The red light committee hearing was last week.

University is the only acceptable route IMHO and actually wasn't that bad this morning. You could try Thomas Ave (4 blocks north of University) from Fairview to Marion, but it's only a single lane in either direction.

That's where I got the info from.

Oh, and which building is the 'State Office Building'?

<--- newb

The link will show you. If the capitol is the base of a U, prongs pointing south, the SOB is the first building on the western prong.

Cool, that's the one I thought, but it showed up in google with a different title floating above.

Sorry for being an idiot on our gov

It's okay. Not everyone can be a policy wonk dork that has been slinking around the capitol buildings since high school.

FYI - there are bike racks on the north side of the capitol building.

I never found the bike racks.

It seemed like there was more opposition than I was expecting from talking with people over the last few months, and also a lot of the discussion seemed to be kind of of the opinion that this was a 'cyclist bill' or something, rather than it being something that's focused on simply getting things to be equitable for everyone. It also seemed like they wanted to make sure the bill didn't have any teeth, and it seemed like they were getting that.

I'm not totally sure what they were meaning when they said that the money that they're talking about isn't from cyclists at all, so they shouldn't be thinking about us at all. I don't know which guy that was, but he seemed to want to license bicycles if they were going to pass complete streets. This made no sense to me. I thought that the funds for the state DOT came from more than just gas tax and vehicle license fees, I thought that they actually came from our property and sales taxes as well. He also seemed to think that passing this law would result in automobiles being always at fault no matter what in a bike / auto collision, or that having paint on the road saying that there's a bike lane would somehow diminish the rights of automobile drivers.

Hearing the kind of rhetoric that I usually read in the Star Tribune's comment section coming from an elected official had me wondering if our efforts are actually doing anything.

My impressions could be wrong.

MNDot slipped a memo to the people behind the big desks partway through saying that they expect this to cost 2 million dollars over the two years that it's planned as a pilot project. After some talking, it was determined that a lot of that 2mil is actually money that they already use. Some of the advocates that I talked to sounded like they had thought the figure for additional costs was going to be 5 figures, not 7 figures.

At any rate, they put everything on hold until they have the actual numbers from MNDot, and said that they thought that they had heard enough testimony. There's going to be another meeting, but I'm not sure when.

I was kind of struck by the lady from the advocacy group for blind people - she was there to make sure that they didn't try to put the sound walk signals in as a default or requirement on all intersections that are getting new signals. Something about how "We've been crossing the street for pretty much forever without your silly signals, they don't really help us much, and people in the neighborhoods they're going in on are complaining, and they're too expensive. There are places where it makes sense, but don't make them mandatory, make sure that the cars follow the laws, that the buses show up at the stops on time and in more places, and that there are safe places for us to ride tandem bicycles."

That sounded a whole lot like my feelings on a lot of the facilities that have been going in lately for cyclists. I'd much rather that the funding be doing things that actually make a difference, you know? Things like a 14 million dollar or whatever mile of bike path or 3 season bike facilities don't do anything for my feeling that we're being treated as equal road users.

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On the way out, I nearly destroyed my wheels on several potholes on University, though to be fair, most of it wasn't actually potholes, it was canyons, 1-2 feet wide and sometimes nearly a block long flowing in the direction of traffic. On the way back I was nearly hit several times on Summit because the bike lane had 100% not been plowed. To be honest, it didn't look like any of the street had been plowed. Taking the little wiggle down Otis over to Marshall I managed to completely wipe out on glare ice melting from the 'snow storage' on the side of the road in that little section of windy residential streets. Why they had been plowed better than a majore East/West bicycle route is beyond me.

hereNT, welcome to Saint Paul. Sorry you had to deal with the poor state of our roads while you were here. FYI, Chatworth and Griggs make pretty good North-South routes. Como is better now on the north side of town where I live due to the fact that we've had some melting. Glad you could help support the good legislation out there now.

Huh, I thought for sure someone had posted this, guess I just saw it on Facebook:

Via Twitter:



WOOOOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes!

This fills me with hope. Thanks for keeping us in the loop.

OT: Is this where Capital Complex folks park their bikes? I'm newly employed in the SOB & wondering what folks do. Or do people bring their bikes inside with them & to their offices?

FWIW, I never found the racks, but they might have just been under a snowbank somewhere.

Saw this on twitter a bit ago:



Still no update on the Complete Streets website / blog so no more detailed info.

I don't know. I work at DHS over off Lafayette and East 7th. We have bike lockers. I imagine Meritex manages the parking over there - ask them. They rent out and maintain our bike lockers here.