By Erik Noonan
If you’ve ever stood at the edge of a busy road in your own town — waiting for a break in traffic that never seems to come — you’ve felt the impact of something called Municipal State Aid roadway standards, even if you’ve never heard the term before.
In Minnesota, many of the busier local roads are designated as Municipal/County State Aid Highways, or MSAS and CSAH routes. Cities and counties receive state funding to build and maintain these roads. In exchange, they have to follow a detailed rulebook created decades ago — Rule 8820 — that dictates things like lane widths, design speeds, and how a road must be built to qualify for state funding. Minnesota expends significant resources to create an unnecessary and often redundant set of barriers that makes safer designs less likely to be implemented. National design guides, from the likes NACTO or AASHTO, already exist and better prioritize safety than Minnesota’s own manual. We’re all for Minnesotan exceptionalism, but there are better ways to be notable.
On paper, that sounds reasonable. The state wants consistency. Taxpayer dollars should come with some guardrails.
But here’s the problem: those guardrails were written for a different era — an era that measured success by how fast and how many cars could move through a place. Not by how safe a child feels walking to school. Not by whether a grandmother can cross the street with a walker. Not by whether a teenager can bike to their friend’s house without fear.
And that disconnect shows up on our streets every day, even the brand new ones.
When Good Intentions Become Barriers
The current MSAS/CSAH standards often require wider lanes and higher design speeds than what makes sense in many communities. Wider lanes encourage faster driving. Faster driving makes crashes more severe. That’s not a political opinion — it’s physics.
Sometimes cities want to narrow lanes to calm traffic. Sometimes they want to remove a travel lane and add a protected bike lane. Sometimes they want to shorten crossing distances near schools or storefronts. Under the current system, doing those common-sense safety improvements can require time-consuming and costly variances or simply be disallowed because the design doesn’t meet state aid minimums.
What that means in plain language: even when a city knows what would make a road safer, the rulebook can tie their hands.
Local Leaders Want Change
Last year at the Capitol, Duluth City Councilmember Mike Mayou and Richfield City Councilmember Sean Hayford-O’Leary testified about these challenges. They spoke not as distant policymakers, but as local officials trying to respond to the lived reality of their communities.
Councilmember Mayou emphasized that cities like Duluth need flexibility to design streets that reflect their local geography, neighborhood character, and safety needs — not a one-size-fits-all template.
Councilmember Hayford-O’Leary made a similar case: cities should be able to use modern, nationally recognized design guides that prioritize safety and context instead of being locked into outdated minimums that prioritize vehicle speed.
When councilmembers from communities as different as Duluth and Richfield show up asking for the same change, it tells you something.
When Standards Become Personal
In Eden Prairie, a driver looking at their phone struck Spogmai Kamawal and her four daughters while they were crossing the street. One of her children was critically injured.
Distracted driving is a choice. There is no excuse for scrolling through messages while operating a vehicle.
But roadway design matters too.
When we build streets that are wide, straight, and forgiving — when they feel like highways — they send drivers a subtle message: you have extra room. You have extra time. You can multitask. The environment creates a false illusion of safety and control.
Safer street designs do the opposite. Narrower lanes, tighter curb radii, shorter crossing distances, raised crosswalks, protected bike lanes, roundabouts — these features communicate that attention is required. They cue drivers to slow down and pay attention. They reduce speeds. They reduce crash severity. They eliminate the false comfort that allows someone to believe they can glance down at a screen and still be fine.
No single design guarantees that a crash won’t happen. But we know this: streets engineered for lower speeds and clearer conflict points dramatically reduce the harm when human mistakes occur.
If safer, context-sensitive designs had been easier to implement, would that crossing in Eden Prairie have looked different? Would speeds have been lower? Would the driver have felt less comfortable taking their eyes off the road?
Those are hard questions. But they’re worth asking.
Think About the Streets Near Your Neighborhood School
In communities across Minnesota, residents have asked for safer streets near schools. Parents notice speeding. Kids notice how long it takes to cross. Crossing guards do their best in wide intersections designed for throughput, not tenderness.
But when those streets are state-aid routes, cities often run into minimum lane widths and design speed expectations that make meaningful safety redesigns difficult without lengthy approvals. Many funding opportunities have deadlines, having to go through variance processes means risking missing these important timelines.
The result? A street that looks and functions like a highway, even though it runs past a playground.
This Isn’t Just About Safety. It’s About Common Sense and Cost.
Under the current system, city and county engineers often spend months justifying why a safer design should be allowed. Variance requests. Reviews. Back-and-forth paperwork. Added costs and inefficiencies.
Senate File 2162 would allow cities and counties to use modern, nationally recognized design guides instead of being locked into outdated state aid minimums. That means:
- Fewer variances required.
- Less administrative back-and-forth.
- More local flexibility.
- Faster project delivery.
- Lower costs through better designs and shorter schedules
It saves staff time. It reduces unnecessary design costs. And it allows cities to focus on building safer streets instead of defending common-sense improvements.
Multiple cities across Minnesota — from Eden Prairie to Rochester to Roseville — have signaled support for modernizing these standards. Communities large and small recognize that the current framework no longer reflects how Minnesotans live and move today.
BikeMN supports Senate File 2162 because it restores local control while aligning Minnesota with current best practices in street design. It doesn’t eliminate standards. It updates them. The bill does not force any community to adopt these safer standards
How to Talk About This With Your Legislator (In Your Own Voice)
You don’t need to memorize rule numbers or statistics. You just need to tell the truth about what you experience.
Start simple:
“Municipal/County State Aid standards are old design rules cities must follow to get state road funding. Many of those rules prioritize speed over safety.”
Make it personal:
“There’s a road near my home where drivers go too fast and I don’t feel safe crossing.”
“My child’s school sits on a state-aid road, and the crossing distance is too long.”
Connect it to distracted driving:
“When roads feel wide and forgiving, they give drivers the false impression that they can look at their phone and still be safe. Design should demand attention, not encourage distraction.”
Appeal to local control and practicality:
“Our cities and counties should be able to use modern design guides that are proven to reduce crashes.”
“Local officials know their communities. They shouldn’t have to fight outdated standards to protect residents.”
Talk about how it saves time and costs:
“We need to make it easier for local experts to meet local needs. Their time spent getting variances costs taxpayers money.”
“My kids will be at a different school by the time this street gets fixed. I know our state can do this better.”
And don’t be afraid to name how it affects your wellbeing:
“I avoid walking to the store because the crossing feels dangerous.”
“I don’t let my kids bike that route.”
Those lived experiences are real. They’re not statistics — they’re daily life.
At the end of the day, this conversation isn’t about abstract engineering policy. It’s about whether our streets invite care and attention, or quietly allow distraction and speed.
Minnesota can do better. Updating outdated roadway standards so communities can design safer, more human streets isn’t radical. It’s practical. It’s neighborly. And it’s long overdue.
Minnesota is a national leader in forward-thinking transportation policy — and that didn’t happen by chance. For over 17 years, BikeMN has been at the table, fight after fight, shaping a future where biking, walking, and rolling is safe, accessible, and valued. That work is funded by members like you. Join as a sustaining supporter today at bikemn.org/join — $5 or $10 a month helps ensure Minnesota stays ahead. We all move forward together.