Whose Streets? Their Streets!

If your bicycle says something about you, then Minneapolis’s bicycle culture says something about Minneapolis. It says something about how much the city values environmentalism and public health. It says something about how the city is led by crazy liberals who also spend time at hearings considering circus animal–cruelty bans. The muffled collision between the Cedar Lake Park Association and the Minnesota Twins after the ballpark bill was passed last year provides an instructive case study.

According to former trail association treasurer Neil Trembley, when the group was in its infancy in the early 1990s, it advocated for Cedar Lake Park and there were no plans for a trail. “[But] the board realized that without trail development,” Trembley says, “it would have looked like ‘another park for Kenwood.’ ” Cut to 2006, when the Twins bill passed the state legislature (without the benefit of any votes by Minneapolis’s delegation of state reps, including Bryn Mawr’s Margaret Andersen Kelliher, a staunch Cedar Lake Trail supporter). The team’s architects had to work with the association regarding the trail. Now in its final phase en route to the river, the trail will run through the stadium site. There were rumors about how difficult it was to work with the association regarding issues such as “beautification.” But the rumors have been squelched and, according to the local design firm overseeing the project, such issues have been accommodated. “We got everything we wanted,” Trembley says, beaming.

There is no doubt as to which project the city cares about most. Lisa Goodman, the powerful Seventh Ward council member who represents most of downtown, is known as a dog person, not a bike person, but she’s still regarded as a close friend of the bicycle community. “We didn’t ask for a Twins stadium,” she says. “But we have been investing time and millions of dollars into the Cedar Lake Trail for more than a decade.”

Associate editor Steve Marsh wrote about wheelchair softball players in our August issue.