From Minneapolis: Ten Street Design Solutions to Transform Your City

Only 11 cities in the U.S. have earned the title of Gold-Level Bicycle Friendly Community from the League of American Bicyclists. In May, Minneapolis joined the select ranks and, last week, the city got a chance to show off its bike progress to a national audience of active transportation advocates and officials.

When Mayor R.T. Rybak took the stage at the Safe Routes to School National Conference, he made it clear that Minneapolis is gunning for Portland, aiming to be the best biking city in the nation. Not surprisingly, many of the 600 attendees were eager to see the anatomy of a gold-level bicycle friendly city firsthand.

The city’s rise is thanks, in part, to the Non-Motorized Transportation Pilot Project, a program created by the last federal transportation bill that put $25 million in the coffers of four cities to increase bicycling through infrastructure improvements. To showcase the innovations spurred by those dollars, in Minneapolis, Shaun Murphy, the city’s non-motorized transportation coordinator, and Steve Clark, walking and bicycling program manager for Transit for Livable Communities, took Safe Routes participants on a bike tour of some of the completed and in-progress projects.

Drawing largely from Clark’s cheat sheet, here are the “10 Design Solutions that Can Transform your City.”