St. Paul added a few new bikeways in 2024 throughout different parts of the city. These bikeways were added to streets and roads managed by a number of different agencies, from the city itself, to Ramsey County, MnDOT, and a joint project with West St. Paul. With the goal of tracking and evaluating bikeway progress as we move forward with the newly approved Bike Plan, this piece seeks to evaluate these new bikeway additions as far as what they add to the current set of bike routes and in an unfortunate number of cases, how they could and/or should have been better.
Concordia/Rondo Avenue – Pascal to Western
This was perhaps the most “controversial” of the new bikeways, or at least the one that got the most media attention. The project added painted, buffered bike lanes to a long stretch of Concordia Avenue, which runs along the south side of Interstate 94. Theoretically, this offers a fairly long, continuous route paralleling 94 for people heading east. There is a huge excess of paved width on these frontage roads, so repurposing the space made sense. But here’s the thing, traffic on this stretch still goes FAST since most drivers are traveling to or from the freeway and there’s no physical separation from those drivers. There are also likely to be a lot of turning and merging movements for the same reason. Riding that close to the 94 trench means breathing highly polluted air and enduring a lot of noise. The result of this combination of factors is a facility that very few people will feel comfortable or enjoy biking on.
However, while this change offers minimal benefits for people cycling, it’s actually still a very solid project in general, because it should function effectively as traffic calming for a stretch that definitely needs it. The changes will provide some benefit to those looking to cross Concordia and significant safety improvements for drivers on Concordia, plus some spot updates in a few other locations along the stretch. However, as with other similar projects, it’s unfortunate that the bike lanes will get the blame for this generally positive update, despite cyclists benefiting relatively little from the changes.
Minnesota Street – 6th to 9th
This section is a continuation of the Capital City Bikeway (CCB) project that got from Kellogg Boulevard to 6th Street previously. In all honesty, this whole section feels like a bit of an afterthought. It’s narrower than required by the city’s own design manual, despite ample space. In winter, it’s often poorly cleared of snow. And unfortunately, the whole four blocks that would connect this new segment to the CCB segment on 10th Street wasn’t completed in the planned construction year, leaving another year of a bikeway peninsula, much like the long-suffering stretch on nearby Wabasha Street. Overall, this is another example of a CCB segment that should be great, but instead ends up kind of “meh” and falls short of the city’s own design requirements, let alone higher aspirations.
Annapolis Street – Humboldt to Kansas – painted lanes from Humboldt to Oakdale Avenue, sharrows east of Oakdale
This project added more of the most common type of bike lane across the city – basic painted bike lanes in the street gutter going west and in the door-zone going east, on a street signed for 30 mph. Because of this design, they’ll most likely see minimal new use, but hopefully at least they can do some traffic calming. As a plus, at least the gutter pan (concrete curb and extension) was made the full width of the bike lane, so you don’t have an awkward seam down the middle. This is in contrast to the non-conforming design of the Prior Avenue bike lanes and many others across the city which are too narrow and try to count the gutter pan as bike lane width. Auto traffic volumes very noticeably fall off after crossing Oakdale Avenue going east (~1K average daily traffic), so the “sharrows” for that stretch are probably just about as effective as the bike lanes on the rest of the project. As a side note, once nearing the Kansas Avenue end, you should definitely head south on Felix Street to Thompson County Park, which has some nice new paths connecting it to the River to River Greenway and Simon’s Ravine.
Larpenteur Avenue – Flandrau to Hazel
Starting with the positive: it’s nice that quality sidewalks were added which should make it possible for folks living within a few blocks to walk to businesses near the intersection of Larpenteur Avenue and White Bear Avenue. However, I would rate these bike lanes as a solid C. They’re basic, gutter-zone painted bike lanes. Given that a full street reconstruction was taking place, this should have included curb-level separated lanes given the traffic volumes (5-7K average daily traffic) and speeds, on top of a general downsizing of the road footprint. However, it’s pretty par for the course with other projects on county-managed roads, which the county seems intent on improving, just not nearly to the level they could or should be, with street widenings still happening far too often.
Hamline Avenue – Highland to Montreal
This gets my vote for the most disappointing “bikeway” project of the year. First, the good: this project does a great job adding a sidewalk to a spot that definitely needed one. Already when I’ve visited, it’s generally well-used by people walking. However, despite the requirement that shared-use paths should be at least 10 feet wide, the obvious demand for walking in the area given proximity to the golf course and parks, and the lack of sidewalks on much of the opposite side of Hamline Avenue, the “path” here is only 8 feet wide. Because of this, trying to bike on this “path” at any time when people might be out walking means going at a relative crawl and feeling like you’re getting in people’s way or risking conflicts. The city has also stated that it won’t be cleared in winter because of skiing and fatbiking, apparently, though it’s strange to imagine these couldn’t make use of the entire rest of the golf course, as they currently do. The sidewalk is also very winding, which is fine for a recreational walk, but if using this as a transportation route, it is unnecessarily indirect. This project is a real disappointment compared to what should have been added. It’s part of a recent trend where many city bike projects are functionally obsolete as designed according to current guidelines and requirements, despite the solid planning bones such as type and location of the projects.
Snelling Avenue – Montreal to Ford
I’d rate this the best new bikeway of the year in St. Paul. The path is adequately wide, with very impressive water retention and management systems as well, something that is often missing from city projects. It would have been great if MnDOT used the excessively wide footprint of Montreal Avenue to create a two-way separated bikeway to connect to it, as this is currently a bit of a disconnected stub. However, it provides a much improved streetscape for all users, with improved crossings on top of the shared-use path and a street footprint that matches traffic volumes.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I’d rate it a pretty mediocre year for new bikeways in St. Paul, following several other mediocre years. There were a total of 4.5 miles added, compared to the ten-year average of 6.5 miles/year. The longest stretches aren’t welcoming to people of all ages and abilities and are really best seen as traffic calming projects, which again, is great — it just doesn’t do much for people biking. The stretches of what should be quality separated bikeways added by the city (along Hamline and Minnesota) were too narrow according to their own design standards, among other issues. Ironically, given the general car-centricity of MnDOT as an agency, they probably put in the best bikeway of all!
Total Lengths of St. Paul’s 2024 Bikeway Additions
– Painted bike lanes: 0.4 miles Anapolis, 0.4 miles Larpenteur, 2.2 miles Concordia, 3 miles total
– Off-street paths: 0.5 miles (Snelling and Minnesota)
– Sidewalks being called “paths”: 0.5 miles (Hamline Ave)
– Sharrows: 0.5 miles (eastern Anapolis)
4.5 miles total, 1 mile of all ages and abilities facilities
Looking forward, the recently updated St. Paul Bike Plan calls for 152 new or upgraded miles of separated/off-street bikeways (not 163 as shown in the screengrab below). Though the plan itself provides no timeline, other city information and communication with staff has since cited 2040 or 15 years as a goal for completion of the plan, which equates to roughly ten miles of separated bikeway per year. However, at the rate of addition this year, hitting those targets will take ten times longer, around 2175. Without much bolder and capable leadership from the departments responsible for implementing the plan, the city is all but guaranteed to fail to meet its goal, and realistically won’t even come close. Along with this, all goals related to mode-share, vehicle-miles traveled (VMT), and emissions targets included in documents like the Climate Resiliency Action Plan, will almost surely fall short as well, as the only way to decrease car traffic is by giving people viable alternatives to driving, and most of the bikeways being added now still don’t offer that for most people.
One big change we need is a stronger willingness to implement separated bikeways as both interim projects and at times other than during full-street reconstructions, which is usually the only time they get added currently. Additionally, as I’ve written about previously, the city needs to stop making excuses and get the equipment it needs to add and maintain one-way separated bikeways.
Our city council and mayor have approved ambitious, forward-thinking plans to offer us a cleaner, safer, and more economically sound transportation future, one that will benefit everyone in the city whether or not they personally want to bike. We need city and county staff in particular to up their game and show a true commitment to achieving these goals at every possible opportunity.
Of particular importance will be getting the costs of street projects under control so that we have the resources to make investments in more productive streets. The Kellogg-3rd Street Bridge offers a perennial cautionary tale here. The bridge is being rebuilt far larger and more expensively than needed (I’d even argue it’s not needed at all in its current state) but most initially planned bike and pedestrian enhancements to access the bridge were eliminated, though it will have sidepaths on each side of the bridge itself. Such poor design and planning locks us into a status quo that we urgently need to change. Projects like the upcoming reconstruction of Shepard Road will also prove to be key tests for the ability of the city to recognize that many streets and roads are massively oversized in their current state and every extra foot of asphalt laid down for car traffic represents a perpetual future liability that we don’t have the the ability to keep taking on, while taking money from other, better projects we could be accomplishing.