Minneapolis was very lucky: they inherited a large number of extremely high quality freight rail right-of-ways as the industry moved out of the city center. These are perfect for conversion in to bike paths: few hills, and routed to minimize grade crossings (and hence traffic lights). I wish they were everywhere, but building bike routes of this quality in other cities will be much harder.
Denmark seems to have built the "superhighway" from scratch, which is pretty cool. It also seems to have only cost $1.5 million. Since the average freeway costs about $1 million per mile, WHY DON'T WE HAVE MORE BIKEWAYS!?
It's a case of the relatively spread out development pattern and associated wide rights of way being advantageous. Minneapolis can tack on fairly substantial bike infrastructure without totally screwing over cars, which would be just as politically difficult in Minneapolis as any other American city.
The Grand Rounds help a lot too. It's a great basis to have inherited from the past.
Not really surprised. The foundation was already there. Maybe 15-20 years ago Minneapolis started to build bike lanes along old railways and trolly lines. Some of the paths spanned the city and became thoroughfares totally isolated from traffic. The city had a good thing and kept at it. Good for them.
Worth mentioning is that the city has grown in population. That was designed by previous mayoral campaigns to bring in industry. Lots of suburban folks also started moving back into the city too in the 2010s, so demographically the city was ripe to see more cycling. There’s also just a better culture for exercise and outdoor activity in Minneapolis. It used to be one of the fittest cities.
I’m not sure this could work everywhere. Minneapolis has different planning than most cities I’ve seen. There’s a lot of residential space (that’s now being re-zoned), which means more room to build on and options in case bike paths reroute traffic. The streets are generally larger and there are lots of parallel avenues and boulevards that facilitate partitioning of cyclists and cars. Personally, I find this to be ideal for commuting, and Minneapolis began to experiment with closing streets to cyclists a long time ago. I’ll stop myself from ranting about the budget for interstates and road maintenance compared to the cost of 76mi bike lanes though.
Anecdotal, but: Yesterday I rode on the Midtown Greenway, chain of lakes paths, Mississippi River Trail, and Minnehaha Creek trail in Minneapolis. They each serve as a big artery to access various semi-urban parts of the city. You'd be surprised how many people are out biking. Each of those trails have a road that runs parallel to them, and there are consistently more people on the trail than on the road. Meanwhile, the trails take up half the space of the road, and spacing between bikes can be much tighter. Each of those bike trails also has a nice pedestrian path running parallel. I'd estimate the portion of the nearby population utilizing either the bike or pedestrian trails is more like 20-30%
I agree that improving bus infrastructure would be a huge help, but that's not mutually exclusive to improving bike infrastructure. If you haven't experienced biking in Minneapolis, please visit some time! Try our bike share bikes, and the trails above, and see for yourself.
I'm a cyclist in Minneapolis, and I'd love to see even more dedicated bike and multiuse trails everywhere. I think it's critical for all sorts of reasons, and have personal investments in it at some level.
I had a sort of similar reaction as you to the study though. It's better than nothing, it provides some numbers that are consistent with one interpretation, and I believe that interpretation, but there are other interpretations.
One issue is that dedicated bike paths in the Twin Cities don't get put in random places. The money and municipal planning involved in them is focused on pathways that are of critical infrastructural importance, or where studies have already shown that they're likely to see a lot of use. They get put in places where the city and county wants to increase nonvehicular transportation as much as possible, to increase access to something (e.g., light rail, some kind of hub) or to connect two or more places.
So showing that bike use is higher in places that a lot of city, county, park, and DoT planners have decided there's a demand for, based on years of study, isn't entirely surprising. It would be like if five companies did a multiyear study of demand for product X versus Y, concluded people would prefer X, made product X, and showed that it sold better than Y.
On the other hand, you could go full circle and interpret this as just meaning the municipal planning studies are usually right, and people do like dedicated bike lanes, especially in the places their studies suggest.
The thing is though, even for Minneapolis, the total length of bike lanes/paths amounts to what, maybe 5% of the total length of sidewalks/walking paths? (spitballing here looking at Google Maps)
Which just strengthens my point: even quite modest efforts can result in big biking gains. And that's in Minneapolis, who nobody is going to accuse of having great weather for biking.
Minneapolis-St. Paul, which is as sprawl-y as it gets has done a pretty good job of connecting most of the area with paved bike-only paths. I am not sure how bad the situation in Bay Area is, but it is not easy to get too many people to bike to work 20 miles each way, every day. So I don't know how this helps unless most people live within a 10 mile radius of the work place.
I do suppose it really should say, "good, well-designed bike lanes" but as it goes, I'm just now realizing it and it is way too late to change.
The bike infrastructure I've seen in the US has been low or lacking entirely, but I really am never sure how representative it was: I lived in Indiana in small to medium sized cities. In the smaller ones, it really wasn't unsafe to just ride on the road anyway and bike lanes weren't so necessary. At least one city had a walkway/bikeway where railroad tracks used to be and lanes around the river, which made biking decently convenient.
Minneapolis resident here. Unlike the other Minneapolis resident here, I feel like I see most of the bike lanes entirely disused. A project in my neighborhood turned a major thoroughfare into a one way with a separated bike lane, and I've seen maybe 40 people use it since it's completion a few years ago.
I'm curious what a 69% increase looks like in real numbers - a 20% increase on next to nothing is still next to nothing.
In my honest opinion Minneapolis is 75% of the year too hot or too cold for all but the most keen bikers.
Our light rail and commuter rail system is a joke. I mean, they are nice to have but decades of NIMBYism and political interference delayed and morphed them into systems that work but are shadows of what they could have been.
IMO the one thing that saves our mass transit is that busses are allowed to ride on the shoulder bypassing most traffic. I lived in the north burbs and had a job downtown Minneapolis. I could take an express bus from a nice ramp facility to right into downtown with just one extra stop. 20 minute trip vs nearly an hour in a car.
However, forget about using mass transit if you're trying to get anywhere outside of downtown Minneapolis.
Also, the cities are bike friendly but not as friendly as most 'best places to bike' actually say they are. Most articles go by sum of miles of bike lanes, but many bike lanes here are pretty terrible. Not protected, poorly maintained, not plowed or light enforcement for cars badly parked. I'd say Minneapolis is as bike friendly as any other ubran area with a sizable health conscious population.
The problem with American cities is that we only have two spaces: the road and the sidewalk. Bike lanes are sometimes added to roads, but they're still just lanes on the road. The roads have all been built and designed for cars. Sidewalks have been built for pedestrians. Bikes, scooters, skateboards, etc. just don't fit well into either space.
There's a great YouTube channel, BicycleDutch [1], that goes into some detail about the Dutch approach to thoroughfares. They almost always build three spaces: a road for cars, a path for bicycles, and a sidewalk for pedestrians. This results in a huge number of people using bicycles to get around; in Amsterdam 30% of people always commute with a bicycle and over 40% usually do.
Of course, it generally wouldn't be practical for an American city to just convert all its roads to also include a separated bike path. Instead they could look for areas where a bike path could be built without costing too much, drawing political ire, or significantly interfering with current use. Railroad tracks are good opportunities. As an example, Minneapolis converted an unused railroad corridor to a separated bike path, called the Midtown Greenway [2]. As of 2016 34,000+ people used it daily [3]. Portland, OR, has converted two former railways into bike paths, the Springwater Corridor trail [4] and the new Trolley Trail [5]. We have plenty of other separated paths here as well.
Where there just isn't enough horizontal space, a more radical approach would be to build an elevated bike path over a few major thoroughfares (i.e. main downtown streets) or freeways that connect commuters to other separated or multi-use paths. Xiamen, China, built an elevated cycle path -- really more of a bicycle highway -- last year [6]. Dallas [7], Phoenix [8], and Detroit [9] have all built parks over freeways that contain some mixed-use paths, though not always with transportation in mind.
Ultimately bicycles/scooters/etc. don't really fit well into the current American infrastructure, but it seems like a solvable problem.
I recently ran across a hard-to-believe, but as far as I can tell, accurate statistic: the Copenhagen metropolitan area has more miles of protected bike lanes than the entire United States combined does. That is somewhat surprising, since the Copenhagen metro area isn't really all that big.
Depends on the city? Minneapolis-St. Paul has ok cycling infrastructure for North America that certainly could be improved, but I don't see a negative attitude
> dedicated bike roads where you never have to interact with cars
We desperately need more of these. They exist in many places, but not nearly enough. They're also far cheaper to build & maintain than regular roads, needing less width or thickness, as well as zero paint, curbs, stop lights or most other things city streets require.
Denmark seems to have built the "superhighway" from scratch, which is pretty cool. It also seems to have only cost $1.5 million. Since the average freeway costs about $1 million per mile, WHY DON'T WE HAVE MORE BIKEWAYS!?
sorry, lost my composure there.
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