under its belt and a new high-
tech bridge poised to leap across Hiawatha Avenue, the Midtown
Greenway has become the I-94 for bicycles through Minneapolis. And its
growing legions of commuters are using phrases you'd never hear
applied to an urban interstate.
"It's a beautiful ribbon of bike superhighway," says Silvester
Guadiana, a Minneapolis resident who pedals to his job in St. Paul
year-round.
"People are really nice and polite, and I ! love it," says Terry
Beller, a St. Paul resident who commutes in the other direction.
And greenway popularity is increasing.
Kevin Ishaug, who bikes to work from Bloomington, owns the Freewheel
bike shop on the West Bank, An outpost of his shop will open next
spring at a spot in the middle stretch of the 5.7-mile greenway. Last
summer, while researching his potential customer base, he learned that
the daily number of greenway users passing the store site was about
1,200. Comparable figures for this summer are about 2,200, and nearly
4,500 people used the western end of the path on July 4th.
Completion of the eastern stretch of the greenway in September 2006
gets some credit for the increase. "I'm actually commuting so much
more now that the greenway is finished this way," said Evan Page, who
bikes from south Minneapolis to Regions Hospital in St. Paul. He's
planning to try year-round commuting this winter.
Page's trip takes him just under! an hour, but shorter-haul commuters
have also have been lured! in. Cor inne Dallas estimates her ride at
just 10 minutes, from Minneapolis' Seward neighborhood to Abbott
Northwestern Hospital, but it saves her money on gas and gets her out
into the sunshine after a day in the radiation/oncology department.
And daylight is key: If Dallas knows she's going to work late, she
drives. Much of the greenway sits in an old rail trench, out of sight
from street level, and passes through a few higher-crime
neighborhoods.
The trail was designed with safety in mind, says Donald Pflaum, a city
of Minneapolis transportation engineer. There are 28 "code blue"
phones along the greenway, each with a camera nearby, and the cameras
are monitored by the Minneapolis police. Bright lights line the path,
and officials even conducted photometric studies to try to minimize
shadows.
It's not immune from urban ills, Pflaum and others say. One greenway
user reported having a glue-like substance tossed on her by some
schoolchildren this spring; i! n past years, Ishaug has been hit by
water balloons and beer bottles dropped from above and knows of an old
bicycle that was thrown down onto the path.
Tim Springer, executive director of the Midtown Greenway Coalition,
said his group has heard of one or two robberies on the greenway so
far this year, but he said that the trail is safer than many of the
streets that surround it. He noted that getting exact data is tricky
because crimes are reported by street address and there are no
addresses on the greenway, but "overall, it's pretty darn safe."
The more the merrier
Miscreants aren't the only hazard. One day, while pedaling along at
about 20 miles per hour, Ishaug spotted a bicycle with kid-carrier in
tow coming down the ramp from Nicollet Avenue. It's a narrow spot in
the trail, and the merging bicyclist ignored the stop sign at the
bottom of the ramp. Instead of slamming on his brakes and going over
the handlebars, Ishaug opted for the ! collision. The kid in the
trailer was unhurt, and the adults e! scaped w ith minor scrapes.
Do such encounters mean the greenway is too busy? Unlike their
counterparts on the crowded highways, the bicycle commuters say the
more the merrier.
"I find the greenway to be perfectly populated," said Beller, who
works at the Wells Fargo campus in south Minneapolis. There are enough
people to feel safe, she added.
Ishaug expressed similar sentiments. Crowding on the greenway "is a
nice problem to have."
Jim Foti · 612-673-4491 · jf...@startribune.com