Transforming our transportation system at the state level.
- New Updates
Let’s build a transportation system for how we move today and how we will move tomorrow.
Transportation policy and funding can—and should—create vibrant communities across our state. It’s time to think differently about transportation to get Minnesotans moving. We can improve our transportation system while promoting racial and economic justice, creating fiscal and economic prosperity, and supporting the vibrant communities across Minnesota.
We’ve built our transportation system on the false premise that we should move as many cars as possible from point A to point B, and it’s failing us. Minnesota has the nation’s fourth-largest road network by lane miles, far exceeding what our population, economy, or farm-to-market needs require, and we can’t afford to maintain it.
Worse, our highway-centric transportation system creates numerous intersecting problems: it limits access to jobs, healthcare, and education for low-income residents, seniors, youth, disabled, and immigrant communities while harming adjacent neighborhoods through poor air quality, dangerous traffic, and noise that worsen health outcomes and nesecitate more healthcare spending. Overbuilt highways have stripped local tax bases from cities and counties, destroying homes, businesses, and main streets that once provided local economic and wealth-building opportunities and much-needed local and county revenue.
As the backbone of our carbon-intensive transportation system, highways drive inefficient sprawl that electrification alone cannot fix, while our failure to invest in diverse transportation options keeps household expenses high for all Minnesotans. Across all of these harms, low-income and communities of color bear the highest burdens, and unsustainable costs, traffic safety woes, and limited transportation choices hurt all Minnesotans.
The roadmap to a people-centered transportation future
How do we achieve an equitable transportation future?
GRASSROOTS ORGANIZING
Real change doesn’t start in a policy memo or a white paper. It starts with people experiencing our transportation system today and envisioning a better future for their communities across Minnesota. Our Streets engages with residents, community groups, small businesses, and local governments across Minnesota. We do this through meeting people where they are at—literally—through door knocking, community engagement and activation events, and coalition organizing.
POWER BUILDING
We pair grassroots knowledge with policy expertise to bring those most impacted by past transportation decisions into designing a system for tomorrow. Through our grassroots organizing and community engagement, we develop and advocate for laws, budgets, and standards that move power and resources into communities. We work to bring the Capitol to the community and bring community members directly to the Capitol to engage with their elected officials. We train local leaders, grow coalitions, and support campaigns that build power and durable change—not just momentum.
PROJECT-INFORMED POLICY
Our Streets engages directly with MnDOT highway projects across the metro region. Through this work, we build a deep understanding of how MnDOT’s processes operate and how the agency fails to meaningfully engage communities and local governments, design systems that meet a variety of transportation needs, invest fiscally responsibly and improve the quality of life and economic prosperity of Minnesotans across our state. We use this experience to directly address challenges with how MnDOT plans, scopes, funds, and builds major highway projects, leading to better project outcomes and more accountable, transparent, and reparative public processes.
POLICY LEADERSHIP & EXPERTISE
We partner with legislative champions, forward-thinking transportation leaders, and communities along highways and across Minnesota to build a transportation system that works for everyone. Through these collaborations, we engage community members, transportation practitioners, legal experts, planners, traffic modelers, GIS and data analysts, and engineers to shape policy and project planning approaches.
The way we invest in Minnesota Transportation is broken. It’s time to fix it.
~$300 Million
The amount MnDOT wants to spend to expand Highway 252 in Brooklyn Center and Brooklyn Park. MnDOT projects that traffic will be just as bad five years after the expansion, and the City of Brooklyn Center strongly opposed the project’s construction.
$3.5 billion
The unfunded gap needed to maintain Minnesota’s current system of roads and bridges, which is expected to grow to over $17 billion by the mid-2030s. Despite this shortfall, MnDOT plans to spend over $1.4 billion on highway expansions while our system continues to crumble.
30-Year High
Deaths for pedestrians at a 30-year high nationally—a trend mirrored in Minnesota, despite efforts to make our roads safer for all users.
Previous Legislative Work
Check out past legislative accomplishments and progress in putting people first in transportation.
