Who are we planning transportation for?

Here are a few grumbles about our Minneapolis streets, directed to the "transport planners" deciding how they are used.

You're clearly not one of our older citizens. There are a lot of them and they pay a lot of the taxes. Your "transportation planning" is taking away the parking they require.

You push parking spots off business streets onto the streets in front of their apartments and homes. You use the current lack of handicapped parking along the business street as an excuse. That is easily changed with signage.

Then, when renters and homeowners try to park on business streets because you've forced them off the streets in front of their homes, you call it "personal storage." Again, simple signage would help.

Sorry, I forgot, another part of your grand plan is to assume that "personal transportation vehicles" (cars) aren't needed anymore. A thought on that later.

You are not a family man or woman, either. You seem to think that moms or dads can transport themselves and their children to where they need to be, when they need to be there, on public transit, bikes and their feet. It's obvious you have never tried to get three kids to two different schools, to the doctor, shopping, play dates or grandma's — all in the same day — while on foot, riding a bike or trying to catch a bus that may or may not show up on time and doesn't take you where you need to be but to a connection you'll probably miss.

You're not handicapped, it seems. Tell me how someone in a wheelchair is going to get where they need to be on time, through the snow, with no parking. There are a lot of cool businesses and restaurants on Hennepin Avenue that are easily reached by foot, bike or even motorized chair — in the summer.

And though you say you care for the poor, you are not poor. I'm not sure you've ever talked with a poor Minneapolis resident. No one needs a personal transportation vehicle and parking more than a gig-working, poorly paid family breadwinner. Been there. Done that. No car? No job. If you're a roofer or other laborer, you can't walk, bike or take a bus trip with transfers from your home in the city to a work site in who-knows-which suburb while carrying your tools.

Walk 10 miles? Bike? With tools? I'm thinking you must work from home where your smartphone and computer are the only tools and "transport" you need.

Walking, biking and transit are great, but they will never meet more than a fraction of the transportation needs of a Midwestern city like Minneapolis.

What about climate change, saving the world? What about it? I am on your side. We must get gas guzzlers off the streets. Your mistake is trying to hammer old square urban planning pegs into the round holes of Minneapolis and St. Paul today.

Our greater metropolitan area is not a European city, New York or even Los Angeles. We do not have and never will have nice compact neighborhoods providing the buying, selling, health, education and recreation needs of the people living there. This area will always need individual transportation vehicles that can take us from Lakeville, to Sartell, to Woodbury, to Delano, to Uptown to downtown, to the Capitol — whenever we need to go there. It will always need delivery vans to leave warehouses off Hwy. 280 to stock the shelves in stores on Hennepin Avenue. All these vehicles will always need parking.

If you ram your plans through, people will have no reason to walk, hop on a bike, or study a bus schedule, because there will be no place to go. We'll all be staring at our computers tracking Amazon deliveries.

The good news is that individual transportation vehicles (cars) will in time become fewer. More importantly, they will not be the CO2 spewing cars of today. Nor will the delivery vans.

I drove a couple grandkids down Park Avenue the other day. We stopped at the American Swedish Institute on our way to the Bell Museum off Larpenteur Avenue by the fairgrounds. We were careful to keep off the bike lanes.

From Minnehaha Parkway to Franklin Avenue we saw not one bike. It was a nice Minnesota winter day, about 20 degrees.

If I live long enough to buy another personal transportation vehicle, it will be an electric vehicle (EV), perhaps a shared EV. Right now, they are way out of my price range.