St. Paul is planning to replace half of historic Summit Avenue’s on-street parking capacity east of Lexington Avenue with expanded and relocated bike lanes as part of a broader objective to rebuild the thoroughfare’s street and utility infrastructure. Opposition to the plan, dominated by concern over tree canopy shrinkage, has coalesced into a call for a more comprehensive environmental evaluation of the corridor’s infrastructure needs that, presumably, spares more boulevard trees.

Trees, however, are not the issue.

They will be taken anyway as the street is rebuilt to modern load-bearing standards and aging utilities are replaced and right-sized to accommodate higher anticipated residential densities and more intense storm runoffs. Few, if any, will be removed solely to accommodate wider bike paths, taken instead to create a pothole-free street and eliminate the risk of sinkholes and sewage backups.  And with the recent removal of diseased trees leaving numerous stumps, clear spaces, and younger replacement plantings, there is no better time than now, not 2030 or 2040, to reconstruct and renew the Summit Avenue streetscape.

Focus, instead, should be on the environmental and economic impact of evolving electric vehicle (EV) technology and on mobility equity for those who depend on drive-up access to Summit corridor homes, businesses and institutions.

That’s because a fleet dominated by quieter, cleaner EVs and 50-mpg hybrids will likely meet St. Paul’s 2040 auto emissions reduction goal independent of vehicle miles driven, an outcome curiously ignored in the current plan.

EVs will also cost less than conventional autos to own and operate due to manufacturing advances and fewer moving parts. (A Chinese automaker claims it could sell an EV today in the U.S. for $12,500.)  As such, there will be more of them, many to be operated by mobility-seeking lower-income drivers vying for scarce parking along the Summit/Grand corridor.

But the city’s plan to cut on-street parking capacity, now averaging 32 percent occupancy of available spaces, will make accessibility much worse because it fails to account for higher occupancies along the avenue at different points and times. That one-block walk in January to crowded night classes at Mitchell-Hamline, to apartments near Dale Street or to a busy Grand Avenue eatery can then become an icy two-block slog with an additional street crossing when half of Summit parking is converted to an underutilized bike lane.

At roughly a couple of thousand cars currently parked per day, use of Summit Avenue by this stakeholder group is thus comparable to peak-season daily bike lane usage, which has remained flat since 2013, but greatly exceeds off-season usage. Sacrificing more permanent parking capacity and year-round venue patronage to favor stagnating, highly seasonal bicycle traffic seems patently inequitable. Add to this an affordable and proliferating EV fleet imposed on a corridor rezoned to achieve European-like residential densities and lower on-site parking minimums, and the disparity only worsens.

Keep parking intact, however, and a rebuilt Summit can still be safer for ALL users by specifying narrower (and slower) driving lanes, increased intersection visibility through extended curb bump-outs, wider sidewalks to accommodate slower riders, and buffered on-street bike lanes to protect faster riders. That may widen mid-block portions of the street east of Lexington slightly but will narrow it considerably at intersections. The world won’t end.

At some point, perhaps 2040, corridor residential density may indeed grow and lifestyles evolve to where the entire community becomes indifferent to parking-dependent drive-up traffic as walking and cycling flourish across demographic lines. It will be an easy engineering fix, then, to trade one lane of parking for wider street-level bike lanes and slightly raised, 2-foot-wide, Copenhagen-style lane separation buffers.

Either way, the 2040 air will be cleaner, the streets quieter and the corridor bustling with clean low-cost EVs underneath a widening canopy of maturing trees. With any luck, St. Paul planners will have been governed accordingly.

Jerome Johnson is a retired transportation economist based in St. Paul.

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