2024 Transportation Summit: Surviving Road Construction

November 20, 2024 - From Move Minneapolis

Recovery Bike Shop’s Seth Stattmiller spoke on this year’s Transportation Summit panel from Move Minneapolis.

This year’s theme was Surviving Road Construction.

Watching your neighbors struggle and go out of business is one of the realities of car dependent cities.

In a place that relies almost entirely on one mode of transportation, infrastructure projects can be devastating for small businesses. NE Lowry Avenue’s three years of construction is throttling the tap of customers to the Central and Lowry business district.

Not only does this loss of sales represent an existential threat for Recovery Bike Shop and other businesses, it also threatens to upset the longterm business ecosystem of the district. Not all of Recovery’s customers come to the area for a bicycle. Lots of people are drawn by Holy Land’s Chicken Lovers Combo or Francis Burger Joint’s shakes and fries when they stumble on a used bike shop they didn’t know about.

In this way Francis’ customers become Recovery customers. And visa versa. Every business in the neighborhood attracts their own customers who often become shared customers. The more businesses, the more draw for the district, the more shared customers.

Phase I of the Lowry construction cost us Dairy Queen which did not survive a summer without cars.

There were 9 businesses on Lowry. Now there are 8. That might be a 10% revenue hit to the business district. This makes every business more vulnerable for the coming phase II or in the event of a recession or anything else that might come along. There are another 20 businesses in the rest of the construction zone. Are we prepared to lose 2 more of them?

We need a more robust transportation network of mass transit, bikes, AND cars, so that when one of these networks goes down for necessary maintenance, customers can still get to us.

Next, we need support rather than punishment. On the day Lowry was closed we received a bill for $14,000 for the improvements coming our way, something that came as a complete shock to most of the businesses in the area, especially since many of the assessed businesses aren’t even on Lowry.

We all pay for the streets in our city through our taxes. If there was ever a time to give someone a tax holiday for this expense it’s when they can’t use it, aren’t benefiting from it, and are most vulnerable.

Other cities compensate their businesses to get them through construction projects. These cities want their tax paying, job providing, community building businesses to be there when the construction is over.

Our businesses thrive because of the busy streets in front of our shops. Take this away and you take away sales, you take away the value of operating at this address. If you’re going to reduce the value of the property, the property taxes should be reduced as well.

When the project is complete and the traffic comes back and the value of the property goes up as a result, the city can recoup their infrastructure investment through increased property taxes.

This is a formula that supports our local businesses rather than hobbles them.

The Summit is free, but you must be pre-registered:
MoveMinneapolis.org