Star Tribune
Two-year Hennepin Avenue reconstruction project begins Monday in Minneapolis
Work to rebuild Hennepin Avenue through south Minneapolis begins Monday, and traffic lanes will be closed or restricted for the next two years.
Routes that run on Hennepin between Uptown and downtown will be shifted to Lyndale Avenue, and two others will bypass their normal stops at the Uptown Transit Station, Metro Transit said.
Construction will be in two phases: between 26th and Lake streets this year, then between 26th Street and Douglas Avenue near Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church and the Interstate 94 interchange in 2025 .
“The project is an opportunity to update Hennepin Avenue to meet the public’s current and future needs,” the city said in a news release.
Hennepin is one of the busiest streets in Minneapolis, daily carrying 15,000 to 31,000 vehicles, 6,600 transit riders and 220 to 280 bicyclists, according to the city in 2022.
The roughly $32 million project is the thoroughfare’s first major upgrade in more than 65 years. It also has been the source of contention as business owners argued that the loss of curbside parking would drive customers away.
When work is complete, Hennepin Avenue will have one traffic lane in each direction and left turn lanes at key intersections. Parking will be allowed in bus priority lanes during nonpeak hours, and the eastside of the street will have some parking and loading bays, wider sidewalks and a two-way protected bicycle lane.
The layout also provides space for enhanced stations being built for the future METRO E Line, a bus rapid transit line that will largely replace Route 6 in December 2025. The line will connect the University of Minnesota with downtown Minneapolis and Southdale Center in Edina.
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Serving hundreds more meals each day brings other logistical challenges, too.
Blaine High School is transitioning from a once-a-week food deliveries to a twice-a-week delivery schedule. The school was running out of storage space for the volume of food it was getting to meet demand, said Noah Atlas, Anoka-Hennepin’s director of child nutrition. Such a shift, he said, might soon be needed at Coon Rapids Middle School, where delivery time requires the Tetris-like strategy of fitting boxes of juice and milk into the cold storage room.
Schools also now have to be pushier about asking parents to fill out paperwork that once determined whether a family qualified for free or reduced-price lunch. Those forms are no longer required to get lunch or breakfast, but they are still used to calculate how much state funding districts receive for other programs, including extra support for students learning English, for example.
“Nutrition programs have had to work all through these challenges,” Peterson said. “But in the end, the payoff is that we’re seeing better behavior of the students, and their attention span has increased because they’re not hungry.”
A driver who was speeding and allegedly had been drinking crashed into several vehicles Wednesday night on Lyndale Avenue just outside of downtown Minneapolis, the State Patrol said.
One person died in the pileup and at least seven others were taken to hospitals with injuries, according to a State Patrol incident report. One of those hurt was a 2-year-old, the report said.
Events unfolded about 9:15 p.m. when a 32-year-old St. Paul man driving a Chevrolet Avalanche exited eastbound I-94 onto Lyndale Avenue and struck several vehicles near Ontario Street. The street and ramp were closed for several hours but have since reopened.
The Avalanche driver was not seriously hurt, but a passenger in his vehicle suffered life-threatening injuries, said Lt. Michael Lee with the State Patrol.
The Avalanche struck six other vehicles. A passenger in a Jeep Cherokee died in the wreck. A 2-year-old riding in a different vehicle was among seven people who were hurt and taken to hospitals, Lee said.
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