What London Planners Can Learn from Minneapolis’s Street Redesigns and Bike Network

A new video from transport analyst Ray Delahanty, who runs the CityNerd YouTube channel, takes a detailed look at Minneapolis’s recent urban transport improvements, including upgraded bus service, protected bike lanes and a major street redesign on Hennepin Avenue. While the subject is a US Midwestern city, the planning and delivery choices on display offer a useful comparative reference for London’s transport planners, borough officers and built-environment professionals working on similar multimodal street projects.

Delahanty, a former transportation engineer, visited Minneapolis for the first time in several years and documented changes along the Lake Street corridor and across the city’s bike network. The video highlights three main infrastructure upgrades: Metro Transit’s new E Line bus service, the expansion of protected bike lanes and the Hennepin Avenue overhaul, which Delahanty describes as potentially setting a new US standard for multimodal street redesigns.

Por que importa

Key facts
| Element | Detail |
|—|—|
| City | Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA |
| Transport agency | Metro Transit |
| New bus service | E Line on Lake Street corridor, with bus rapid transit (BRT) characteristics |
| Major street project | Hennepin Avenue overhaul including protected bike lanes and multimodal redesign |
| Source | CityNerd YouTube channel (Ray Delahanty) via The Urbanist |

The E Line and bus rapid transit delivery
The E Line is Metro Transit’s latest enhanced bus service running along Lake Street, one of Minneapolis’s key east-west corridors. Delahanty notes that the service meets several characteristics of bus rapid transit (BRT), including off-board fare payment, level boarding platforms and signal priority at intersections. For London readers familiar with Transport for London’s (TfL) bus priority programmes and the ongoing work on bus rapid transit schemes such as the West London Transit project or the Greenwich Peninsula BRT, the Minneapolis example raises questions about speed of delivery and the political conditions needed to implement dedicated bus infrastructure in mixed-traffic streets.

Contexto

Minneapolis has not achieved a full-grade separated BRT system, but the E Line shows what can be delivered within existing street widths using relatively low-cost interventions: platform upgrades, priority signalling and branding. London’s own bus priority work has faced repeated delays and funding gaps, particularly for schemes that require removing general traffic lanes or parking.

Bike network: off-street and on-street integration
Delahanty describes Minneapolis’s bike network as the best big-city network in the United States, a claim based on both the extent of off-street paths winding around lakes and the Mississippi riverfront, and the growing number of on-street protected bike lanes. The city has added several new protected lanes since his last visit, including on routes that previously had only painted bike lanes or no cycling provision at all.

For London, which has built a substantial cycle network including Cycleways, the comparison is instructive. London has more total kilometres of cycle infrastructure, but delivery has been uneven across boroughs, and some routes remain discontinuous or rely on shared bus lanes. Minneapolis’s approach of combining a strong off-street recreational network with targeted on-street protected lanes on major corridors may offer a model for London boroughs that have struggled to integrate cycle routes with existing street uses.

Hennepin Avenue overhaul: multimodal redesign in practice
The Hennepin Avenue project is the most ambitious of the three examples. Delahanty says the redesign may set the standard for multimodal street transformations in the US. The project reallocates road space to include protected bike lanes, wider footways, improved crossings and dedicated space for bus services. It represents a shift from a car-dominated arterial to a street that prioritises walking, cycling and public transport.

London has its own comparable projects, such as the Oxford Street transformation (currently stalled), the Bank Junction redesign and the ongoing work on the A10 corridor. What the Minneapolis example highlights is the importance of political continuity and clear design guidance. The Hennepin Avenue project moved from concept to construction within a few years, whereas similar London schemes often take a decade or more due to funding cycles, political changes and legal challenges.

What London planners can take from this
The Minneapolis case is not a direct blueprint for London. The cities differ in density, governance structure, transport funding and legal frameworks. However, the comparison is useful for several reasons:

• Delivery speed: Minneapolis delivered its E Line and Hennepin Avenue redesign within a single mayoral term, suggesting that political will and streamlined design standards can accelerate projects.
• Multimodal integration: The city combined bus priority, protected cycling and pedestrian improvements in one corridor rather than treating them as separate projects.
• Network thinking: The bike network connects off-street recreational paths with on-street commuting routes, creating a coherent system rather than isolated segments.

London’s transport planners and borough officers reviewing their own local implementation plans may ask whether similar approaches could be applied to corridors such as the A23, the A10 or the South Circular, where multimodal redesign has been discussed but not yet delivered at scale.

Source: The Urbanist, “Sunday Video: Is Minneapolis Too Nice for Its Own Good?” by Doug Trumm, 6 September 2026. https://www.theurbanist.org/sunday-video-is-minneapolis-too-nice-for-its-own-good/

Datos clave