Our Streets led a transportation reform hearing on Monday, April 20, in the Senate Transportation Committee. In collaboration with legislators, we opened the discussion on the future of transportation policy in Minnesota, focusing on building a transportation system that works for everyone.
During the hearing, Senate Transportation leaders gave Our Streets the opportunity to share a community-centered vision for how the legislature, the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT), and other agencies and stakeholders can deliver on this vision.
This vision is grounded in more than 15 years of our organization’s work in communities across the Twin Cities and the state. We’ve knocked over 200,000 doors and talked to residents, engaged more than 1,000,000 Minnesotans attending events like Open Streets Minneapolis™ and Imagine, and we’ve worked directly with people who experience the transportation system from every angle—community members, advocates, unions, elected officials, local governments, engineers, policy experts, and more.
What we’ve heard is consistent: people want a transportation system that works for everyone and creates healthy, safe, and prosperous communities across Minnesota. With that said, more work remains to reorient the Minnesota Department of Transportation to deliver that kind of system and all of the benefits it could bring.
We shared a snapshot of Minnesota’s current approach to planning, funding, and building our transportation system, which has created intersecting challenges that prevent Minnesota from delivering on the vision of forward-thinking elected officials, advocates, and community members.
Minnesota has the fourth-largest road network in the country, despite ranking 12th in land area and 22nd in GDP. Additionally, the Twin Cities have the third-highest lane miles per capita of any urban region in the United States, rising from the eighth-highest in 2008. Functionally, we are asking taxpayers to pay for two states’ worth of roads, many of which are concentrated in the metro.
At the same time, road fatalities remain stubbornly high, and pedestrian and bicyclist deaths have reached a 30-year high across the country and in Minnesota. Last year alone, 370 Minnesotans did not make it home to their family after a fatality on Minnesota streets and roadways.
These impacts hit dollars and cents, too. Highways occupy 559 square miles of land in Minnesota’s 17 largest counties—10 times the land area of St. Paul and 24 times the size of Lake Minnetonka. That land, valued at $53 billion, generates no property tax revenue and costs significant resources to maintain. Our maintenance gap has grown to somewhere between $15 and $20 billion as we get further and further behind on maintenance.
There’s a human cost to our system, too. When our state’s major highways were first built, communities of color, low-income communities, and immigrant communities were steamrolled in the name of progress. Their homes and businesses taken, their neighborhoods divided, their voices dismissed.
This pattern was repeated across the metro, in Near North, Rondo, Cedar-Riverside, and the Old Southside. Those same communities still bear the daily harms of the system we built. Families living along highways breathe polluted air linked to higher rates of cancer, asthma, and birth defects.
The infrastructure decisions we make are never just about roads and bridges or buses and bikes. They shape every part of public life beyond the curbline—whether a parent can pick up their kids from school, whether a senior can get to a doctor’s appointment, whether a family can reach the grocery store or a good-paying job, or find an affordable home. They determine how our land is used, shape local government’s tax base potential, decide whether our main streets and downtowns are vibrant or hollowed out, and whether small businesses can take root and thrive. Our transportation policy decides who gets to be safe, healthy, and prosperous in their own community—and who does not.
Getting to share this vision with legislators capped off our work this biennium on a variety of policies and projects that deliver the kind of transportation system Minnesotans want to see.
Partners in Land Use and Transportation Planning Advocacy
Peter Wagenius, legislative and political director at Sierra Club North Star Chapter, delivered an excellent presentation on the inseparable connection between transportation and land use, drawing on historic and current examples of policies that achieve better outcomes in both areas. The Sierra Club North Star Chapter has led the way in integrating these conversations to advance climate goals, affordability, transit, and walkability.
Michael Wojcik, executive director of the Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota, delivered powerful testimony to the diverse transportation needs across Minnesota, where communities big and small want safe streets and roads, multi-modal infrastructure, and effective use of state dollars to deliver on these goals. He also spoke on the important work to update design standards to create better, safer projects, and has been a key driver of emerging policy on e-bikes in 2026.
MJ Carpio, executive director of Move Minnesota, also spoke on the organization’s 2026 legislative priorities.
Related Legislation
The bills heard at the April 20th informational hearing build on a continued push to prioritize road maintenance over costly expansion projects, improve transit and highway project development, and create accountability at MnDOT.
Fix-it-First
First on the agenda was Senator Doron Clark’s Fix-it-First bill (SF4055), which directs MnDOT to fix existing road infrastructure first, plan for the long term, and deliver on smart maintenance projects across the state. It uses the state’s Transportation Asset Management Plan (TAMP) as a decision-making tool, stating that if we have a maintenance backlog for roads and bridges, we should not expand any highway infrastructure until we close that gap.
We were joined by John Siekmeier, a retired MnDOT engineer and advocate for resilient transportation systems, who provided excellent expert testimony and answered questions. We greatly appreciate John’s expertise and collaboration.
The bill is the nation’s strongest Fix-it-First provision and includes annual performance measures and targets to ensure MnDOT makes progress toward meeting our state goals. It also creates a fiscal transparency portal to communicate how state spending on transportation projects aligns with goals in our 20-year planning documents.
We had a great conversation about the bill’s substance, but the ranking minority member raised concerns about prioritizing maintenance over expansion, arguing that the status quo is better for greater Minnesota.
We believe there is no one-size-fits-all approach to transportation across the state, given the varied needs in urban, suburban, and rural areas. However, deteriorating roads are found across Greater Minnesota, and letting them crumble raises household costs, decreases safety, and increases emissions for those driving along them. We need to better understand the trade-offs of these expansion projects and deliver safe, smart maintenance and multimodal projects to improve the lives of Minnesotans across the state and strengthen our economy and environment as a whole.
A fiscally responsible system gives all Minnesotans affordable access to jobs, schools, and healthcare without raising taxes. At the same time, prioritizing maintenance will give us better streets at a lower cost and create more jobs.
The bill was laid over for possible inclusion in an omnibus bill, and we appreciate the work of Senator Clark to bring the bill forward in the Senate, and for Chair Koegel and her staff for driving the bill’s progress in the House.
Fix-it-Right
Also on the agenda were two bills led by Chair Dibble that aim to improve MnDOT’s process for developing major highway projects, resulting in better outcomes for communities across the state.
This included our Fix-it-Right provisions, which improve MnDOT’s process for studying and delivering high-quality projects. When initiating major highway projects, MnDOT must evaluate a wide range of approaches that meet the needs of the principal users of the transportation system, defined as those who travel by all modes of transportation, not just cars.
Under the bill, the agency must create an unbiased purpose and need statement, evaluate good project alternatives that improve affordability, including multimodal options, and at least one alternative that reduces the capacity of the roadway, coordinate transit planning and trunk highway planning, and consider land use to find potential to maximize the local tax base while minimizing maintenance costs. The bill also creates a working group to reevaluate the scoping process and update the state’s benefit-cost analysis framework to ensure the true costs and benefits of different project approaches are understood and used to guide decision-making.
We were joined by Giancarlo Valdetaro, Senior Organizer with the National Campaign for Transit Justice, who helped develop the bill and provided expert testimony on the benefits of developing and studying better projects, prioritizing multimodal investments, and creating flexible funding and strong policy frameworks to benefit people across the state and the country. We greatly appreciate Giancarlo’s expertise and collaboration.
“We Mean it” MnDOT Agency Reforms
Growing out of the same policy conversation this biennium, Senator Dibble’s SF 4657 bill was developed alongside Our Streets’ work and is a forward-thinking reform to how the Minnesota Department of Transportation plans and develops major highway projects. By establishing new standards for project “purpose and need” statements, it ensures that transportation decisions start with a clear-eyed look at the actual problem rather than jumping to predetermined solutions like lane expansions. The bill thoughtfully reduces reliance on traditional capacity metrics and instead elevates considerations like safety, cost efficiency, community input, multimodal access, and equity—bringing Minnesota’s transportation planning in line with the diverse needs of the people who actually use these roads, sidewalks, and transit systems.
Beyond reshaping project scoping, the bill builds in meaningful accountability and transparency throughout the process. Interdisciplinary teams with expertise in multimodal and social sciences will guide projects from planning through construction, conduct field visits, and evaluate outcomes against statewide goals. Stronger oversight tools—including expanded authority for the Transportation Ombudsperson, targeted compliance audits, and performance reviews tied to statutory standards—ensure these reforms have real teeth. Combined with robust outcome reporting and tighter integration with Minnesota’s Complete Streets policy, the legislation moves the state toward a transportation system that is more accountable, more context-sensitive, and better aligned with the long-term outcomes Minnesotans care about.
We were joined by Nahid Kahn, a longtime resident of Brooklyn Center, an advocate, and citizen expert on transportation planning. Nahid spoke to the importance of the broader reforms in Fix-it-Right and We Mean it, showing how the Highway 252 project in Brooklyn failed to look at a wide range of alternatives, engage the public and local governments, and led to a highway expansion project that will harm the community and is out of alignment with local needs.
We greatly appreciate Nahid for joining the committee and for her expertise, and will continue to work towards better projects and policies at MnDOT to improve the Highway 252 project and ensure that the project’s mistakes are not repeated in other communities.
Also heard at the hearing were:
- SF 4658, a bill to improve transit development and efficiency in the region, led by Rep. Katie Jones (DFL, 61A) in the House and shaped by Our Streets, Sierra Club North Star Chapter, and Move Minnesota
- SF4598, Senator Dibble’s bill to improve requirements relating to design standards and variances in certain county and municipal state-funded transportation projects to improve safe street designs
- SF5085, Senator Dibble’s bill to develop a program to ensure all pedestrian crossings in the state are in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, funding accessibility improvements across the state
All of these additional bills were passed out of the committee and referred to the Finance committee with the recommendation to pass. Because the hearing was informational, the bills were sent to the rules committee.
However, this was a strong, substantive conversation, and the committee votes demonstrate viability, support, and forward momentum for the agenda. They also build substantively on our work from past sessions and on our work in the House Transportation Committee this year.
Thank you to Legislative Partners, Testifiers, and Community Members
We are deeply grateful to community members who shaped these bills and this vision for a transportation future, including those who testified and joined us at the hearing. We would also like to thank Chair Dibble, Senator Clark, Senator McEwen, and Senator Johnson Stewart for authoring these bills and other legislative leaders and staff who carried these bills and championed a transportation system that works for everyone.
Our transportation system is one of the most powerful tools this state has for building healthy, connected, and prosperous communities and strengthening our state economy as a whole.
Minnesotans deserve a transportation system that is safe, affordable, equitable, and accountable to the people it serves, and we look forward to continuing that work.