Next year, Hennepin County is fully reconstructing Lyndale Avenue, one of Minneapolis’ main streets. The project has been in the works for years, and by now thousands of people have weighed in. As I’ve written before, street reconstructions are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to transform city streets and align them with our visions and values.

But something funny happened on the road to Uptown. The county’s Department of Public Works, which has otherwise been doing good work on equitable transportation, took a detour at the end of a lengthy process. Without much warning to city or community partners, engineers released a design that has few of the advantages of the three previous options that went through months of process with community.

The last-ditch proposal offers a compromise tha

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