Regardless of which side “wins,” it only makes a 0.012% difference
Monday night at the VFW in Uptown, a familiar argument played out. Residents gathered to review reconstruction plans for Lyndale Avenue, and the room quickly divided along predictable lines. Business owners raised concerns about extended construction timelines, reduced parking, and a concrete median that would make their already-struggling storefronts harder to reach. On the other side, advocates pushed for road designs that promote alternatives to driving, such as buses, bikes, and foot traffic, arguing that changing infrastructure is how you change behavior. The debate spilled onto social media before the night was over, bringing with it the usual taunts and high-minded proclamations.
It’s worth stepping back and asking what, exactly, is driving all of this anxiety. At its core, the car-versus-bike debate is a proxy for a larger concern: that we are contributing to climate catastrophe and have a moral obligation to stop it. The logic is straightforward, if human activity is warming the planet, then humans must do everything in their power to reverse course. The problem is that, from where Minneapolis sits, there isn’t much we can actually do. Our city’s emissions account for roughly 0.05% of global output annually. That means if every resident stopped driving tomorrow, no cars, no Amazon deliveries, bikes and boots only, it would make essentially no measurable difference to the planet’s trajectory.
The numbers bear this out. According to an Associated Press report from 2018, admittedly a few years old, but the order of magnitude holds, global CO2 emissions run between 37 and 40 billion metric tons per year. Minnesota’s share is approximately 117 million metric tons, or about 0.29% of the total. Minneapolis, as a portion of the state, accounts for roughly 0.05% of that global figure. And transportation makes up only about 24% of the city’s emissions, the majority comes from heating and powering our homes and businesses. Do the math: if we eliminated every car in the city entirely, Minneapolis’s contribution to global CO2 would drop from approximately 0.05% to about 0.038%.
Turn down the heat
But when those choices become a cudgel, when people who need to drive to work or want their business accessible by car are treated as the enemy, it’s worth asking whether the anger is proportionate to the impact. Someone who bikes their kid to school but flies the whole family to Florida every December may well be generating more carbon than a neighbor who drives daily but never boards a plane. We’re all making trade-offs, and most of us are doing the best we can.
The point is this: even if every person in Minneapolis made every right choice, it would not meaningfully alter the planet’s future. The fury that urban planning decisions tend to generate is wildly disproportionate to the actual environmental stakes. Let’s keep making good choices where we can, and let’s stop treating road design like a moral referendum. The city has real problems to solve. We’ll solve them faster if we’re pulling in the same direction.
Currently, only 3% of trips in Minneapolis are by bicycles. By 2030, based on Minneapolis’s own transportation and climate plans, bicycles are projected to deliver about 1–3% of the total of Minneapolis citywide carbon emissions reductions. According to the city and biking advocates, this will result from successfully shifting a portion of car trips to biking within the city’s broader mode shift strategy. This percentage is modest in the aggregate because transportation is only one emissions sector, and biking can replace only a subset of short urban trips. This reality strongly challenges the primary rationale of carbon emissions reduction by making large public investments in more bike lanes. The “collateral damage” from these policies makes driving and parking necessary for the vast majority of Minneapolis residents more difficult and eliminates very limited parking essential for the economic viability of many small businesses which well documented. So, are other rationales for these policies, or is the realpolitik simply we are doing this in Minneapolis because we can.
I clicked post too quickly.
I wanted to add that since these street rebuilds cost millions, why not include purchasing empty lots or underused buildings to create small parking areas on every block or two to help the merchants there? The exclusive bus lanes are justified on streets like Hennepin which have heavy bus service. Given the current depressed condition of Uptown, this would be a great time to create these small parking areas while real estate prices in the area are down and buildings are empty.
I’ve lived in Mpls most of my 81 years. I have not complained much about the twice as high taxes versus in the suburbs because I wanted to support the urban core and felt I was getting my money’s worth in the form of parks, educated kids, sidewalks, boulevard trees, neighborhood businesses and cultural institutions and amenities. I have always been in favor of better transit and biking, even though I’ve mostly been a driver.
The main problem with the current street reconstructions is that there is simply not enough width on most Mpls streets to squeeze cars, parking, biking, walking, scooters, etc. in. When I have biked somewhere I avoid arterial streets like Hennepin and Lyndale. It makes biking much safer to use residential streets like Aldrich, Dupont or Humboldt. So why aren’t they where the bike lanes are created? The street abortions that have been built on Blaisdell and Bryant don’t function well for anyone whether driving, biking, walking or busing. In addition, the bike lanes that have been designated on arterial streets south of Lake Street almost never have anyone using them, but do make driving much more difficult, bottlenecked and stressful.
All this makes one suspect that the advocates and city planners have an unspoken ideology of disdain (or maybe jealousy) for cars and those who drive them. The ballaster sticks at so many intersections and other places where they serve no imaginable purpose, feel like an intentional harassment to insult drivers. I would ask the young bikers and walkers who may have this ideology to please consider us old people who need to drive or be driven in order to get to church, shop for groceries or pick up our meds at Walgreen’s drive through window. (Metro Transit might also consider special evening bus runs to get people to and from evening cultural and sports events. We are now forced to drive and pay exorbitant parking fees when we would use these bus runs.)
My husband and I feel we need to consider moving to the suburbs because we are being driven out of Mpls by these unworkable street designs and the unaffordable property taxes. In the suburbs there is much less available transit for us. Although Hennepin County’s rebuild of 66th Street in Richfield is a great design for all three modes of transportation, and Metro Transit makes the most of it..
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Thanks for perfectly encapsulating why our American society and most of humanity have not made the changes necessary to stop climate change. It’s never really an individual, city, or state problem. Or even country, I guess, if your country is small enough.
But, again, this isn’t just an environmental issue in terms of climate change. It’s also about building the type of neighborhoods we want for today and into the future. I’m one of many who want to be able to get around our city using any mode but a car. I want an excellent network of protected bike paths. I want safe streets for pedestrians, with tree canopy and places to sit. I want transit that is reliable and quick. I want to see more places pedestrianized so people can enjoy themselves without the constant noise and impact of cars. We’ve seen in Paris how removing cars has also significantly reduced air and noise pollution. Minneapolis isn’t Paris, but we can certainly carve out some more car-free areas over time.
By the way, someone who drives 15,000 miles a year is generating about the same level of emissions as about 5-7 round trip flights between Minneapolis and Miami. And I would bet actual money that the people in Minneapolis who drive the most are probably also the most likely to fly. So we can pretend that the person biking who happens to fly is being counterproductive. But the real horror shows are the people who drive everywhere and then still do multiple trips by plane every year.
Hi, Thank you for reading and providing a thoughtful response. You’re right in thinking that we’re all responsible for the direction climate change is heading. However, my argument is meant to stress that our contribution to changing it is miniscule, especially when you consider the toll street design is having on businesses. I, too, want more spaces that aren’t dominated by cars, but we must choose them carefully and we can’t act as though they are going to save the planet.
Another fact to consider was highlighted in a recent Star Tribune article:
“The Twin Cities lands somewhere in the middle — number 156 of 233 — in new rankings from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The analysis, updated this month for the first time in a decade, ranks the least-sprawling city first and the most-sprawling city last.”
Minneapolis may feel like an island, but we’re surrounded by suburban sprawl. Commuters into the city average 24 minutes of driving time each way. There are no indicators that the trend of people moving to suburbs is going to slow anytime soon. A lot of city dwellers must drive because the businesses they work at have located in the suburbs for lower costs. There are many factors to consider when we look at urban design. What fits for other cities, like Paris, may not work here.
Most of your stats check out, but I asked Grok AI and they say Minneapolis’s share of manmade CO2 is more like 0.01%, not 0.05%
Thank you for pointing this out. There were several data sources I looked at to derive this amount, some older, some more recent. To be safe, I went with the most conservative calculation, but I think your figure is probably more accurate.
Well said. These however are zealots. Most are unproductive ideologues living on someone else’s effort.
They are not moved by logic and common sense.
Mpls is dead unless a Spencer Pratt like voice of reason emerges in mpls and mn governance. Barring that, this state will become an economic wasteland. A frozen mississippi…..
As a former Minneapolis resident, the last time I owned a bike was in 8th grade, when I lived in the Camden neighborhood and biked to school and delivered newspapers. I am now 81 years old, drive a plug-in hybrid, and fill my gas tank only for road trips, which are rare. As a community development consultant, I’ve worked in many major cities and smaller towns (from Minneapolis and St. Paul to Moorhead MN and Lebanon PA.) I’m also considered something of a parking expert, having managed the downtown parking system in Kalamazoo MI and led parking expert panels in more than two dozen cities. I’ve advised Uptown and Dinkytown, and downtown St. Paul. I worked in downtown Minneapolis (at Donaldson’s, IDS, and the Star Tribune. I was the night watchman at the General Mills A Mill.Those are my bona fides. From decades of observations and research, I have concluded that urban neighborhoods are vital if they have close proximity to commercial streets with goods and services, and that are safe and clean. When urban districts deteriorate, stores close, public spaces are neglected, and gathering spots empty, people move out, and home values diminish. When downtown office and commercial buildings lose tenants, taxes decrease, and cities place tax burdens more on residential properties. When I worked in Des Moines, a Drake University economist found that downtown Des Moines was paying $19 in tax revenues for every $1 in city services delivered. Quite simply, if a city wants good police a fire protection, good schools and parks, and well-maintained infrastructure, in needs a healthy downtown and healthy neighborhood business districts. Bike lanes and bus lanes are fine, but not at the expense of convenient parking. When I was part of consulting team in Fort Collins, CO, we found that one on-street parking space contributed as much as $300,000 a year in gross sales to the businesses on that block. When I worked in the East Liberty district in Pittsburgh, the city had closed three streets to parking and made one buses only. The result? the number of businesss and gross sales were cut in half. Many years later, the city opened the streets to parking and auto traffic, and East liberty is now one of the hottest markets in Pittsburgh.
The city would do well to evaluate the impact on neighborhood commercial districts before removing parking. Especially in cold weather cities like Minneapolis, residents are not going to abandon cars. EVs and car sharing are smarter ways to reduce emissions, and city planners need to understand the impact of removing parking before undertaking projects like Hennepin and Lyndale.
Thank you for this detailed and highly informative comment, on this excellent piece by Terry White.
The amount of money we are likely to HAVE to spend for do overs, directly related to the excessive amount of bus and bike lanes in Mpls, which have become exclusive and business choking, is so unfortunate. This waste is like throwing massive amount of public dollars in the gutter, the gutters that adjoin many of these ill conceived modes.
We need more to pay attention to this….
“The city would do well to evaluate the impact on neighborhood commercial districts before removing parking.”
I bike a lot for exercise and do some minimal errands/commuting by bike. The reality is most likely that Minneapolis will never see any significant replacement of car trips with bike trips, due mostly to our winters. Walking trips would be much more likely, but would require a not going to happen return to the local shops distribution of yesteryear prior to WW2. In the meantime the road mods are partially responsible for choking small businesses ala the Hennepin Ave. modifications, reducing the tax base and impacting residents with higher costs.