St Paul's Hamline Avenue Mill and Overlay is a Street Safety Betrayal

[Aftermath of a recent car crash on four-lane segment of Hamline Avenue.]

The maddest I ever saw Barb Thoman was at a Transportation Committee meeting in 2014. I was a Planning Commissioner, and had just joined the Transportation Committee, a city-led group started under Mayor Chris Coleman (and then Council Member Russ Stark) which was intended to offer public input and guidance for the city’s Public Works and Planning departments.

[Thoman at the Grand Avenue parking meter meeting.]

If you don’t know her, Barb Thoman is a long-time St. Paul transportation advocate. She started Transit for Livable Communities (TLC) back in 1996 (!),  a literal lifetime ago. Back then, it was literally the 20th century, a stone age for transportation advocacy, the era when building freeways and parking garages was still pitched as climate action, before either city had a bicycle coalition.

Thoman's, TLC (and its successor, Move Minnesota), and her other efforts have improved transit, sidewalks, and bike lanes for so long by now, laying the groundwork for whatever change has happened over the last two decades. On top of that, Thoman is an incredibly kind, even-keeled person, the epitome of thick-skinned practical criticism. I once watched her get boo’d by a room full of rabid St. Paul drivers during a public meeting about parking meters, taking a gamut of criticism for having the gall to invoke climate change. She dealt with it all a cool, calm way, though I'm sure she was deeply upset.

[Link to source documents.]

My point is that she's not an angry person, but on this occasion, in the City Hall Annex, I was astonished to see Barb yelling full-throated at St Paul engineer John Mazko (and calling him “John”, no less). Furious, she accused him of lying directly to her face, saying something like “this bridge is going to last for 50 years, and now it’s locked in.”

(Maczko, a genial-but-old-school, i.e. condescending, transportation engineer, looked like he’d been run over by a truck. Deservedly so, it turned out.)

The issue was this: St. Paul Public Works had funded, designed, and bidded out a new bridge for Hamline Avenue (over Ayd Mill Road) without bringing it to the Transportation Committee as had been promised. Instead, the bridge was built as a four-lane road without bike lanes. The city moved ahead without considering whether or not a three-lane “road diet” might have worked better for the city and its communities. 

[See the letter at right from 2012/2013 transportation advocates, explaining the issue in great detail.] 

Instead, as multiple neighborhood groups pointed out at the time, the city designed the bridge and its road for the benefit of drivers, keeping a dangerous design in place despite low traffic counts and policies calling for safer road designs.

Well, Barb Thoman was right. St. Paul's 2013 mistake is coming back to haunt.

What Goes Around

Thirteen years later, you can read about the recent spat in the Pioneer Press, where the city repaved Hamline Avenue without doing anything to make the street less dangerous. Here’s the relevant situation, along with the surprisingly on-point pushback from the adjacent District Councils:

The Hamline Midway Coalition and Union Park District Council have sent a joint letter to St. Paul Public Works requesting a “4-to-3” lane conversion on Hamline Avenue between Selby and University avenues. The proposal calls for reducing the roadway from four travel lanes to two, adding a center turn lane and installing bike lanes. Supporters say the time is now because the street is already scheduled for repaving, which means new striping will be needed either way.

The groups cite a history of crashes, speeding concerns, pedestrian crossings near Concordia University and the lack of a direct north-south bike route as reasons for the change.

A full reconstruction of Hamline Avenue is expected around 2035 to 2039. The groups argue their proposal will improve safety until then.

However, city officials described the proposal as “not possible or practical.”

In a letter responding to the neighborhood groups, Public Works Director Deb Barber said the city would have to conduct a broader public engagement process and studies on traffic, business and public safety impacts.

Not much has changed in the last 13 years, other than that Hamline Avenue has been repaved more than once, and the thinking on road diets has vastly improved. The street remains an ideal candidate for a four-to-three conversion, with 15,000 cars a day. Furthermore, Ayd Mill Road is now smaller and traffic has been reduced. Also, the Green Line is up and running. 

Meanwhile, countless people have been impacted by a street that’s difficult and dangerous to cross. According to the (inadequate) city crash data, there are three or four bike and pedestrian crashes on this stretch of Hamline Avenue every year; I would guess that at least 50 people have thad their lives transformed for the worse since the road diet was first squashed by city staff.

The other significant disappointment from this recent repaving  decision is that it signals a walking back of St. Paul's commitment and leadership on four-to-three conversions. Also called “road diets,” these are by now a fairly straight forward safety improvement. I have some thoughts...

[The deadly four-lane design of Hamline Avenue in 2013, when it was repaved by Mayor Coleman.] 

Four-Lane Death Roads and Road Diet Conversions

Ten years ago, busy streets were thought to be impossible for a "four-to-three conversion", aka "road diet." In the Twin Cities, that changed thanks a specific tragedy on St Paul’s Maryland Avenue. It took courageous leadership from Ramsey County elected officials and Public Works staff, but it also took a terrible tragedy. I had thought we'd moved beyond blindly accepting these deadly streets.  

[worst offender "death road" streets as of 2016.]

Here’s the longer explainer: Hamline Avenue through its central section — from University Avenue south to Summit — is what I call a four-lane death road, a term I coined an antiquated, obsolete, wildly dangerous, 20th century road design that out to by now be synonymous with engineering malpractice. 

I have written about this so many times at this point, I need only cite myself:

When a decision maker says “we can’t do that because of traffic,” to me they are really saying that they value traffic volumes over safety. To me this is morally indefensible, and is not a choice we should be making as a society.

In the 20th century, four-lane death roads were common practice for engineers, who looked at busy urban arterial streets and only saw congestion. Back then, the focus was on car "stacking" and intersection efficiency (also called LOS). The result were streets that were crash magnets.

[Traffic Counts.]

Sadly, someone usually has to die before change happens. In this case, the reform movement around four-lane death roads came to a head in 2016 after a woman named Elizabeth Dunham was killed by a driver on a four-lane undivided stretch of Maryland Avenue. The details of the story are sickening: a kid saw his mother get killed by a driver out of the window of his school bus. 

As I wrote then, streets did not have to be this dangerous:

The other option is to “go smaller” with a 4-3 conversion, trading out two through-lanes for a center turn-lane. I’ve written about this many times before. (And then a few more times.) You’re trading speeds and complexity for a simpler-but-slower urban environment. This change also gets left-turning cars out of the way, to create continuous through lanes with more constant speeds. Many studies show that this kind of design improves safety for car drivers, and especially for people on foot. (Sometimes, this change can have minimal effect on overall automobile through-put.) More importantly, a road diet prevents exactly the kinds of situations that killed Dunham.

Crashes on four-lane death roads are as predictable as a thunderstorm, a straightforward outcome. Left-training cars stop, forcing / encouraging high-speed weaving between the lanes. Drivers stopping for pedestrians create the conditions for a fatal crash, which is exactly what happened to Elizabeth and many others. These risks and dangers happen constantly, every day; the only countervailing benefit is less "stacking" of traffic during rush hours, but that's a terrible tradeoff. In the meantime, these streets sit in our cities causing havoc, especially anytime pedestrians are present.

To me, it's engineering malpractice, and only the intentional obfuscation of design manuals keeps cities from being financially liable. These kinds of roads should be removed from service as quickly as is feasible.

Thankfully, the conversation around this has shifted a lot in my time advocating for street safety. Both Minneapolis and St. Paul have examples of what this looks like: The St. Paul case, Maryland Avenue, was a pioneering street design reform led by the Ramsey County Public Works, which, at the time, took a risk because the traffic counts (called ADT) were so high. 

Following that lead, other local Public Works’ engineers have followed suit: NE Broadway was converted around 2018 by the City of Minneapolis. Lyndale Avenue was converted by Hennepin County about four years ago. North Dale Street was converted by Ramsey County last year. There are many other examples.

In each case, streets became more congested during rush hours, but much safer at all hours of the day and night. These are all clear wins for public health, public salty, justice, and equity, especially for their local communities.

Compared to those higher-volume streets, Hamline Avenue is a no-brainer. Its dangerous design should be treated in the same way as these other clear policy wins, and more so given the history of crashes and advocacy. 

But it’s really hard to shift engineering practices and the automotive myopia of some decision makers.

"Just Pave It"

Incoming mayors tend to adopt a “just pave it” attitude, looking for quick solutions to problems where they can put their imprimatur on the city. This is the kind of thing that, for example, Zohran Mamdani has been doing in New York City. In his first few weeks in office he was out there personally shoveling asphalt onto a long-standing problematic bike lane bridge entrance.

St. Paul is trying to copy Mayor Mamdani, only they're doing it wrong. Mamdani has been choosing projects that advance equity and justice in New York City: A dedicated bus lane. A bike lane fix. Removing unnecessary roads through parks.  

Instead, Mayor Her’s administration here is literally repaving the status quo, using a short-term fix to paper over what should be a long-term solution. 

In her defense, this is a common mistake. It repeats the short-sighted solution that Mayor Chris Coleman once made with some penny-wise repaving back in 2014. He launched a campaign against what he called the “Terrible Twenty,” replacing the surface asphalt -- and just the asphalt -- on the city's most pothole'd arterial streets. 

(Particularly ironic, Mayor Coleman's dramatic asphalt gesture did a "mill and overlay", i.e. surface repaving, on exactly same stretch of Hamline that Mayor Her has just completed.)

There were two problems with Mayor Coleman's “terrible twenty” approach. First, it was a short-term fix to a long-term problem. It looked good for a few years, but the aging streets quickly degraded worse than before. In the meantime, the long-term street reconstruction budget had been drained. 

The second problem was that the mill and overlay projects did not fix any of the pedestrian sidewalk or safety measures, terrible situations that the city has been desperate to resolve. This was a borderline violation of ADA laws, but it was also the wrong thing to do from a social justice, climate action, or equity perspective. 

In fact, Mayor Coleman's blinder'd repaving was so egregious that it prompted a shift in city policy. Now, at least theoretically, any time the city does a repaving project they also go in and, at much added expense, improve the sidewalks with ADA ramps, bump outs, curbs cuts and the like. (This is why some property owners balk at the costs and sue the city.)

Unfortunately, Mayor Her did not follow that policy. Instead, she has brought us back to the worst paving practices from 15 years ago, throwing asphalt on a problem without doing jack squat to fix streets, sidewalks, or improve safety. 

The fresh pavement might look nice, but it does not bode well for the list of voter-approved Comment Cent projects, city-funded reconstructions where there's great opportunity to improve streets . Under the Carter Administration, Hamline Avenue (one of the sales tax projects) was going to be a textbook case of reconstruction and redesign with equity in mind. That would mean a road diet and separated bike lane along its entire length, from the railroad tracks on the north all the way to Highland.

Under the Her Administration, I'm not optimistic. I guess we’ll see. City policies and plans are technically on the books, but in the end, those are just paper.

[Aftermath of the 2012 Hamline Avenue crash that killed Cleo Louise Marie Thiberge.]

In Conclusion: Dangerously Bass Ackwards

To make a long story short, the neighborhood groups are exactly right to be pissed off here. The myopic repaving is a short-term solution to a long-term problem, and leaves in place the dangerous status quo conditions, the uncrossable street next to a populated university, the needless traffic sewer that will predictably lead to violent crashes. It will inevitably lead to someone being hurt or killed by drivers who are incentivized, by design, to drive dangerously.   

In the meantime, the city is in the midst of a death spike. Just the recent examples: Barbara Mork-Woodford was killed crossing Hamline Avenue two weeks ago, and Ricki Larson was killed riding a bicycle on Highland Parkway this week. They join the six (and counting) deaths of pedestrians and cyclists on St. Paul streets this year, an alarming increase.

Smooth pavement looks nice but papers over serious problems. I know we can do better in St. Paul, because not too long ago we were! It sure seems like that progress in St. Paul these days has to happen the hard way. 

Mayor Her’s Public Works department is off to a bad start, and I predict more people will get hurt.

Links of previous articles on this topic:

• https://streets.mn/2014/10/28/four-lane-death-roads-should-be-illegal/
• https://streets.mn/2018/05/29/the-death-of-4-lane-death-roads/
• https://streets.mn/2019/01/29/get-to-know-a-four-lane-death-road-broadway-street-ne-minneapolis/
• https://streets.mn/2018/09/13/time-to-kill-the-northeast-minneapolis-death-roads/
• https://streets.mn/2017/05/19/so-much-depends-on-the-next-six-weeks-on-maryland-avenue/
• https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2019/10/risky-hennepin-and-ramsey-county-streets-are-increasingly-being-put-on-road-diets/
• https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2025/10/bike-lane-rants-are-fig-leaves-covering-up-serious-traffic-safety-concerns/
• https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2025/09/new-lyndale-avenue-reconstruction-plan-fails-the-test-for-non-motorized-users/
• https://tcsidewalks.blogspot.com/2016/01/death-road-death-watch.html
• https://tcsidewalks.blogspot.com/2017/05/pioneer-press-misses-point-arterial.html
• https://tcsidewalks.blogspot.com/2021/02/another-predictable-tragedy-on-east-7th.html
• https://tcsidewalks.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-road-diet-cut-off.html

Metaphor #10: Robot Car / Cigarette Filters

I'm just finishing up Peter Norton's excellent book, Autonorama, and came across this lovely metaphor: 

The worst news about AVs (automated vehicles) is not that they can't deliver on their promises. In two ways, AVs are not just disappointments by their own standards but actual threats. First, to the extent that they are indeed developed and deployed -- that is, to some fraction of the extent that promoters promise -- AVs are likely to worsen the very aspects of passenger transportation they are supposed to improve. Second, AVs are an attractive but expensive distraction from things we can do today at far less cost that yield affordable, sustainable, equitable, healthful, and efficient mobility. Much as elaborate but ineffectual cigarette filters were an attempt to perpetuate cigaret smoking when it was clear that smoking itself was the problem, AVs are, more than anything else, an attempt to perpetuate car dependency when car dependency itself is the problem. 

[See also my Cars are the new Tobacco post, or my post on why robot cars will fail.]

Shabazz Stuart on Safety, Enforcement, and Justice in Cities

The excellent War on Cars podcast had a discussion in their last episode that touches on the issue of enforcement and traffic safety, something I've been pondering lately. The crew talks to Shabazz Stuart about streets and policing in New York City.

Stuart's comments helped clarify this difficult issue for me, and got to the heart of the key questions around enforcement and representation.

Here's a rough transcript, from about 15:00 into the episode.

Question from Doug Gordon:  Particularly since VZ initiatives start popping up, advocates for VZ have often talked about enforcement to make streets safer. And there's been a lot of pushback on that, saying "hey calling for more enforcement to make streets safer does not necessarily make streets safer for black and brown people. and the bike advocacy movement does tend to be a white and male movement. There's been some writing saying you can't actually have a movement for safe streets until you deal with racism. 

Shabazz Stuart: There's a lot to unpack in this conversation. I think it's a conversation that's long overdue in our community. Look, we cannot be afraid of the term enforcement, and I'm afraid we're heading in this direction where all enforcement is bad. 

Enforcement is a necessary mechanism in an ecosystem of a society that functions with law. If you have laws, your laws need to be supported by enforcement at some point, otherwise why bother having laws? We risk being naive if we think we can have a fully functional legal system without some form of enforcement. So when we talk again about abolishing police departments, we are talking about completely rebuilding what our enforcement mechanisms look like. And the question is not to abolish the notion of enforcement, the question is to fix the notion of enforcement. 

... Right now, I don't know if we can narrow down [the larger conversation about police] to traffic enforcement. In the short term, we can be mindful as advocates that enforcement as it is today is inherently problematic. We have to be mindful that simply saying "we need more enforcement" is not going to be a silver bullet or panacea that solves our problems. We have to account for the problematic nature of enforcement on our streets in our policies. We have to say, if we enforce bike lanes, why are black and brown people more likely to get stopped for running a red light? 

It doesn't mean that we say "no more enforcement." So we include black and brown voices in our conversation, in a manner that is humanizing and acknowledging of their diverse experiences, than we can expect to resolve some of these challenges by virtue of having these people, this constituency, at the table with us as we discuss these issues.  

Listen to the whole conversation for more.

Dr. Nichole Morris on Enforcement and Policing

[The one time I got a ticket for running a red light.]

If you have time and interest, check out my article in Minnpost today on policing and traffic safety. It's a very difficult and important issue, and I tried to cover some of the different perspectives that are out there about how and why to rethink how police are used in our transportation system.

There are a lot of sources for folks interested in diving into the topic, including The Untokening and Our Streets Minneapolis.  There's a good article on this topic in Vice that covers the Stanford Policing Project, a thorough effort aimed at reducing traffic stops. And I would absolutely recommend diving into the academic literature on automatic enforcement cameras (rather than the huge amount of online nonsense out there).

That said, one of the people I interviewed is Dr. Nichole Morris, who has been studying enforcement and traffic safety on the ground in the Twin Cities for years and is, in my experience, an exceedingly careful thinker when it comes to traffic safety.

Here's her full statement on the role of policing; I could not fit it all in the article: 

While this has been a very painful time, I'm thankful for the push to take some time to reflect on my notions about traffic safety and what role enforcement should play. I've long believed that fear of ticket is a motivator for drivers to comply with speed limits or other roadway laws. And while that still may be true for some drivers, if we look to the literature, there is little or, at best, mixed evidence that speeding citations result in significant long-term reductions in speeding or additional citations. This is doesn't support the case for big investments in in-person enforcement of speeding.  

I have been studying automated speed enforcement (ASE) for many years and I still believe it is an effective alternative to in-person enforcement. We have found a number of barriers regarding its implementation in Minnesota, but historically a majority of the public supports its use in limited forms. It is commonly stated that ASE or red light cameras are unconstitutional in Minnesota, but Frank Douma, a legal expert from the Humphrey School, will tell you that simply isn't true. It is not unconstitutional but was struck down because the city of Minneapolis did not have the legal authority to implement it. The state legislature does need to allow it and has declined to do so to-date. I am curious about how public perception holds today, if support has grown or diminished. There are still risks to automated enforcement regarding decision making on where to place cameras and how to implement a fee structure. Each decision could result in disproportional impacts or harm on minority populations if not done thoughtfully. Additional benefits of ASE are for reducing the likelihood of "speed discounting" so that white drivers aren't more likely to get away with a warning compared to BIPOC and most importantly, there is little risk of escalation or violence. It also doesn't function as a pretext for other crime enforcement which is doesn't do anything to make our roads safer but I believe simply delegitimizes our traffic laws.  

Ultimately, enforcement in any form treats the symptoms and not the causes of risky driving. There are multiple contributors, but one that we should first look at and treat is the design of our roads. We have overbuilt our roadways to allow drivers to feel too comfortable and drive fast. Near the end of our pedestrian study in St. Paul, compliance was quite high at our study sites, but those drivers who were still not yielding for us were almost always driving too fast. Speed is an undeniable component of the crisis we have with pedestrian safety. High speeds met with wide roadways make it less likely that drivers see a pedestrian waiting to cross and stop for them. We should not be expecting pedestrians to walk halfway into the roadway to be seen. We should add more bump-outs to put them safely closer into the driver's line on sight. The resulting narrowing will also slow drivers down. This type of work is already underway by cities, counties, and the state, but it will take serious reprioritization of funding to expedite to the level that our communities need. 

Two other culprits I see fueling the causes of risky driving are phone and vehicle manufacturers. There is little doubt in my mind that Google and Apple could make it far more difficult for drivers to use their phones while driving (pressing a button to say you aren't driving just isn't cutting it), they just have little desire to do it. We can't enforce our way out of phone-related distracted driving. It's too pervasive and too hard to detect. We need forcing functions and our government needs to start demanding it of these companies. There is also little doubt in my mind that vehicle manufacturers could make it harder to speed. Systems like GMs Supercruise can only operate where they have mapped the roadways, meaning they KNOW the speed limit, yet they allow drivers to exceed that limit with hands-off, feet-off comfort. It's insane that we allow the manufacturers to be accessories to drivers behaving recklessly on our highways. They don't have any desire to sell a vehicle that prevents you from speeding because who would buy it when other alternatives that let you speed to your heart's desire sit next to it on the car lot. Again, our government needs to demand it as the EU has been pursuing. This isn't some advanced form of level 5 automation that is years (or decades) down the road. It exists today. 

Lastly, in addressing high visibility enforcement for the crosswalk law,  I don’t have enough information yet speak to its efficacy within the STOP for Me program. We had great results for increasing driver compliance in our last study, but we observed smaller improvements with earlier treatment phases that included enforcement and education/outreach, and a bigger increase in stopping compliance was seen after we introduced low-cost engineering treatments (along with continued enforcement and education/outreach). However, we do not yet know whether the improved compliance was mostly from engineering, or if it was additive with the multi-pronged approach, or if time/duration of enforcement was a factor. We hope to have a clearer answer to that with future research. But, I'm not sure judging purely based on stopping compliance is good enough. I think we need to question and examine Stop for Me as holistically as possible to ensure that we aren't simply trading off one risk for another. It may be time to consider how the Stop for Me program can transition to something that meets the needs of the entire community and increases public safety.   

[List of names, disproportionately POCI, from the cover of the Vision Zero plan.] 

My personal take on this is evolving. I've long been focused on the how cars and our automobile-drenched cities have been a tool for injustice and harm, and tend to be somewhat myopic when it comes to the role of cars in cities. Yet structural racism in policing is an older, more deeply rooted problem, and thinking through how to address it in the 21st century is our fundamental challenge.

But the relationship between automobile violence and police violence is not straightforward. This fascinating book on how African-Americans relied on cars in the mid-20th century is worth your time (or this podcast interview here). Punitive traffic fines - like the ones that still plague Ferguson, Missouri - lead people into an unjust court system. For folks who lack stable housing, cars can be their only refuge.

At the same time, vehicle violence is increasing, and people of color are the most vulnerable to being killed or injured by reckless drivers. As we have seen, cars or trucks are increasingly used as weapons against people, demonstrators or not. People of color disproportionately live in places with bad air quality because of fossil fueled cars. And highways and county arterials have been designed for generations to privilege suburban and wealthy drivers over people living in urban neighborhoods. Even robot cars are racist.

And on and on...

This problem is not an easy thing to solve, which might be a reason why Alex Vitale's otherwise comprehensive book, The End of Policing, does not really mention traffic safety. I wish there were easy answers besides "redesign all our streets," which is not an easy answer at all.

I continue to believe we need some enforcement of speeding and parking rules in cities, which is why I believe we need automatic enforcement cameras to replace cops. Automatic enforcement is technologically simple, effective at solving the problem of dangerous driving, is vastly better than relying on police. We must try to craft a system that does not overly punish black, brown, or indigenous people, but holds every driver to the same standard.

I'd love to learn more about how to do this, and whether it's even possible.