Shopping carts are piling up at one Roseville bus stop. What’s the solution?

More than 20 shopping carts, pushed into three lines, languished earlier this week along Snelling Avenue at the A Line bus rapid transit stop near Roseville’s Har Mar Mall.

Bus-riding shoppers abandon them at the stop — and the neighbors and city officials have noticed.

”When you drive by it every morning and you see this large stack, it just looks like nobody gives a rip about the neighborhood,” said Roseville City Council Member Julie Strahan, who lives near Har Mar, at a recent City Council meeting. “It has an appearance that it’s not well-attended.”

Transit advocates say the cart pileup shows the popularity of taking the bus to the retail area, where riders can shop at Cub, Target and Marshalls. But it also shows how the 1960s-era shopping landscape with massive parking lots caters to cars and drivers instead of buses and riders.

Eric Lind, director of the Accessibility Observatory at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Transportation Studies, said the carts are a symptom of trade-off: Rapid transit is fast and frequent, but makes fewer stops, which means people walk farther to their destinations.

“You have to think about these trade-offs between moving people quickly to lots of destinations, and moving them directly to a destination,” he said.

And if a store is farther from the bus stop, people are less likely to return a shopping cart.

City staff members have been tracking the number of carts at the Har Mar stop since January, counting, on average, more than 10 per day.

The city is working with businesses to retrieve their carts. Dave Englund, the city’s building official, told the council that Cub and Target have been particularly receptive and are picking up carts on a regular basis.

The city has also reached out to Metro Transit to ask about adding a cart corral at the stop. Metro Transit spokesperson Drew Kerr told the Minnesota Star Tribune no such plans are in the works.

Roseville resident Rob Barona said he started noticing the carts during the pandemic and said they sometimes get buried under snow and ice. He worries the carts, along with dangerous jaywalking, panhandling and trash, contribute to an image that the area’s going downhill: “It’s just a junkyard up there.”

Barona said he’s noticed some improvement in removing the carts as the city has worked with retailers, but it remains a problem.

Strahan, who brought the issue to the City Council, pitched several potential solutions. She said some U.S. cities require some retailers to use technology to keep carts in their parking lots, using wheel locks or geofencing. At stores in other cities, she noted, carts are sometimes labeled with reminders that taking them off-premises is stealing.

She said she’s sympathetic to transit riders’ needs, but argues the cart pile is a problem.

“I love that it’s convenient for people who maybe don’t have a car or who use public transportation,” she said. But, she said, she doesn’t think Target owes patrons an off-premise cart.

Other elected officials stressed the importance of access to shopping via the A Line, which travels from south Minneapolis to Rosedale Center, running every 10 minutes for much of the day. A Line ridership, now at roughly 4,000 on the average weekday, has climbed steadily since the pandemic.

“There’s no perfect system here, but the A Line went in to allow people to have access to things like Target or Cub,” Council Member Jason Etten said. “I think we want to make sure we are not creating a problem there.”

Etten said he favored continued work with companies to retrieve carts on a regular schedule.

His comments were echoed by Mayor Dan Roe, who said, “I’m not sure that it’s so widespread of an issue in the city that we need to have an ordinance in the city affecting all businesses in the city.”

Kerr, of Metro Transit, said when the agency finds carts at transit stations, staff typically move them out of the way until businesses retrieve them. In cases of recurring issues, he said Metro Transit can work with businesses or cities to find solutions.

Cub Foods did not return a request for comment. A Target spokesperson declined to comment, but confirmed the store retrieves carts.

Lind, at the Center for Transportation Studies, said he sees the shopping carts as a sign of success for the A Line.

“There’s a lot of people who are meeting their daily needs on transit, including some pretty robust shopping that’s going on,” Lind said. “I think the solution is less in terms of what do we do with the transit station and more how do we make the connecting pedestrian network a little bit more straightforward or a little bit easier for people to navigate?”

Lind noted this is likely to become a more frequent occurrence as Metro Transit expands bus rapid transit and light rail in the suburbs.

“Whenever you’re trying to ride this compromise between straight, fast, frequent and bringing people right to the door, you’re going to have these trade-offs,” he said. “It’s a lot harder in areas like this, which are primarily oriented around the ease of auto travel.”