The City of Minneapolis has started work on its Ten Year Transportation Action Plan. This plan is to implement the policies that are in the Minneapolis 2040 Comprehensive Plan. This work has started despite the 2040 Comprehensive Plan not being adopted yet.
You can read about the work going into the Transportation Action Plan here:
http://www.minneapolismn.gov/publicworks/gompls/index.htm
The chapters of the plan do not include travel by automobile despite the fact that the vast majority of people in Minneapolis drive. The chapters will include:
• Advanced mobility (driverless cars, Uber/Lyft, etc.)
• Pedestrian
• Bicycle
• Transit
• Street operations (signal timing, etc.)
• Freight
• Street design
The presumption is that this plan will continue the narrowing of streets, addition of bike lanes at the expense of driving, changing of timing of signals to make driving take longer, removal of parking, and other actions to deliberately make driving harder. This is being done to actively discourage driving, as this is one of the tenets of the draft 2040 Comprehensive Plan.
The City has put together a skewed survey to demonstrate how much people want to walk and bike and take transit, while ignoring that most people need to drive. You can take the survey here:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/gompls
The City is focusing its engagement efforts only on groups below, ignoring the needs of the vast majority of residents:
- People living in areas of concentrated poverty where majority of residents are people of color (ACP50s )
- People with disabilities
- Seniors and aging population
- People who walk and bike as their primary mode of transportation
- Transit-dependent people
- Families and youth
Transit, walking and biking all are important components of the City’s transportation future. But driving will continue to be an important part of how people get around the City for a very long time. Ford and GM have announced that they are changing over their fleet to electric in the next five years, which will reduce carbon emissions. It is short-sighted to deliberately make the City hard to drive around. Doing so shrinks people’s access to jobs, takes them away from their families and increases pollution due to idling cars stuck in traffic. We need a city that works for everyone.