A Road Map to a Transportation System that Works for Everyone
On Tuesday, February 17th, the 2026 Minnesota legislative session officially kicked off after a tense and difficult year in the Twin Cities and across Minnesota.
The session brings lawmakers back to the Capitol for the first time since the assassination of Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, the attempted assassination of Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette and daughter Hope, the mass shooting at Annunciation school in Minneapolis, and the federal crisis brought on Minnesota and our most vulnerable communities by Operation Metro Surge.
First Committee Hearings of the Year
On Wednesday, February 18th, the House and Senate Transportation Committees met for the first time this session.
In the House, co-chair Representative John Koznick (GOP, 47A) held the gavel for the first hearing, which included a high-level presentation on connected and automated vehicles from MnDOT, and a presentation on a legislatively mandated report on high subsidy transit routes by the Metropolitan Council.
The main takeaway from the report is that “opt-out” providers—MVTA, Plymouth MetroLink, SouthWest Transit, and Maple Grove Transit—are costly and create duplicative administrative overhead. As other cities like Chicago have shown, consolidation could improve governance and reduce costs. Further discussion is needed on effectively serving suburban communities with high-quality transit and transit-oriented development.
In the Senate, Chair Scott Dibble (DFL, 61) presented a fiscal overview of the state transportation budget and bipartisan cost participation legislation reducing the local match required for MnDOT-initiated highway projects. The bill caps costs at 0.8%, shielding communities like Brooklyn Center from $20M+ bills for MnDOT-initiated projects like the unwanted expansions of Highway 252. However, it doesn’t address MnDOT initiating projects misaligned with local needs and prioritizing harmful highway expansions.
A split house, an election year, and the bruises of a 2025 session that cut healthcare for undocumented Minnesotans and the disability community, slashed transit funding from the state general fund, and saw efforts to roll back other 2023–2024 wins, does not set the stage for transformative transportation policy in 2026.
Despite this difficult context, Our Streets will be at the Capitol with community members, forward-thinking legislators, partners, and other allies pushing for a transportation system that works for everyone, building on the momentum in 2025 to rethink transportation and setting up potential wins in 2027.
Learn more about our 2025 progress at the legislature here.
A Transportation System that Works for Everyone
Our Streets’ 2026 policy agenda addresses the underlying problems with how we invest in transportation to ‘Fix MnDOT’ and create a transportation system that works for everyone.
This will create a safe, affordable, and accessible multi-modal transportation system built with transparency and democratic accountability, giving all Minnesotans reliable, affordable options to reach jobs, schools, family, healthcare, and daily needs without the high cost of car ownership.
Frontline communities living, working, learning, and playing along highways would enjoy cleaner air and safer streets rather than bear the health and environmental burdens of highways. Vibrant main streets and local businesses would thrive as transportation investments strengthen community tax bases and create union jobs. Cities and communities would benefit from restored developable land, tax base, and neighborhood amenities, and households spend less on transportation—finally making transportation a tool to build thriving communities in cities, suburbs, and small towns across Minnesota.
Policy Priorities To Bring This Vision to Life
Redefining Highway Purpose
Building on near-success last session, a coalition led by Our Streets, the Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota, the Sierra Club North Star Chapter, and Move Minnesota is pushing to clarify the legal definition of ‘highway’. The change builds good governance and flexible funding for highway projects to facilitate a transportation system for all along these routes, including transit, active transportation, and vehicle miles traveled (VMT) reduction projects.
Our constitution and case law support this clarification, and the practical case is compelling: on the F Line BRT project along Central and University Avenues, MnDOT acknowledged that failing to align BRT and highway funding would result in three additional years of construction delays and $18 million in costs.
Community Preferred Alternatives Act
This bill addresses a persistent problem: communities feeling unheard by MnDOT. On projects like Rethinking I-94 and Highway 252, residents—and even local governments—have described engagement processes that feel more like rubber-stamping than co-creation. Brooklyn Center’s Mayor April Graves testified last year about requesting a safety project on Highway 252, only to receive a highway expansion that would take 30 properties by eminent domain and worsen air quality and pollution.
Community engagement and public meetings are the bedrock of democratic participation for residents across the state, giving folks a rare opportunity to shape their communities. When people don’t feel heard by their government, they disengage—not just from transportation planning, but from democracy itself.
Cumulative Impacts of Transportation
Minnesota’s groundbreaking 2023 environmental justice law examined the burden of factories, power plants, and permitted facilities on surrounding communities but left out one of the biggest pollution sources: transportation infrastructure.
Beyond carbon emissions, tire and brake wear contribute to elevated rates of asthma, cancer, and cardiovascular disease in highway-adjacent neighborhoods. As the federal government rolls back environmental and climate protections, our state must build long-term resilience in communities, in particular immigrant, low-income, tribal, and communities of color. Incorporating these impacts into project planning from the start would protect residents and improve MnDOT’s process and project efficiency, reducing costly late-stage modifications.
Fix It First, Fix It Right
This broadly popular policy would commit the state to addressing its existing road maintenance gap before expanding the highway system. It’s tied to a measurable benchmark—the Transportation Asset Management Plan—that Minnesota already tracks under federal requirements. The “Fix It Right” component would require studying transit, active transportation, and even roadway reduction when initiating new projects, also improving benefit-cost analyses to fully capture the transformative benefits of these approaches. Sometimes the smartest move is building a smaller road back where a bigger one was overbuilt, returning land to the tax base and giving neighborhoods back green space, housing, and multi-modal transportation.
Other Policies We Support
Our Streets is pleased to be joining other partners this year in championing legislation to:
- Ensure MnDOT follows existing laws, goals, and policies, creating accountability in the agency from how major projects are developed to how the agency operates internally.
- Create a process for citizen-led traffic safety projects to improve road safety for all users.
- Improve the way we spend Metro Sales Tax dollars to support a world-class transit system in the Twin Cities with fast, frequent, and affordable service and more integrated transit-oriented development, displacement, and land use policies.
- End the “Opt-outs” for suburban transit and incorporate them into Metro Transit, creating an efficient, more cost-effective transit system with good governance.
- Redefining what projects are eligible for the corridors of commerce program to include transportation projects that improve real, local commercial corridors, not just facilitate highway expansions that bypass project selection criteria.
- Eliminate cumbersome processes and update modern design standards for county and local road systems, giving local governments the ability to build good, complete streets projects.
Bonding Bill
Our Streets supports including transit projects in a potential 2026 bonding bill, including Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system expansion and rail capital improvements. This includes closing the funding gap for the H Line BRT project. Our Streets also supports bonding to build critical transit-support infrastructure, including a light-rail maintenance depot on the Metro Green Line Extension and an additional bus storage facility to accommodate current and future bus fleet growth that would allow faster, more frequent transit service.
Our Streets opposes bonding for highway expansion projects and emphasizes the need for prioritizing maintenance through a “Fix-it-First” approach.
Defensive Work
Our Streets and partners will continue to defend the Driving Down Emissions Law passed in 2023 and updated in 2024, as well as new transit funding secured under the metro sales tax for transit. This includes MnDOT’s efforts to raise the threshold for major highway projects, allowing many projects to bypass policies to reduce VMT. This also includes pushing for a broader conversation around the Highway User Tax Distribution Fund (HUTDF), where conversations on electric vehicle fees have missed a critical point: that we subsidize gas-powered cars with a significantly lower gas tax than would be necessary to actually fund our road system.
This work will also extend to Minnesota’s autonomous and connected vehicle policy conversation surrounding the arrival of Waymo testing in Minnesota. Our Streets opposes autonomous vehicles like Waymo, which undermine transit, exacerbate the need for overbuilt road infrastructure, and threaten the livelihoods of workers across our state.
The Federal Crisis
An unprecedented federal dynamic has put Minnesota in crisis, and it’s essential for everyone, including transportation decision-makers, to stand up and do what they can to protect vulnerable Minnesotans.
The federal government has pushed Minnesota to strip environmental justice, racial equity, climate, and community health considerations from environmental review processes. MnDOT has complied, removing these values from reviews of major projects such as Highway 252 and Rethinking I-94. Our Streets is calling on the state to slow down those projects and establish a parallel review process under the Minnesota Environmental Policy Act (MEPA) to uphold state values independently.
Community engagement on these projects has struggled in recent months. At a recent in-person session, attendance was sparse, and those who did show up were largely unrepresentative of the communities most affected—many residents of color are understandably hesitant to participate given the broader political climate.
Pausing these major projects is a critical step to ensure restorative outcomes, protecting state laws and values, and protecting vulnerable residents.
Eyes on 2027
The honest assessment is that 2026 is a year for continuing important public conversations, defensive work, and building foundations for 2027. The hope is that when conditions shift, the framework will be in place to deliver real change—continuing the progress of 2023 and 2024, passing a transformative DOT reform package for Minnesota, reversing transit cuts, implementing and building a transportation system that works from small, Greater Minnesota main streets to suburban communities to the Twin Cities.
Because at its core, that’s the question: Will Minnesota keep pouring money into a highway system it already can’t afford to maintain, or will we transition to a transportation system that actually works for everyone?
Stay updated on legislative progress.
We’ll let you know about action alerts, opportunities to testify, and other transportation-related legislative happenings.