As St. Paul’s transportation system evolves, the safety of the walking public will get top priority. After that come the needs of cyclists and those using public transit. Only then come drivers.

That’s a key policy recommendation in the first-ever St. Paul Pedestrian Plan.

It calls for filling in 330 miles of “missing” sidewalks throughout the city, as well as adding crosswalks.

The plan, still in draft form, prioritizes areas where residents walk the most, own the fewest vehicles and need access to schools, public transit or other major destinations.

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Putting pedestrians first isn’t just rhetoric in the 91-page draft.

It encourages residents to phone in complaints about snow and ice on sidewalks, and even calls for empowering city inspectors to seek out icy patches themselves.

The draft’s call for safer streets for pedestrians is certainly timely. In past weeks, several pedestrians were killed or injured in a series of east-metro crashes.

With an emphasis on adding crosswalks, medians, signage and enforcement exercises such as the “Stop for Me” campaign, the plan aims to get drivers to be more aware of pedestrians and slow down.

“One of the most fundamental things we can do is address speeds, and the distances or number of lanes that people have to travel across when they’re trying to cross the street,” said Fay Simer, the city’s pedestrian safety advocate, in a 20-minute YouTube presentation. “St. Paul is a walking city.”

Pushback is already palpable.

Business owners along city and county thoroughfares such as Cleveland Avenue or Rice Street have long questioned efforts that might restrict parking, add bike lanes or allow greater loitering.

Off Mount Curve Boulevard, homeowners along Woodlawn, Stonebridge and Stanford streets successfully circulated a petition in December blocking a city road reconstruction project that would have added sidewalks where none exist.

The draft pedestrian plan makes no such exceptions.

“Are there places in the city where we shouldn’t be encouraging people to walk? And the answer is yes. Those are our interstates,” said Simer, in an interview Monday. “Other than that, we are a dense urban area. … We think that all of St. Paul should be a safe and appealing place for walking.”

Overall, according to the pedestrian plan, the city is home to 1,080 miles of sidewalk, but without a single dedicated funding source for sidewalk construction, only six to eight miles are replaced annually.

St. Paul has 330 miles of sidewalk “gaps,” which is defined in the plan as a street without a sidewalk on one or both sides. Of those missing sidewalks, 62 miles are on busy “collector” or arterial streets such as Dale Street or University Avenue.

The St. Paul Planning Commission will hold a public hearing on the draft pedestrian plan at 8:30 a.m. Feb. 8, and public comment will close at the end of that workday.

By mid-2019, the plan will be added to the city’s Comprehensive Plan, or master planning document, which will be voted upon by the St. Paul City Council and forwarded to the Metropolitan Council, the metro’s regional planning agency.

JANUARY OFF TO A DEADLY START

For some, the emphasis on pedestrian safety was made all the more poignant this month after a number of fatal and serious-injury vehicle-to-pedestrian crashes throughout the east metro.

The collisions drove home the point that pedestrians are over-represented when it comes to crash fatalities. Drivers are more likely to survive such encounters with minimal injury.

“When a pedestrian is involved in a crash, it’s much more likely to be a serious or fatal crash,” Simer said. “Obviously, a person in a car has a metal box around them to keep them safe.”

On Jan. 4, friends Hanan Farah, 22, and Zahra Mohamed, 19, were struck by a driver while crossing McKnight Road near Burns Avenue in St. Paul. Mohamed died at the scene, and Farah was gravely injured.

McKnight Road has sidewalks on the Maplewood side but not on the St. Paul side. Burns Avenue also has sidewalks on one side only, and the area is particularly dark.

Also this month, Robert Blake Buxton, 47, and Meridith Nypree Aikens, 45, both of Roseville, were killed after being hit by a car near Rice Street and Larpenteur Avenue, just over border from St. Paul in Roseville.

The Roseville incident, which involved two drivers, happened on the early evening of Jan. 3 in an area also poorly lit.

RT @MnDPS_OTS: January is off to a deadly start on Minnesota roads. There have been eight traffic deaths so far this month, and half of them are pedestrians. Pedestrian safety is a two-way street. Tips for pedestrians & motorists: https://t.co/oEKoqqEYZq pic.twitter.com/1RQ1B7vheN — MN Public Safety (@MnDPS_DPS) January 7, 2019

In Inver Grove Heights on Jan. 5, Haimanot Gebremedhin, 55, was struck and killed in a hit-and-run on 80th Street east of Blaine Avenue. The suspected driver later turned herself in.

A GROWING MOVEMENT

Even without a formal plan in place, St. Paul has been putting greater focus on pedestrian safety improvements over the past several years.

In 2018, the city installed pedestrian medians along Snelling Avenue between Highland Parkway and Randolph Avenue, and added traffic bump-outs and marked crosswalks on Grand Avenue.

A federal “Safe Routes to School” grant allowed the city to fill in “missing” sidewalks around Cretin-Derham Hall, Holy Spirit Catholic and Expo Elementary schools without assessment to property owners. Seven such Safe Routes plans are in various stages of completion throughout the city.

Simer noted there’s no single dedicated funding source for sidewalk replacements and new installations, so homeowners foot the bill to varying degrees, depending upon the amount of state, county or federal assistance a road project obtains.

Nate Hood, a transportation planner with Hennepin County and chair of the Highland District Council’s transportation committee, said he supports the pedestrian plan.

But Hood said he’s skeptical about how much is realistic without greater support from Ramsey County.

“They’re prioritizing certain corridors, and that’s great,” he said. “I think the problem, though, in St. Paul is that a lot of the roads that are really bad, they’re county roads. And while the city is stepping up, I haven’t seen the county make that commitment yet.”

Hood said he’d like to see Rice Street, a county road, reduced to three lanes, which would slow traffic and then maybe draw more pedestrians to the business corridor.

“That’s an economic-development tool,” he said. “It’s kind of an equity issue. A lot of these roads that don’t get the pedestrian improvements are in low-income areas.”

Andy Singer, co-chair of the St. Paul Bicycle Coalition, said there are stretches of busy four-lane roads in St. Paul where a pedestrian or cyclist currently has to travel up to two miles before reaching the next crosswalk.

“Think about Shepard Road,” Singer said. “There’s a crossing on Elway Street, at the northeast entrance to Crosby Farm, and there’s not another crossing until Davern Street. And Shepard Road is a four-lane highway, basically, and you have a ton of senior housing on one side. There’s these major impediments to people being able to get across neighborhoods safely.”

Singer also pointed to multiple half-mile stretches along Snelling Avenue. Even sections of Rice and Dale streets controlled by traffic signals are spaced too far apart, he said.

“To get to the nearest light, maybe it’s two blocks down and two blocks back,” he said. “That’s nearly 15 minutes just to cross the street.”

The pedestrian plan calls for establishing a consistent process for evaluating crossings, and for adding crosswalks to busy arterial streets. It also calls for using low-cost materials to create interim, or temporary, crosswalks and safety measures in areas where they later can be made permanent.

Formal planning for the St. Paul Pedestrian Plan officially began in January 2018 with a 26-member steering committee, including representatives of city offices, city council offices, the Minnesota Department of Transportation, Ramsey County, the St. Paul Transportation Committee and citizen participants.

The committee met eight times and held open houses last spring. They also were informed by an online survey and targeted outreach to underrepresented groups, including a teen advisory council from Skyline Tower, a large housing development near University Avenue. Related Articles US bans WeChat, TikTok from app stores citing security risk

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The plan highlights the importance of volunteer-driven pedestrian and bicyclist counts, which are conducted annually at various intersections. It also calls for streamlining the application process for neighborhood “Paint the Pavement” gatherings, where neighbors are invited to congregate around a particular intersection that is blocked off to traffic for the duration of the event.