Minnesota, and more broadly, the U.S., has a fundamental issue with designing safe streets and setting reasonable speed limits. These issues stem from the design of the roadway itself, which relies on an outdated car-first logic that favors wider roads and speed-friendly design. These roadways are a staple of North American cities and the Twin Cities, jeopardizing the health and safety of our communities.
Between 2013 and 2022, 3,980 people have been killed in Minnesota by traffic-related fatalities, 27% of which involved speeding. Since the pandemic, traffic-related fatalities have remained high in Minneapolis, with 21 people killed on local Minneapolis streets in 2023 alone. This risk disproportionately affects Black residents, who make up 19% of the population of Minneapolis but 26% of vehicle crash fatalities.
Policies resulting in streets designed to invite speeding and speed limit-setting practices contribute to these deaths. It may seem counterintuitive, but speeding often dictates the speed limit on American roadways.
“A lot of people believe we say, ‘Let’s set the speed limit there and design the road around it.’ We actually do the exact reverse,” said Beth Osborne from Transportation for America in an interview. Setting speed limits utilizes a concept called the 85th percentile rule, a practice that uses existing speeds on a roadway to set speed limits.
What is the 85th percentile rule?
Transportation officials will conduct traffic studies to monitor the speed at which vehicles naturally travel down a roadway to determine the average speed traveled along it. The speed that 85% of drivers are traveling at or below becomes the speed limit. This is consistent with MnDOT’s approach to setting speed limits across the state, with some county and city participation depending on the roadway.
For example, if they study a road where 15 out of 100 cars are driven at 60 miles per hour, the speed limit will be set at 60mph. This includes neighborhoods like Near North Minneapolis, where the posted speed limit for Olson Memorial Highway that divides a neighborhood is 40 mph, but 85% of cars speed over 50mph, justifying higher speed limits by these evaluation metrics. The result: the most dangerous road in Minneapolis.
How it Leads to Higher Speed Limits
Roadway changes often lead to increased speeds, prompting DOTs to raise limits. Modifications like wider lanes, removed medians, or fewer roadside obstacles encourage faster driving. This cycle of design changes and speed increases can become self-reinforcing, resulting in traffic studies justifying further speed limit increases.
For Minnesotans behind the wheel, this intuitively makes sense. If a street is straight with wide lanes without features like a median, protected bikeways, crosswalk art, or other traffic-calming features, the roadway invites drivers to speed. But if a street is designed thoughtfully to include features to make travel safe for all users, including pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users, the mitigation of risks from speeding and other traffic-related fatalities falls significantly.
This is consistent with findings from the U.S. DOT, which states that “roadway design strongly influences how people use roadways.” The responsibility for roadway safety does not rest simply on the driver, a common misconception related to traffic safety. Traffic cameras and speed traps also do not address the underlying design of roadways that continue to put pedestrians at risk in Minnesota and across the country. Traffic engineers, county and municipal public works, and MnDOT ultimately hold the responsibility to design safe spaces for all road users.
What can we do about it?
Roadway design is the number one way to reduce traffic fatalities for drivers, pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users in our communities. By adding safety features to roadway projects, we can protect all kinds of users along roads in Minnesota. We must push public officials to rise to their responsibility and take ownership for designing safe streets.
This comes at a critical moment as cities and MnDOT are currently redesigning long-neglected roadways, including major projects in Minneapolis like Hennepin, Lyndale, and Bryant Avenues and highway projects such as along Olson Memorial Highway (MN 55). However, MnDOT and others have been slow to implement traffic calming and safety measures, endangering all road users.
Traffic calming through street design must be the name of the game to ensure lower speeds, safer streets, and comfortable spaces for all to bike, walk, and roll in our communities. It’s critical to act now as major infrastructure investments are being made in communities across the region, paving the way for safer streets for the coming decades.
Our Streets opposes traffic cameras and continues to advocate for universally designed streets and other proactive safety measures along city, county, and state roads through the Streets for People, Twin Cities Boulevard, and Bring Back 6th campaigns.
Learn more about Bring Back 6th.
Once called the “Beale Street of Minneapolis,” the old Near-Northside was an integrated Black and Jewish community that was destroyed in 1939 for the construction of Olson Memorial Highway, a low-trafficked highway “to nowhere” that has been polluting the neighborhood ever since.