Lake Street Visioning Workshops

Wider sidewalks? Three lanes? Four lanes? Bumpouts? Parking? Bikelanes? How do citizens, public officials, small businesses, transit users, pedestrians and drivers figure out what to do on Lake Street?

A good start is by asking people what they want and what they envision for the future of this important street - and that's just what we did.

Working with Councilmembers Gary Schiff, Robert Lilligren and Dean Zimmermann; with State Representative Karen Clark; with Latino Economic Development Center (LEDC); with Minnesota Somali Chamber of Commerce; and with Southside Traffic Reduction Initiative (STRIDE), we co-sponsored a set of design and visioning workshops for imagining the future of Lake Street.

The workshops were held at the new Me Gusta Restaurant. We held both a Spanish language workshop (geared to the Latino business community) and an English language workshop (geared to general members of the Lake Street residential and business community). Each workshop had English, Spanish, and Somali translators available. The workshops were well attended, with about 40 participants for the Spanish workshop and about 50 participants for the English one. 

We presented information on street configurations, possible alternatives, and experiences from other cities. We also developed materials that helped participants think about their preferences for this important street. For example, to begin the conversation about sidewalk widths, parking and number of lanes, we prepared boards and scaled elements that people, working in groups, could arrange as their ideas and choices evolved. The outcome from the workshops (in the form of the street configuration choices and the comments written by participants on the boards) was used to prepare a summary document that was then made available for policymakers working on related infrastructure projects.