By Erik Noonan
There’s a pedestrian bridge over I-94 in Minneapolis at Seymour Avenue that most Twin Cities drivers have passed under without registering it exists. Concrete span, chain-link fencing, a ramp or stairs at each end. Unremarkable, unless you need it.
If you need it, it’s everything.
Minnesota has dozens of these bridges, most of them built when the interstate highway system carved through existing neighborhoods in the 1950s and 60s. When a new freeway cut a community in half, a pedestrian bridge was often the concession — a way to preserve connections that a six-lane highway had just made impossible. They were built to the standards of their era: stairs, steep approaches, annoyingly sharp turns, designs that would never pass today’s accessibility requirements.
That was forty to seventy years ago. Many of these bridges haven’t been meaningfully updated since.
There’s currently no financial mechanism to bring them up to ADA standards short of them collapsing. They don’t qualify for typical maintenance funding. MnDOT owns them, MnDOT knows they’re inaccessible, and the money to address that doesn’t exist yet. So they sit. People who can climb the stairs do. People who can’t don’t cross.
I’ve ridden over some of these bridges and been grateful they exist, I’m sure many of us are. A little steep, a little narrow — still better than the alternative, which in many cases is miles of exposure along a highway shoulder or no crossing at all. That’s the view from a bicycle when you’re able-bodied and not in a hurry, and it still registers as meaningful. What it doesn’t capture is what it’s like to navigate one in a wheelchair, with a stroller, with a loaded cargo bike, or with any mobility limitation the designers didn’t account for in 1962.
The bridge at 14th Avenue over Highway 62 in Minneapolis. The Hazelwood Street crossing over the I-94 on-ramp in St. Paul. The span over Highway 61 in Newport. These aren’t amenities. They’re often the only safe crossing for significant distances in either direction. Render them inaccessible and you’ve told a portion of the neighborhood that the other side of the highway isn’t for them. That’s not rhetorical. That’s just what happens.
MnDOT is now trying to understand this bridge system in a systematic way, which it should have done a long time ago — and it’s a credit to their bike/ped team that it’s happening now. The Statewide Pedestrian Bridge Planning Study is developing a framework for a future construction program to bring these crossings up to current standards. As part of that, they’re hosting focus groups around five Twin Cities bridges and they want to hear from people who actually use them — how the bridges fit into regular travel, what design or location changes would matter.
The focus groups are centered on five Twin Cities bridges, but the framework MnDOT develops will shape how these improvements get funded statewide. The people who rely most on these crossings — people without cars, people with disabilities, people in neighborhoods freeway construction cut apart — tend to be least represented when that kind of policy gets written. If you use one of these bridges regularly, sign up here. If you know someone who does, send it their way.
They’ll be looking at the following bridges specifically:
Ped Bridge # 27958 – Minneapolis – PED AT SEYMOUR over I 94
Ped Bridge # 62869 – St. Paul – PED AT HAZELWOOD over I 94 EB ON RAMP
Ped Bridge # 27061 – Minneapolis – PED AT 61ST ST over TH 121
Ped Bridge # 27535 – Minneapolis – PED AT 14TH AVE over TH 62
Ped Bridge # 82028 – Newport – PEDESTRIAN over US 61, HASTING AVE, 7TH
These bridges were built as an afterthought when the highways came through. It’d be a mistake to treat fixing them as one too.