3 days Ago
Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of guest commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here . ••• For nine months I did my best to return my shopping cart home to the Har Mar Mall from the A Line bus rapid transit stop in Roseville following my after-work grocery run, until I injured my leg.
Then came the Minnesota Star Tribune article “Shopping carts are piling up at one Roseville bus stop. What’s the solution?” (Nov. 14).
I made my effort because I’ve watched my city be stripped of its bus system, bus by bus, using poor residents as an excuse for that action. I’m disappointed in the article for lacking that local context. It‘s more dangerous to bring a cart back to Har Mar Mall than it is to bring a cart to the bus stop, which is why only a 26-year-old resident like me ever attempts to do so, even though people going from the bus stop to the mall could theoretically each grab a cart on the way there.
Snelling Avenue has a turn-lane separation on the Har Mar side of the intersection, but doesn’t have separation on the A Line side. Cars go fast on Snelling, and the right turn has no arrow on the A Line side. So cars taking a right turn onto Snelling need to move fast to merge, I would argue faster than is safe, especially with the huge forward blind spots on modern cars.
If you are coming from the Har Mar side to the A Line side, at least you can see the car that cannot see you. If you are coming from the A Line side to the Har Mar side, there is a point at which the right-turn driver will be in your blind spot as a pedestrian, so it’s a double blind spot. I have had many close calls in my cart-returning journey.
The carts are hard to get back into the parking lot as well. I think the carts piling up at the bus stop come from the mall along the sidewalk aligned with Skillman Avenue W., but you can’t take the carts back to Har Mar that way if you want to live — you have a similar problem of cars making a left turn into Har Mar where you can’t see them and they aren’t looking for you, and you are having to watch traffic leaving from the right.
Ideally Har Mar would put a little sidewalk through where Chase Bank has a garden and a protected walking path on that diagonal into the mall. My trick to returning the carts used County Road B, but that still involves merging with car traffic going into the mall. Again, this to say that it’s not safe to return the carts, even though it is safe to bring the carts to the bus stop, because nobody designing any of this thought about the blind spots a pedestrian might have or the huge front blind spots trendy large-snooted cars have.
What Roseville needs to solve this problem is a Roseville Roads Task Force, because Har Mar is private property, the roads are county roads, the buses are run by the Metropolitan Council, the large-snooted cars are at the car dealer and the City Council is the City Council, and for any of this to be designed well, all of these stakeholders need to work together in collaboration (in the same AutoCAD file). The ground reality is none of them have a good venue to do so, and none of them have the authority to look at the bigger picture. Until there’s a venue to coordinate the civil engineering work at this intersection, expect carts to build up until further notice.
Amethyst O’Connell, of Roseville, is an electrical designer..
