Editor’s note: “Street Views” appears in Streets.mn twice monthly. Respond to author and board member Joe Harrington directly at [email protected].
It’s no secret that streets in U.S. cities, Minneapolis included, were primarily built to prioritize cars. At the turn of the last century, streets that had served all modes of transit — pedestrians, bicyclists, streetcar users and a handful of cars — increasingly sacrificed more and more space to the personal vehicle.
More than a century later, we’re a nation of freeways and fast-moving four-lane “stroads” that are unsafe for everyone and downright dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians.
This year, Minneapolis can improve road safety in its 2025 budget by investing in traffic-calming measures, shifting away from car-centric design that prioritizes speed over multimodal safety.
What Is Traffic Calming?
Traffic calming modifies the design elements of a road to ensure that drivers travel at safe speeds, keeping other road users safe.
Design interventions and roadway modifications include roundabouts (above, left) bump outs and bollards (above, center) and speed humps (above, right). Raised speed tables and crosswalks, medians and “pinch points” to narrow the roadway are also part of the city’s traffic calming toolkit.
These projects play an integral role in operationalizing the city’s vision zero goal — a program aiming to eliminate traffic and pedestrian fatalities by 2027, not including highways or interstates. Traffic-calming measures play a significant role in modifying streets to make traffic move slower, which is critical to ensuring the safety of all road users. City traffic data shows that speeding was a contributing factor in 65% of fatal crashes in 2021, significantly higher than the 2021 national average of 29%.
Vulnerable road users who make trips biking, walking or rolling are significantly more likely to be injured or killed in these accidents, further emphasizing the importance of swift action. Although walking, rolling and cycling account for only 19% of trips in Minneapolis (16% walking/rolling and 3% cycling), these vulnerable road users represent a disproportionate 42% of severe traffic injuries and deaths (31% pedestrians and 11% cyclists).
Traffic and pedestrian safety is a racial equity issue as well. Indigenous residents, who make up just 1% of Minneapolis’ population, account for 5% of pedestrian and bicycle deaths and 4% of vehicle crash fatalities. Black residents, representing 19% of the population, constitute 26% of vehicle crash deaths, highlighting significant racial disparities in traffic safety.
Current City Push for Traffic Calming
The City of Minneapolis has been quietly pursuing traffic calming improvements over the past few years following the City Council’s renewed interest in the issue in 2022. A new process to create a resident-powered response grew from this push, allowing residents to apply for traffic calming projects in their communities through a public application. Applications are scored on transportation factors, like crash history and traffic volumes, as well as racial equity measures. Projects began implementation in 2023, with 23 completed projects across the city’s 13 wards in 2024.
But these 23 implemented projects — including speed bumps on Logan and Humboldt avenues in North Minneapolis and speed bumps on 28th Avenue South — fail to meet the current demand for traffic calming.
As the city looks to 2025, it is facing an 850-application backlog for traffic-calming projects. If the city and the public works department were to meet all these requests by the end of 2025, it would cost $15 million upfront and $7 million annually to keep up on requests from 2025 to 2028, according to Minneapolis Public Works.
The City Council allocated a one-time $400,000 to fund the slate of traffic-calming projects in 2024, leaving a significant gap to fill in the 2025 budget. Without investing more resources into these efforts, “Vision Zero” will never be met.
To address this shortfall, City Council Member Robin Wonsley (Ward 2) submitted a legislative directive to understand how the council can support addressing the backlog of requests. The climate and infrastructure committee heard more on the issue in July 2024, with a likely budget amendment from the City Council advocating for additional funding. Currently, Mayor Jacob Frey’s proposed budget focuses on interventions like traffic cameras, an incomplete solution to street safety.
County and State Roads
It may seem counterintuitive that the City of Minneapolis doesn’t have control over all the roads and streets within its jurisdiction. Roadway ownership paints a complicated picture for traffic calming and safe streets efforts.
While Minneapolis owns most local streets, some are owned and maintained by the Minneapolis Park Board and the University of Minnesota.
Hennepin County also owns and operates some major thoroughfares, like Lake Street in South Minneapolis and West Broadway in North Minneapolis, limiting the city’s jurisdiction in shaping street design and maintenance as residents’ calls for safer streets on county roads continued to grow.
The Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) controls other roads, such as the interstate highways and other trunk highways like Hiawatha Avenue and Olson Memorial Highway (MN 55) and Central Avenue (MN 65) in Northeast Minneapolis.
To overcome this mismatch of ownership and design and maintenance structures, broader action across city, county and state agencies is needed to fully address safety across all road types.
Given that only 9% of streets — many of which are operated by the county or state — were the site of 66% of the fatal and severe crashes in Minneapolis between 2017 and 2021, attention must be given to state and county roads as well if we want to see significant reductions in serious injury and deaths. This should include complete street design and highway rightsizing and removals to really move the needle.
Will MnDOT and Hennepin County Take Action?
It’s generally hard to get state DOTs to make changes to legacy highways, especially in neighborhoods that traditionally have faced long-running disinvestment. This has certainly been the case along Olson Memorial Highway in Near North Minneapolis.
Community members have been asking for years for immediate safety improvements, including reducing speed limits to 25 mph, adding dedicated bus and bike lanes, and implementing better pedestrian crossings, while working toward long-term goals of highway removal and community reparations. MnDOT added some lackluster safety fixes, including bollards, but still left many major safety concerns unaddressed, according to a 2024 report made by the World Resources Institute and The New Urban Mobility Alliance (NUMO).
Changes came more quickly in other locations, such as along Snelling Avenue in St. Paul, a whiter and relatively wealthier area with a well-endowed private college. It took Macalester College’s willingness to pay for pedestrian safety for MnDOT to agree to add a planted median with pedestrian crossings on Snelling between Grand and St. Clair avenues. This year, the agency further improved these crossings and narrowed Snelling between Ford Parkway and Montreal Avenue in St. Paul, also adding painted bike infrastructure on the pavement.
In Hennepin County, issues around street design also plague city traffic-calming efforts. The preliminary designs for the Cedar Avenue reconstruction project (County Road 152) feature 14.5 foot wide lanes, several feet wider than what a modern safe street would design. The county said its wide snowplows needed turn clearance around new medians and multimodal infrastructures designed to lower speed and make the street safer and better for all users.
Wider roads directly lead to faster driving (a concept known as “design speed”) and are more expensive to maintain relative to narrower roads, making this a costly misstep if the county locks in wide roads for decades to come.
As the Minneapolis City Council and Mayor Frey work through their 2025 budget, it’s time to fund the backlog of traffic-calming projects and advocate for greater state and county action to meet safer street policies across all administrative levels.
Call to action: If you live in Minneapolis, contact your City Council member to weigh in on the municipal budgeting process and advocate for traffic calming and safe street design. And if you live outside of Minneapolis, reach out to your city and county government representatives to advocate for traffic calming and other measures to keep all those who bike, walk, roll and take transit safe.