Lyndale Avenue fix was a long time coming

Thom Sandberg's daughter was a few weeks old when he joined the uprising that stopped the widening of several miles of Lyndale Avenue in south Minneapolis in 1994.

Now that she's a teen eligible for her driver's permit next year, a freshly paved Lyndale in front of her house will likely be the first street on which she drives.

Detours start today in preparation for reconstructing 21 blocks of Lyndale along a concept devised back in 1997 by residents, including Sandberg, after they stopped the bulldozers that threatened dozens of trees.

The neighborhood-friendly concept they produced by working with engineers marked the coming of age for traffic calming in Minneapolis. It was unconventional enough that it has taken 11 years to go from concept to construction.

That it's happening at all is a tribute to the persistence of a politician and the doggedness of activists such as Sandberg, who stuck with the process as they got grayer and balder.

Hennepin County Commissioner Gail Dorfman rescued the project from political oblivion. Upon her 1999 election, she started meeting with city officials to try to get the project off the shelf, working through complications posed by the street's dual nature as a county road and major city street, searching for the $10.5 million to build it, battling through sticking points.

She called the 1997 design forward-thinking. "I didn't know it would be this far forward," she quipped to a property owners meeting this spring. County engineers were greeted with applause several times during the meeting by residents facing dirt and noise during months of construction.

For people like Sandberg, that's vindication for countless meetings at which they worked with engineers to adapt their ideas to the realities of matters such as state design standards. Some ideas, like a roundabout at 50th Street that would have taken four houses, were quickly discarded. County design engineer Nick Peterson said of the 1997 design concept: "It laid a foundation, but it had to be very thoroughly analyzed, which is one reason it took so long to deliver." The road itself was badly potholed when the county's proposal to widen it was stymied by a turnout of several hundred residents at Martin Luther King Park in 1994. As a stopgap, the county milled several inches of paving from the road and repaved it. Ironically, the smoother surface increased speeds. "As a policy, I drive 30 miles per hour on Lyndale and people fly by me," Sandberg said.

With more than 19,000 vehicles per day on some sections, the basic design was intended to keep traffic moving, but not too fast. There is one through lane in each direction for the length of the project, from 31st Street to Minnehaha Creek, rather than the four narrow lanes now present at rush hour. Those through lanes are supplemented by left-turn lanes, and a few right-turn lanes, so that traffic on the through lanes keeps moving.

There's a 10-foot-wide tree-planted median slated between 31st and 38th streets where Lyndale is wider, with around-the-clock parking. There will be parking bumpouts south of 38th. Pedestrian lighting will be installed.

The goal, according to Sandberg, was a design that worked well for traffic, but made the street livable for residents who occupy it during the non-rush hour periods.

The segments from 38th to 50th streets will be done this year, while the 31st to 38th and probably the 50th to Minnehaha Parkway segments are slated for next year.

There's some chance the latter could be delayed to 2010 if the scheduled replacement of the Minnehaha Creek bridge in 2010 can't be moved up, according to Peterson. Money hasn't been found yet for the remaining nine blocks between Franklin Avenue and 29th Street. Lyndale will be closed today between 46th and 50th streets for gas line replacement, after scattered lane closures earlier for other utility work. Reconstruction work begins June 16, proceeding north with the blocks reopening as finished. The official detour is France Avenue in an effort to keep from overloading Nicollet Avenue, which is already carrying traffic bypassing closed exits on Interstate Hwy. 35W.

Steve Brandt • 612-673-4438