Whose Streets? Their Streets!

Sjoquist’s demographic profile bears an uncanny resemblance to Minneapolis’s “Fittest Mayor” (so-called by Men’s Fitness Magazine in 2006), the honorable R. T. Rybak. When I talked to Rybak at city hall this summer, he had just completed a ten-mile morning ride as part of his training regimen for an upcoming triathlon. “I usually do about ten miles every three days,” he says. The mayor owns two bikes—a “perfectly functional” Trek road bike and a “great” Proflex mountain bike. “I bought one at Penn and one at Erik’s,” he says.

Like many politicians, Rybak often speaks in what sound like prefabricated and frequently used public statements. On the economic need for bicycle-oriented amenities in the city, he says, for example, “When you take any of the industries we depend on, the lifestyle and creative economies of advertising, the people who want to work at Target . . . more and more [potential employees] are choosing Minneapolis because we are in the forefront of a lifestyle that’s more than just getting in your car in a vacant parking lot and riding to the next vacant parking lot.”

On bicycles and the environment: “It’s a totally different world now because of the climate crisis, in which people, regardless of ideology, get the fact that we have to make dramatically different choices in the way we move or we will literally not be able to survive. ”

On two-wheeled childhood memories: “When I was a kid, I was lucky enough to grow up in this nice tree-lined neighborhood in southwest Minneapolis, where I could hop on my bike and ride four miles to the Hiawatha Golf Course with golf clubs on my back. What an incredible gift, where a kid can move freely and safely around the city!”

And just when you think you can’t take it anymore, he looks across his desk with his earnest blue eyes and says, “When you’re a mayor, you get to cut ribbons. I’m not somebody who in thirty years is going to get that big of a kick out of having a single building built as much as I would to know that a few years from now a kid can hop on a bike in the middle of the Jordan neighborhood in north Minneapolis and choose whether to take the bike trail to Theodore Wirth or to the river.”

The mayor’s bike man inside city hall is a big, blond country boy named Don Pflaum. A thirty-one-year-old civil engineer in the public works department, Pflaum grew up on a corn-and-soybean farm near Farmington. After graduating with an engineering degree from the U of M, he was hired by the city in 1999 and immediately given the job of staffing the Minneapolis Bicycle Advisory Committee, an influential little group that meets the first Wednesday morning of every month. Several municipal entities—including the mayor’s office, city council, police department, Metro Transit—send representatives to the meetings; also in regular attendance are members of the St. Paul and state BACs, lobbyists such as Sjoquist, neighborhood bike activists, and the occasional distraught (“I got pulled over for riding on the sidewalk”) citizen. Pflaum referees each meeting with a deadpan Napoleon Dynamite-esque demeanor. He is equally adept at detailing the progress of a $7.2 million federal grant, keeping a tiff between committee members from getting out of hand, and explaining the arcane city sidewalk statute to the distraught citizen.

Though Pflaum echoes Rybak on public health and environmental concerns, the BAC’s operating philosophy seems to be "Build it and they will come.” The BAC’s basic objective is “modal shift”— which means getting car people to become bicycle people. The BAC has an aggressive goal of pushing the city’s 2.4 percent commuting figure to 15 percent by 2015. “We’ve learned you can’t take away parking on city streets,” Pflaum says. “Other than that, everybody’s for [bicycles]. Now you see ‘Just off the Cedar Lake bike trail’ in real estate listings.” And whereas bike trails were once under the sole jurisdiction of the park board, the public works department has been the driving force behind new bike amenities since bikin’ mayor Don Fraser drew up the first citywide bicycle plan in 1982 and created the city’s first BAC. Now public works is infested with probike engineers. “And engineers want to build stuff,” Pflaum says.