Roadguy received this e-mail last evening from alert reader Ken of Columbia Heights:

After reading about all of the recent bicyclist fatalities, I discovered today just how bad it can get. My wife and I were bicycling south on Stinson Parkway in NE Minneapolis when we came upon Hennepin County Road 88.  We have always had trouble crossing this stretch of road to get onto the new Minneapolis Bike/Ped path but today was beyond belief.

When the walk light went white, we proceeded to cross the four-lane 120+ foot road  and got halfway across when three large northbound commercial trucks cut us off while turning right, and forced us to stop in our tracks. To make matters worse, as we started to continue across the road an SUV with a not so nice ungentlemanly person stopped just short of hitting me and then started to yell that he had the right-of-way because the “Don’t Walk” sign was flashing.  After I went through he proceeded to cut my wife off as if she wasn’t there.

I’m sure the Minneapolis PD will say they are too understaffed to work these intersections, but what about the Park Police since this is an entry to a new and major bike path. Are these drivers ignorant of the law or just stupid?

Bike injuries are up, too, according to this Strib story posted this morning. You can probably imagine the comment thread without even looking.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Main, Scenes and stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.