The Deets

A group of bike commuters in Minneapolis are taking a glass half empty approach to the new crossing of Hiawatha. While the Hiawatha bridge will help bikers avoid 6 lanes of traffic, they’ll now have to deal with 4 lanes of traffic on 28th St withotu traffic signals. More precisely, there is a planned yellow flashing light but nothing to stop car traffic in either direction.

Here is a shot of the area where the bridge comes back to street level and crosses 28th:

Frankly, I don’t see a particularly difficult area to cross. Especially compared to crossings further West in St. Louis Park. However, here’s the take of a fellow bike commuter from MPLSBikeLove.com:

When a popular local cyclist dies at the 28th Street intersection because one car barreled on through the blinking yellow light, while two lanes of 28th Street traffic stopped and waved the cyclist through, we’ll have a big memorial effort, the city will be eager to put up a suitable crossing light, and donations will pour in so that we can have a proper traffic signal. But why should we have to suffer through the tear-jerking TV and newspaper coverage when we could just cut out that dead middleman altogether?

Let’s just have a “Pre-Memorial” campaign in “pre-Memory” of you, me, the promising young grad student from the U, the funny kid who always loved to bike …. Our “Pre-Memorial Fund” can raise the 50 grand that an ideal traffic light would probably cost, and get a system with the two features cited above.

This isn’t to say that I wouldn’t support a below or above grade crossing that would allow me to keep my momentum. But as far as safety goes, the sight lines are pretty long and traffic from the East is coming off a turn so shouldn’t be moving particularly fast.

If I was to predict a bike-car accident on the Midtown Greenway, I’d go with one of the at grade crossings to the East of Minnehaha. The sight lines suck and cross traffic has little warning about the trail. Especially from the South.

The eco-warrior blog on the TimesOnline has posted 10 tips on how to be a winter biker. Good stuff. It looks like the problems I noticed are fairly universal: keeping hands and feet warm.

Other than those two, the biggest challenge I’ve encountered is the lack of light. My commute from Eden Prairie to Minneapolis is almost entirely on a rails to trails trail with little lighting. For some reason, suburbs don’t seem to find the money to invest in lighting the trail with Minneapolis does.

Since I’m on trails rather than the road, my biggest concern is having a head-on collision with another biker or plowing into a dog walker or runner. All could be ugly for all parties involved. I decided to pick up this cateye light to help make myself more visible to oncoming trail traffic and cast some light on the trail:

What I like about this light is that it’s easy to install, runs on four AA batteries, so it’s easy to keep charged (I use rechargeables), and it’s pretty darn bright.

I’ve mounted it on my fork just above my breaks to keep it from sliding down. This worked out well because I already have a handlebar bag crowding out room on my handlebars. The only challenge with the fork mounted position is getting the light to point down or straight rather than up due to the angle of the fork. The mount can be adjusted with a screwdriver to correct for this, so you shouldn’t have any problems unless you have a particularly curvy fork.