This summer let’s start treating the parkways like parks

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Recently when I drove down West River Parkway in Minneapolis, a car tailed me, then passed, barreling toward downtown way too fast to notice the flowering trees or see the hawk hunting from a dead limb. The same thing happened last week. And the week before.

Yeah, I’m that guy who drives the speed limit on the parkway — 20 miles per hour. It seems to really infuriate the drivers who want to use the parkway as a commuter highway.

Minneapolis’ 30-odd parkways are called parkways because they’re actually part of a park. They run through park land and are managed by the Park and Recreation Board as public space for you and your family to play, forage, picnic, walk, cycle, skate and scoot.

But in the last few years a lot has changed to make some of the parkways feel more like highways.

The parkway I’m most familiar with — West River Parkway — has essentially become a commuter route for impatient families going to work, school, the airport or downtown, and hurried Amazon drivers making their deliveries. Few drivers heed the 20-mph speed limit. Very few slow to view an eagle passing overhead, and it’s rare that one would stop for a dog-walker in a pedestrian crosswalk.

Minneapolis is famous for its parks and parkways and we should encourage more people to get out and enjoy them. I have four requests for the mayor, city and park board to make the experience more enjoyable and safer. Happily, none of these requires any change in existing, applicable law.

• Enforce the speed limit. Just a little well-positioned, recurring enforcement, with stiff penalties, would change driver behavior. Commuters need to realize they are driving through a park.

• Move anything with a motor and wheels off the bike path and onto the parkway. Under current law all those electrified bikes and other toys are “motor vehicles” because they aren’t “moved solely by human power.” That means they don’t belong on the bike path. Let’s require all the e-rollers to use the road, which will help to temper the speed of the cars and make the parkway feel like it is, in fact, part of a park.

• Street bikers who want to ride over 10 mph should be welcomed on the road. Many bikers who are out for exercise already ride on the parkways, but it’s not always a welcoming ride, with frustrated drivers often honking or passing too close. It should become the norm, not the exception, to follow a biker if you’re driving on a parkway.

• Ask Google Maps and other driving apps to remove parkways from preferred routes. I don’t pretend to know how the mapping apps figure out a preferred route. But it seems they often disburse traffic from designed arteries to less-trafficked places, like parkways. (Are times calculated by speed limit or traffic flow?) We want our parkways to be a destination, not the fastest way to get to some other place. Announcing that to Google Maps might be a City Council resolution that the whole city could get behind.