In the conversations leading up to the City Council vote today on the 3rd Ave S redesign, it seems we’ve gotten focused on the wrong questions. The most important question isn’t “will the downtown businesses agree to replace greening by a large enough percentage?” It also isn’t “but how do downtown business owners feel about this?”

The right question is: is a three lane road or a four-lane road better? That’s pretty clear, in general. Three-lane roads are better for the safety of pretty much everyone, including people on foot and people in cars. The additional greening and placemaking potential is the cherry on top. If you can handle the traffic, three lanes are better than four.

So there’s this followup question: do we need that fourth travel lane? A small group of downtown business owners clearly believe we do. But the answer is very clear: we don’t.

There are several reasons to believe that we don’t need four lanes on 3rd Ave S, south of 7th St S. The first, and simplest, is that the original Public Works staff traffic analysis (which has been buried due to political pressure) said that a three-lane road would work just fine. That’s why they developed that layout, and why it was presented to the Pedestrian and Bicycle Advisory Committees.

The second major reason: there are roads that the City has already changed from a four-lane to a three-lane layout that carry more traffic than 3rd Ave S. And I mean that in every possible way: more traffic over the course of the full day, and more traffic in the highest peak hour.

Let’s take these one at a time. First, overall traffic. The highest mid-block traffic volumes on the section of 3rd south of 7th Street, per the City’s Traffic Count Management System, is 9,687 cars/day. This is lower than several three- and even two-lane roads I’ve been able to find:

Riverside at 23rd Ave S (three lane): 13,112 cars/day

Franklin at 23rd Ave S (two lane): 13,885 cars/day

Cedar Ave S at 5th St S (two lane): 13,401 cars/day

Lyndale Ave S at 35th St W (three lane): 13,040 cars/day

That’s pretty clear. There are streets that manage much more traffic every day than this southern section of 3rd Ave S, and do it with three (or even two!) travel lanes. But what about the contention that there’s something unique about 3rd Ave, that it somehow has a busier evening peak than other roads?

That also turns out not to be true. The highest peak-hour volume on 3rd is the PM peak at 8th St S, which has a count of 1,326 cars/hour (in both directions – again, all of this is per the Traffic Count Management System). I’ve found six intersections (so far) on three-lane roadways that have higher evening peak-hour traffic counts than that: Franklin Ave E at 11th Ave S (2,635 c/h), Lyndale Ave S at 35th St W (2,360 c/h), Lyndale Ave S at 36th St W (2,151 c/h), Riverside at 23rd Ave S (1,403 c/h), Franklin Ave E at 14th Ave S (1,389 c/h) and Lyndale Ave S at 33rd St W (1,362 c/h).

When you stack up all of the intersections on 3rd with a host of intersections on 2- or 3-lane roads around Minneapolis, it’s very clear: it’s carrying less traffic in the busiest evening peak than several roads we’ve already converted to three (or, again, even two!) lanes.

So here’s the real question: why are we even having this debate? So a small number of downtown business owners (six, according to the Star Tribune) believes, with no evidence to back up their superstition, that changing 3rd Ave S to a three-lane road south of 8th St S will cause terrible traffic congestion. But the evidence says otherwise. It says that there are multiple roadways with fewer than four lanes carrying a greater amount of traffic – both over the course of the day and in the peak hour – and operating just fine.

Why should we believe that 1,326 cars/hour will blow up a three-lane road when 2,635 cars/hour doesn’t?  That’s almost twice as much!  Why should we believe that a three-lane can’t handle 9,687 cars/day when we can go out and look at two-lane Franklin Ave S safely carrying 13,885 cars/day? We can go look at a 4-to-3 conversion that dramatically improved pedestrian safety last year on Cedar Ave S, which for what it’s worth carries 13,401 cars/day.

Editors note: This post was edited slightly from its original version. Apologies for any confusion.