Fridley Hates Pedestrians - Justin Foell

I’m excited about the prospects of a safer Osborne Rd. For the record I am for the 3 lane conversion the most of the proposed options. If the county were to mill and overlay tomorrow, this is a great low/no cost way to drastically increase safety and accessibility.

However, I feel this particular study does not draw from other cities past experience well enough. At the study meeting it was mentioned that the city of Crystal lamented that they did not do the 3 lane option for the full length of the roadway. I see the same sort of trepidation here.

Road Speed

Why not lower the speed limit to 30MPH? Residents in attendance at the meeting were obviously concerned about the speed as they’re asking for more enforcement. The real answer to enforcement is self-enforcement and the road diet would provide that. But why not lower the speed limit to 30? The odds of a pedestrian fatality at 40MPH is two times of that at 30MPH – and lets face it, travelers on a 35MPH road are going to be driving 40MPH.

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No I don’t mean rename it, Fridley already has a Main St. which was probably named because of its proximity to the railroad. But if you look at Mississippi St., it truly has the potential to be the main street of Fridley.

Located on it are: city hall, the police and fire department, Fridley’s library, the Fridley Historical Society museum, Hayes Elementary School, several churches, and a few home-based businesses.

Now the bad news: this STROAD is too fast and too wide to provide any value to the businesses and residents on or near it. It is home to a dumpy strip-mall which is almost impossible to get to as a pedestrian. Mississippi St. could easily go on a road diet.

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Road Diet

For the sheer width of the road, it could be changed from 4 lanes to 2. The speed limit could be lowered to 30MPH (or even 25) and on-street parking allowed in lieu of the extra lane. There’s probably room for bike lanes left over, and the city – or county, as this is a county road – could add sidewalk bump-outs at the intersections so it’s faster and safer for pedestrians to cross the road.

School Safety

I mentioned this idea to my neighbor – whose child attended Hayes Elementary – and he remarked that the road size is warranted for (automobile based) school arrival/departure. There is a solution for this problem and it is called a school bus. You’re paying for it though your property taxes, so you might as well use it and save yourself the headache. Leave it to the school bus drivers. They’re trained to be better (and safer) drivers than the rest of us. And safety, it seems, is paramount:

Safe Routes to Schools interviewed parents in 2012 about why they drove their children to school. The overwhelming response was concern about traffic speeds, crossing busy highways and general safety.

Fridley’s own Activate Transportation Group, which I’m a part of, recommends the city/county “eliminate parent parking on the south side of Mississippi St. directly opposite the school and to enlarge the east side entry apron at the curb to better accommodate school buses entering the driveway.”

The problem isn’t parking, it’s the fact that kids are crossing a 4-lane road with cars traveling at 40MPH. Once it’s two lanes parents will instinctively send their kids on the bus so they don’t have to deal with traffic. Then the school driveway can stay as-is because the turning radius will have been effectively been increased. Done and done.

Rezoning

Why not zone Mississippi St. so that all homes along the corridor can be home-based businesses? Allow residential to commercial conversions so foreclosed properties can be transformed into useful, productive places. Some of the setbacks on Fridley homes are so deep that you could literally put a business in their front yard, right next to the sidewalk:

Business owners wouldn’t have to “live above the shop” – they could live behind the shop. How awesome of a commute would that be?

My other neighbor, who is in her 80s and has lived in Fridley since the early 60s. She told me how her friend moved to Mississippi St. in the 60s to open a salon. The city should re-ignite the local economy by giving people an opportunity to spend money locally. I bet if there were a locally owned convenience store a block down from the elementary school, it would be frequented by Fridley’s youngest consumers.

Art

Look at this imposing wall:

It could be a blank canvas for a pretty incredible mural. Guess what? There’s a wall exactly like this one on the other side of the street! Transforming what is one of Fridley’s ugliest features may also be the cheapest and easiest to accomplish.

Auto Alternatives

Fridley should decide to use one and only one of its east-west corridors to quickly move cars between Central Ave./MN-65 & University Ave./MN-47. 73rd Ave. might be a good candidate as it’s a road with few consumer businesses and it already has a service street separating the houses from the main traffic area. Then other east-west STROADS can be converted back to 2-lane streets, providing the city the value it deserves. Osborne Rd. would be next on my list – which is home to a hospital, elementary school, grocery store, coffee shop, etc…

I’ve always said that University Ave. in Fridley is where businesses go to die… but Mississippi St. could be where businesses go to live!

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I had the opportunity to represent my city’s “Active Transportation” group in the 2013 Fridley 49er Days parade. We were parading under the auspices of getting around Fridley using non-motorized transportation.

I was disappointed in the turnout of or group. We had some great volunteers from the Fridley Senior Program walking with signs and banners. However my family and neighbors were the only representatives on bicycles. So if I didn’t show up (or recruit my neighbors), the parade unit would have been almost non-existent.

I was starting to get the feeling that here in Fridley, we’re all still stuck in our cars and could care less about weirdos that walk to the store or ride bikes to work.

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Our group was promoting “share the road.” We were given handout materials from sharetheroadmn.org and carrying a banner promoting the phrase. My only problem with it is the “Share the Road” campaign is brought to you by MnDOT (the aforementioned web address redirects to dot.state.mn.us/sharetheroad/). Most pedestrians and cyclists would agree that MnDOT is the worst single offender when it comes to government agencies that consistently promote driving above all transit modes.

The banner read “Stop for pedestrians at every corner.”

Then the back side (which wasn’t prominently visible) asks walkers to “look again before you cross.” My emphasis added because you never know when you’ll be run down by someone speeding in a SUV while updating their facebook status on their phone.

This two-sided banner assumes that there’s some sort of give-and-take between drivers and pedestrians. But MnDOT just takes and takes until there’s no walking infrastructure left.

At one point a resident watching the parade (who didn’t see the back of the banner) said “well, it would be nice if they [pedestrians] would look out for us [cars] before stepping into the intersection.” I inferred cars & pedestrians because she distinctly used the verb step. She should be a spokesperson for MnDOT.

Then on my way home I was cut-off (almost right hooked) by a car speeding to get into the Lifetime Fitness parking lot on E. Moore Lake Dr. before I crossed the intersection (with my son on the bike and my wife and infant daughter close behind).

All of this has just led me to believe that Fridley’s residents are simply not ready to admit the Suburban Experiment is coming to an end. Or are they?

A Ray of Hope

Thankfully our forward thinking Fridley City Council unanimously adopted the 2013 Active Transportation Plan. It’s not a law (yarr – they be more like “guidelines”) – but I hope when the next re-striping or re-paving project comes along, the city will do it’s best to accommodate those outside of automobiles since it’s good for health, and good for the economy. But it is incumbent upon city officials to act. A plan is just a plan until it’s put into action. Looking at the previous 1975 Bikeway / Walkway Systems Plan (adopted two years before I was born), it’s obvious that the city is still struggling with some of those same issues.

See also:

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Once the BNSF railroad passes over the south side of I-694 and expands into the vast Northtown Yard, you have but one option to cross it in Fridley City limits: the 44th Ave. Bridge.

I always had assumed that this bridge is in Columbia Heights, but it lies in Fridley proper. The notion sunk in when I saw a Fridley Police car staking out the bridge – presumably looking for speeders.

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And speed they will. This bridge has a 2-lane road with extra wide lanes and extra wide shoulders. The speed limit is 30 MPH. Who are we kidding? No one is going to go 30 on it because it is engineered like a 45 MPH road:

44th-wide-lanes — Impatient driver, wanting to go faster than 30 MPH

The view from the top of the bridge is actually quite fascinating. You can see the “hump” at the Northtown Yard in action. A train backs up slowly to a hill (the hump) and one-by-one cars are uncoupled and roll down the other side, switching to various tracks so the non-unit train cars get rearranged to move on to their next destination:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/family_man_system/28129427798/

Photo courtesy of Man of Family

Getting up to the top of this bridge is the laughable part. There’s no real entrance to the bridge walkway from the road on the east side. There’s just a narrow, weedy, sandy, decaying section of asphalt that says “trouble” more than “walk this way:”

The path is perilously narrow, squeezed down by the guard rail. Once you get to the bridge it turns to concrete and doesn’t get any wider. In fact it feels narrower since you’re now encased between a fence and a jersey barrier:

I think it would be impossible for two pedestrians to pass without brushing shoulders. Yet automobiles on this bridge are given a extra-wide berth for their whopping 30 MPH:

This bridge is technically a county road (Anoka County Road 2). I understand that the county (and state) sometimes operate with heavy hands. But regardless of who assumes ownership, someone should be ashamed of themselves.

The next time this bridge is resurfaced, the lanes should be narrowed to 10 or 11 feet, to fully reflect it’s 30 MPH speed limit, and the shoulders should be even narrower yet. Then the pedestrian area could be widened to provide actual space for non-motorized traffic to travel in both directions simultaneously without the certainty of a head-on collision which is guaranteed today.

Justin Foell

Technology, Bicycling, Hobbies, Kids, Life.

Tag Archives: Fridley Hates Pedestrians

An Open Letter to Anoka County – Osborne Road Diet

Road Speed

Still Double-Wide in Places

Different East/West Treatment

More planters and crosswalks

Friendly Fridley Bold Idea: turn Mississippi St. into main street

Road Diet

School Safety

Rezoning

Art

Auto Alternatives

Fridley Hates Pedestrians (Part 5) – Share the Road

A Ray of Hope

Fridley Hates Pedestrians (Part 4) – 44th Ave. Bridge

Fridley Hates Pedestrians (Part 3) – MN-65 & I-694

MnDOT’s solution, still part of the problem