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| [Aftermath of a recent car crash on four-lane segment of Hamline Avenue.] |
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| [Thoman at the Grand Avenue parking meter meeting.] |
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| [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...
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| [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.
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| [worst offender "death road" streets as of 2016.] |
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.
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| [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.
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| [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
