Speeding motorists turn Minneapolis avenues into urban speedway

A street racer in the wee hours along the 3300 block of Park Avenue in south Minneapolis last month veered off course and plowed through three front yards before flipping and coming to rest near the porch of Mark Schoening’s meticulously restored Victorian home.

“It was a sound unlike anything I’ve ever heard; it was like a massive bomb,” Schoening later recalled. His porch was left in ruins and front yard littered with car parts and coated in gasoline: “Thank God it didn’t ignite.”

For residents of the city’s Central neighborhood, street racing, crashes and speeding have turned Park and Portland avenues into urban freeways, casting an air of anxiety over the neighborhood. Many say they avoid walking on sidewalks, crossing the street and parking in front of their homes for fear of out-of-control motorists.

Both one-way streets feature two lanes and an unprotected bike lane between Lake and 46th streets that often becomes a de facto third lane for speedsters despite a posted speed limit of 30 mph.

“It’s just constant,” said Jeff White, who has lived on the 3300 block of Park Avenue for 17 years. “It’s insane.”

Both streets are under the purview of Hennepin County, which plans a $38 million roadway improvement project between Interstate 94 and 46th Street beginning next year. The idea is to make biking, walking and crossing both streets safer, and to deploy “design elements to calm vehicle travel speeds.”

It’s unclear at this point what those elements might entail.

Hennepin County Commissioner Angela Conley not only represents the Central neighborhood, she lives on Oakland Avenue, which is sandwiched between Portland and Park avenues. She’s grown accustomed to “the squeal of tires and the sickening thud of metal” signaling yet another crash.

According to the Minnesota Department of Public Safety (DPS), there were 65 crashes from Lake Street to 46th Street along Portland and Park in 2022, the most recent data available. Comparable data from recent prior years isn’t available, and 2023 statistics haven’t been released yet.

“It’s extraordinarily dangerous,” Conley said. “I can’t wrap my head around why we still have roads like this in residential communities.”

Once a grand boulevard stretching south from downtown Minneapolis, Park Avenue was converted from a two-way street to a one-way mini-freeway in the late 1940s to accommodate suburban commuters before Interstate 35W opened a decade later. The evolution of Portland Avenue’s design is less clear.

Arrow-straight, multi-lane, one-way streets where drivers don’t have to fret about head-on crashes tend to encourage “risk-taking behavior,” said Nichole Morris, a research associate professor in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Morris, who isn’t associated with the county’s redevelopment project, said there are a number of design elements that can be deployed to slow traffic on busy thoroughfares.

One is converting a street to two-way traffic, which is the case on Portland and Park avenues south of 46th Street. Another involves median strips and pedestrian islands, which “can be calming and create a feeling of community in the area.”

Morris said “chicanes” — gentle curves in the roadway to slow traffic — can help, as well. This was deployed along Snelling Avenue in St. Paul near Highland Park. “It forces you to slow down because people must navigate a more complex roadway,” she said.

For its part, Minneapolis is making improvements to city streets near Portland and Park avenues to bolster safety, spokesperson Allen Henry said. That includes safety measures at 34th Street to provide better connections to Green Central Elementary School, plus a planned reconstruction of 35th and 36th streets will begin next year.

The city has found that narrowing streets using protected bike lanes and medians can encourage people to drive at safer speeds, Henry said. This has been done on Plymouth Avenue N., Emerson and Fremont avenues N., and 2nd Street in the Mill District.

“These are tough decisions,” she said, but “they can be very impactful.”

In Conley’s view, redeveloping Portland and Park avenues is also an equity issue. She points to Blaisdell Avenue, a city street on the west side of I-35W that features median strips with perennials and small trees, and a protected bike lane, as a model for her neighborhood.

“Southwest Minneapolis looks a whole lot different demographically than south Minneapolis,” she said. “When you see how different the roads are, it’s telling. You can visually see that the things we should have in a denser, browner part of the community, we don’t have. But the investment has been made in wealthier, whiter part of the community.”

Marinan said engineering solutions, such as median strips and protected bike lanes, “are just one tool. Road design can help reduce speeds, but engineering alone is not going to solve these challenges, particularly involving street racing.”

On that note, she added that “education and enforcement is important and drivers are responsible for their behavior. Speeding and erratic driving are controlled by the person behind the wheel.”

Street racing in the neighborhood got worse during the pandemic, said Anna Ashcroft, who lives on Park Avenue near 36th Street, a phenomenon seen throughout the Twin Cities. Living on an urban speedway alters the “normal passages of childhood,” she said, like taking her children out for a walk or teaching them how to ride a bicycle.

“It seems out of reach,” she said. “How do I teach them to be safe?”

Shortly after speaking with the Star Tribune, Ashcroft texted and said there had been yet another accident near her home. The same thing happened after Conley’s interview last month. She sent along video of a chaotic crash scene.

“A constant occurrence,” she wrote.