On October 12, 2019, Ted Ferrara was killed when he was struck by a car while walking across Lyndale Avenue at 25th Street in my neighborhood. I send condolences to his friends and loved ones. This a tragic event our community has long feared, and one that we been working to prevent.
Nearly every person who lives in the Lowry Hill East Neighborhood (known to most as The Wedge) will tell you the thing they appreciate most about their neighborhood is its walkability. Indeed, with multiple schools, groceries, places of worship, doctors, dentists, co-working spaces, coffee shops, restaurants, bars, retail locations, parks and lakes within an easy mile walk of any location inside our neighborhood, it is arguably the most walkable place in Minneapolis, perhaps even the entire state. Yet crossing Lyndale, Hennepin or Lake, the busy streets that run through the neighborhood, can be a harrowing experience.
The 2017 Minneapolis Crash Study confirmed our experiences with data. Our neighborhood is home to three of the most dangerous intersections for pedestrians in the city. Since the release of that crash study, community members have been contacting our elected officials to complain about the unsafe walking, biking, and driving conditions. The reconstruction of I-35W and the use of Lyndale as an alternate route has compounded the problem.
29th and Lyndale Is Especially Dangerous
Just a couple of weeks ago, at a city open house to discuss the redevelopment of a parking lot behind the Jungle Theater on the other side of Lyndale Avenue, city planners asked people to identify barriers to accessing the area. In response, there were so many colored dots marking the intersection of 29th and Lyndale as a safety hazard that you could no longer read any of the text.
While the Midtown Greenway hypothetically provides a safe, healthy and easy way of accessing the LynLake business district at the Lyndale and 29th Street corner, in practice it does not. If you exit the Greenway here, there is no crosswalk. That means that, for two blocks, there is no designated place for pedestrians or cyclists to cross a busy street with high-speed vehicles. Meanwhile, the nearest controlled intersection to the Greenway, at Lake Street and Lyndale Avenue, has suffered the most crashes involving pedestrians in the entire city over the past 10 years.
Thousands of people live within a few blocks of this location, and thousands more utilize the Greenway by foot and by bike. Scores of small, independent businesses are a unique and rich resource, but the inability to safely cross the road negatively impacts our quality of life. And there is also no crosswalk at 27th and Lyndale Avenue, making it a disastrous pedestrian situation that continues as you move north.
Barriers to Change
All along the street, with multiple extended areas that have no traffic lights and no stop signs, many drivers treat Lyndale as an expressway. The uniformity of public response at a recent city engagement event gave me hopes that something would be done sooner rather than later to address this problem. Imagine my dismay to hear that just a week later a pedestrian was killed walking from our neighborhood across Lyndale.
Long- and Short-Term Solutions
Our community members ask that a temporary solution for improving pedestrian safety between Franklin and Lake be in place by January 2020, and after that a more permanent solution by June of 2020. We are eager to support our local and regional leaders in meeting these reasonable safety requests.
In addition, we ask all of you who drive through our neighborhood to look up and to SLOW DOWN. No matter what the posted speed limit is, we know that driving over 25 mph in a high traffic, heavy pedestrian-filled area is lethal.
Furthermore, please reconsider any number of driving habits that make using our streets as pedestrians unsafe. Furthermore, please reconsider any number of driving habits that make using our streets as pedestrians unsafe: rights on red when parked cars block visibility, moving through intersections while human beings are still present in them, left hand turns without checking for approaching pedestrians.
And please, please do not run red lights and stop signs. This is a truly frightening act that has become the new norm. We can have all the improved safety laws we want, but if the people behind the wheel don’t take responsibility as drivers to care more for the lives of others, the injuries and deaths will continue to occur.