Bikes, bicycling, and road safety.

• The League of American Bicyclists ranks Minnesota 5th out of 50 states in the Bicycle-Friendly State Program. Woo. West Virginia? Totally last.
• Arden Hills wants to make County E between Lexington and Hamline all pretty, and add some bike lanes. Once pretty, they want to re-name it to Lake Johanna Boulevard. (PiPress)
• HAY LOOK! A bridge reconnecting I35W. (Strib)
• Richard Dean Anderson, aka MacGyver, talks about how to make a torch out of a bike it’d have to be made of magnesium. BAD IDEA. (I count this as metro news, because per Wikipedia, MacGyver was born in Minnesota.) (Popular Mechanics)
• Find out how walkable your community is based on WalkScore.com’s standards. Note that their standards may be daft, as they claim I can walk to the Caribou that is 0.84 miles away, but, trust me, not so much since there are no sidewalks. They also claim the U-Haul Store is a ‘clothing and music’ store. Uh….
• They’re still trying to figure out how to finish the Cedar Lake Trail around the new Twins Ballpark, aka Target Field. (here)
• They’re still repairing the MN 43 bridge in Winona.

In the comments of my last post - concerning repairs to the U of Minnesota’s bridge over Washington Avenue - Hugh states that the bridge can be ridden over.

Actually, it can’t. The University has asked that bicyclists dismount and walk over the bridge. Due to many students and other users not doing so, they plan to have the Kampus Kopz write $80 tickets to users caught cycling over the bridge.

The U expect the restrictions to be in place throughout the school year.

In the department of ‘all bad bridges, all the time!’ -

In a move that will create near-certain chaos as the University of Minnesota gathers for fall classes, Hennepin County and U of M officials have closed the exterior sidewalks on the upper deck of the Washington Avenue bridge to traffic.

The upper deck is solely for the use of pedestrians and cyclists, and is a key connector of the East and West Bank campuses at the U.

Pedestrian traffic will be allowed only on a 14-foot-wide portion of the covered inner section of the bridge. New braces will be installed under the sidewalks on the exterior. Given that pedestrians aren’t precisely heavy (even with the rise in adult obesity rates in Minnesota), how bad is the decking?!

Repairs will reportedly cost about $400,000.

They have finally started work on the sidewalk on the MN43 bridge in Winona, hoping for favorable weather to complete the project by October.

Signage still says bikes are legally unwelcome on the bridge. However, enforcement seems lax - when I’ve been in Winona, I did see some cyclists using the roadway. MN43 is a 4-lane bridge with plenty of room for a bicycle and a car to travel efficiently over the rider alongside one another.

Not that I am advocating illegal behavior. I’m just observing.

Riding the wrong way - against traffic - is one of the most hazardous acts for a cyclist. Yet, many inexperienced cyclists do it, chiefly because they believe that being able to see traffic oncoming will allow them to react better.

This is, of course, false. Two objects moving toward each other at any speed will have a more forceful collision than two objects traveling in the same direction. It is also illegal road use in Minnesota.

Which doesn’t explain why when I saw a dude on a bike going the wrong way in the shoulder of Central Avenue shortly after it crosses under US10 in Blaine the cop he rode by had no reaction. That part of Central is a crapshoot at best, but going against traffic there is like waving a neon sign that says I WANT TO DIE K THX.

As they continue to build the I35W bridge - while also doing construction work on MN36 and MN280, completely making my commute near-impossible, and helping me go through my THIRD windshield this year - a Colorado paper has an interesting ‘outside’ perspective on the bridge project. The bridge is being built by a Colorado company, so this coverage is more on the mechanics than on the aftermath of the bridge tragedy.