Minnesota's future: Car-free utopia will collide with reality

Opinion editor's note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. (To contribute, click here.) This article is a response to Star Tribune Opinion's June 4 call for submissions on the question: "Where does Minnesota go from here?" Read the full collection of responses here.

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In 1843, Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May of "Little Women" fame, set up a communal farm in Massachusetts that he hoped would become a modern day utopia. He called it "Fruitlands" and many of his transcendentalist friends gave it a try. Things didn't go well.

"None of us were prepared to actualize practically the ideal life of which we dreamed," he wrote. "So we fell apart."

Note to the Minneapolis Public Works Department: You might want to read up on 19th-century utopias before jumping headlong into your idealistic Transportation Action Plan (TAP) as described by planner Amy Barnstorff in "New goal: 60% of Mpls. trips car-free" (June 26).

Begin with the idea that everyone shares your abhorrence of cars and looks forward to the "opportunity to hop on" a scooter, bike or bus to get around town.

Nearly 90,000 Minneapolis residents are over 55; another 45,000 will be joining that group over the next decade. I'm one of them and I can tell you, I don't "hop" on anything these days, let alone a bike or a scooter during our half-year of winter.

Let's talk about buses. We recently took one downtown to see the Twins. The bus was clean and safe, only a couple minutes behind schedule. But it ran over city streets. They're not as potholed and impassable as they were a couple of months ago, but they're in such a broken-up state of disrepair that riding a bus over them felt like being a pebble shaken in a tin can.

Barnstorff says we will be "free to type, swipe or scroll" on the bus. Even if we had wanted to do any of those things (we didn't) it would have been nearly impossible.

The Action Plan talks about an "All Ages and Abilities Network" that would get us to "pedestrian friendly commercial areas." Check out Lake and Hennepin, which used to be the heart of Uptown. A couple decades of bad zoning and transportation decisions have devastated its local shops, small restaurants and parking spaces. Also its pedestrians. And its friendliness.

Barnstoff uses the "research shows" trope to assert that people "are hesitant to try something new." Well, yes. I'm betting that real research also would show that more than 90,000 of us are hesitant to try biking, scootering or skateboarding along icy streets, unplowed sidewalks or snow-covered bike lanes you can't see. As architectural critic Paul Goldberger said: "Urbanism works when it creates a journey as desirable as the destination."

The city has hired a marketing agency, Vision Flourish, to change our hearts and minds. It also hopes to enhance the "money spent" by people using transportation other than cars. No flourishing vision is apparent about the money to be spent on broken legs, wrists, pelvises and wrenched backs accrued trying to move about a city that enjoys the challenges of six months of winter.

It's true that we all need to work toward a greener city, a more thoughtful use of resources and a more climate-friendly planet. But this imposition of impractical idealism is both counterproductive and dangerous. As Minnesotans might say, it's "interesting" — by which we mean it's fantasy espoused by people who don't have the common sense God gave geese.

Minneapolis is a great city, but a northern one. Suggestions for car-free future promoters: Get out and talk with a wider variety of people. Get out in bad weather. Take your parents and grandparents along. As a chastised Bronson Alcott put it: "To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of the ignorant."

Doug Wilhide is a writer in Minneapolis.