Minneapolis Bike Route Safety Map

PeopleForBikes' 2026 City Ratings gave Minneapolis the second-highest score among large US cities — 68, behind Brooklyn's 70. That reputation is earned on the trails — and it can mislead you on the streets, because at the end of 2025 the city's 140 miles of painted bike lanes still outnumbered its 36 miles of curb-protected bikeways and paths by almost four to one. Brakeaway rates any Minneapolis route 0–100 on protected infrastructure, trail connectivity, intersection risk, traffic exposure, and surface quality. Paste a Google Maps link, upload a GPX, or connect Strava. Scores are informational estimates — not a substitute for local judgment. Verify conditions before you ride.

Score a Minneapolis route

How Brakeaway scores a Minneapolis route

Every route is analyzed across five factors, weighted for the conditions Minneapolis riders actually meet: an unusually strong off-street trail spine, a grid where most of the bike network is still paint, a small set of High Injury Streets that absorb most of the severe crashes, and a winter that changes the surface under half the year's rides.

Protected infrastructure and trail connectivity. What share of your line sits on a trail, a curb-protected bikeway, or a bicycle boulevard rather than a painted stripe? At the end of 2025 Minneapolis had built 89 miles of trails, 36 miles of curb-protected bikeways and paths, 24 miles of bicycle boulevards and 140 miles of painted bike lanes. The first three categories carry this factor; the fourth mostly does not.
Intersection and arterial-crossing risk. Minneapolis Vision Zero reports that High Injury Streets are 10% of the city's streets and yet are where 64% of the fatal and serious injury crashes happened between 2020 and 2024. Brakeaway penalizes riding along those corridors and crossing them without protection, which is why a quiet south Minneapolis residential route can drop a band at one signalized crossing.
Traffic volume and speed exposure. The city set speed limits of 20 mph for local residential streets and parkways unless otherwise signed, and 25 mph for larger, arterial city-owned streets. Those limits stop at the city's own jurisdiction: the City states that county and MnDOT road speed limits in Minneapolis will not change, because under Minnesota law cities do not have authority to change speed limits on those streets. Hiawatha Avenue is Highway 55, a MnDOT trunk highway — which is a large part of why some of the hardest-flagged corridors in Minneapolis are not city streets at all.
Surface quality and winter condition. The Transportation Action Plan commits the City to prioritize clearing snow and ice on the All Ages and Abilities Network, including trails and protected bikeways, within 24 hours of a snow event. The same plan still lists as open work the question of how to give neighborhood greenways and standard bike lanes the same quality of clearance. Brakeaway scores surface as a live factor, not a footnote.
Elevation and grade. Minneapolis is flat by the standards of most American bike cities, and the trail network is flatter still — the Hiawatha LRT Trail is described as relatively flat over its full 4.7 miles. The real grade on a Minneapolis ride is usually a bluff descent to the Mississippi or the climb back up out of the river gorge, and Brakeaway factors that into the score rather than reporting it separately.

Highest-scoring Minneapolis bike routes

These are the routes that repeatedly land in Brakeaway's High Confidence band, because the separation is physical rather than painted.

Midtown Greenway (5.5 miles, Chain of Lakes to the Mississippi)

The single most important piece of bike infrastructure in the city, and the clearest illustration of why grade separation dominates a score. The Midtown Greenway is a 5.5-mile former railroad corridor in south Minneapolis, and for most of its distance the corridor is grade-separated from the street grid — either in a gorge passing under bridges carrying streets overhead, or on a levy with traffic passing underneath it. At the west end it connects with paths around the Minneapolis Chain of Lakes and the Southwest LRT Trail extending to the western suburbs; at the east end it connects with paths along the Mississippi River. The Midtown Greenway Coalition states the trails are plowed in the winter, lit at night, and open 24/7, and that several thousand people use the Greenway each spring, summer, or fall day, with hundreds of cyclists and runners using it each winter day. Near the Martin Olav Sabo Bridge it meets the Hiawatha LRT Trail.

Cedar Lake Regional Trail (4.5 paved miles from downtown)

Three Rivers Park District manages the Cedar Lake Regional Trail, 4.5 paved miles running from downtown Minneapolis and connecting to other bike and pedestrian trails in the city and western suburbs, open 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. It is known as the first "bicycle freeway" because it has three lanes for most of its length within Minneapolis: separate one-way lanes for bike traffic and a third parallel lane for two-way pedestrian traffic. Mode separation of that kind is rare in the US and shows up directly in the score. It is also the trail that carries downtown commuters out to St. Louis Park and the western suburbs without putting them on an arterial.

Grand Rounds Scenic Byway (about 55 miles of parkways)

The Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board's byway is a loop of approximately 55 miles of parkways carrying 102 miles of Grand Rounds trails — 51 miles walking, 51 miles biking — and it was designated a National Scenic Byway by the Federal Highway Administration in April 1998. The system runs in seven segments: Downtown Riverfront (1.2 miles), Chain of Lakes (13.3), Minnehaha (12.6), Mississippi River (9.2), Northeast (6), Victory Memorial (3.8) and Theodore Wirth (4). Because the bike and walk paths are separated along most of it, the Grand Rounds is where Minneapolis scores look least like the rest of the country. One local quirk the engine respects: the bike paths at Lake Harriet, Bde Maka Ska and Lake of the Isles are one-way, so a route drawn against the direction of travel is not the route you will actually ride.

Hiawatha LRT Trail (4.7 miles, downtown to Minnehaha Creek)

A mostly-concrete path running the length of the Blue Line corridor, from downtown Minneapolis near the stadium at its northern end to a bridge above Minnehaha Creek at the southern end. It is the north–south spine for the Longfellow and Hiawatha side of the city and the alternative to riding Hiawatha Avenue itself, which is a state highway. The trail and the light-rail track diverge near the Midtown Greenway and the Martin Olav Sabo Bridge, which is the junction most south-side commutes are built around.

Bryant Avenue S bikeway (2.5 miles, Lake Street to 50th Street W)

The reconstruction of the 2.5-mile stretch of Bryant Avenue between Lake Street and 50th Street West produced a two-way, off-street bikeway — sidewalk level, ten feet wide, with a buffer between the street and the bikeway — and it was included in PeopleForBikes' nationwide list of best new 2023 bikeways. What makes it score well is continuity: it stays on the same side of the road for the full length with no jogs onto other streets, and it connects to both the 40th Street bikeway and the Midtown Greenway, plus the lakes and the Minnehaha Creek Trail. Continuity is worth more to a score than any single treatment.

Stone Arch Bridge and the Downtown Riverfront

The Stone Arch Bridge was partially closed in 2024 for preservation and rehabilitation work managed by MnDOT and reopened fully on July 21, 2025, ahead of schedule. It carries pedestrians and bicycles across the Mississippi with no motor traffic at all, tying the Downtown Riverfront segment of the Grand Rounds to the East Bank. Combined with West River Parkway it is the highest-scoring way to cross the river near downtown.

Kenilworth and North Cedar Lake trails (reopened March 2026)

Both trails were closed for seven years for construction tied to the Metro Green Line Extension project and reopened on March 25, 2026. They restore the direct southwest connection between the Midtown Greenway, the Chain of Lakes and the western suburbs that had been missing for most of a decade. If your saved routes date from before spring 2026, they were drawn around a closure that no longer exists — re-scoring will find the shorter line.

Minneapolis by area — what to expect

South Minneapolis

The strongest part of the network. The Midtown Greenway runs east–west, the Hiawatha LRT Trail and Bryant Avenue run north–south, the Chain of Lakes and Minnehaha Parkway trails close the loop, and the 40th Street bikeway ties them together crosstown. Scores here are high between the arterials and drop sharply at them: Lake Street, Lyndale Avenue, Franklin Avenue, Cedar Avenue and Hiawatha Avenue are the crossings that cost points.

Downtown and the Riverfront

Downtown is where the trail network converges — Cedar Lake Trail from the west, Hiawatha LRT Trail from the south, West River Parkway and the Stone Arch Bridge on the river — and also where the street grid is at its most hostile between those trails. The practical pattern for a downtown ride is to stay on a trail as long as possible and accept a short low-scoring segment at the end rather than crossing the core on painted lanes.

Uptown and the Southwest lakes

Hennepin Avenue South was reconstructed between West Lake Street and Douglas Avenue, with Phase 1 from Lake Street to 26th Street completed in 2024 and Phase 2 from 26th Street to Douglas Avenue substantially completed in 2025. The City describes the result as a multimodal design that improves space for people to walk, ride transit, bike and drive, and its bike lanes and sidewalks are open. Scores along the corridor have moved with the rebuild — a good example of why an old saved route through Uptown is worth re-running.

Northeast and the East Bank

The Northeast segment of the Grand Rounds and the river parkways anchor this side. The University of Minnesota campus adds the Washington Avenue Bridge, which MnDOT describes as the only known double-deck bridge in Minnesota with a pedestrian upper deck and a vehicular lower deck — a fully separated river crossing for people on foot and on bikes. Off the parkways and the bridge deck, though, Northeast leans on painted lanes, and the score gap between a parkway trail and the street two blocks away is as wide here as anywhere in the city.

North Minneapolis

Victory Memorial Drive and Theodore Wirth Parkway carry the Grand Rounds through the north side, and they score like the rest of the parkway system. The gap is between them: connections across North Minneapolis rely more heavily on painted lanes and bicycle boulevards than the south side does, and Our Streets' Bring Back 6th campaign to remove Olson Memorial Highway is a direct response to how that corridor severs the neighborhood grid.

What the numbers say about riding here

The network is still being built. The Transportation Action Plan commits the City to build all low-stress routes identified on the All Ages and Abilities Network by 2030 — a total of 140 miles of new or upgraded bikeways, including 80 miles of protected bike lanes, 51 miles of new neighborhood greenways, and 9 miles of new trails along the Mississippi River or convertible rail lines. By the end of 2024 the City had built or upgraded 30.8 miles of low-stress bikeways and 3.3 miles of connector bikeways on that network, and by the end of the 2026 construction season it expects to have completed 46% of the 2030 low-stress bikeway goal. In 2026 alone there are 2.6 miles of new curb-protected bikeways and 1.25 miles of existing bikeway being upgraded to curb-protected. A corridor that scores 60 today may not score 60 in two years.

Cycling is common and still over-represented in the injury data. The City reports that over two-thirds of residents say they often or sometimes ride a bicycle and that over 4% of Minneapolis residents ride a bicycle to work. Vision Zero data shows people in Minneapolis make 3% of their trips by bicycle while bicyclists are 10% of severe traffic injuries and deaths. Between 2017 and 2025, about 160 people each year died or were seriously injured in traffic crashes in the city — almost 1,500 people. Speeding was a contributing factor in 80% of fatal crashes in 2024.

The mode-share goal is aggressive. People biked for 3% of their trips in 2019, and the City set a goal to increase that to 10% of trips taken by bicycle or micromobility by 2030.

Bike share is in between systems. Nice Ride ended after 13 years in 2023 when its main funder withdrew. MinnPost reported in June 2026 that a large, seamless scalable bicycle system has been missing since 2023, with the Great Plains Institute holding the former Nice Ride assets and studying a relaunch centered on e-bikes. Dockless shared bikes remain available in the meantime, and Brakeaway scores those trips exactly like trips on your own bike.

Pre-score the crossings, not the miles. On a Minneapolis route, most of the score damage happens at a handful of arterial crossings rather than along the quiet blocks between them. Run the route first and look at where the line goes red.

Resources

Frequently asked questions

Is Brakeaway free to use for Minneapolis routes?

Yes. Scoring routes — in Minneapolis or any other city Brakeaway covers — is free. Upload a GPX file, paste a Google Maps directions link, or connect Strava to import existing rides. Every score is informational data, not a substitute for local judgment; verify conditions before you ride.

Why does the Midtown Greenway score so much higher than the streets beside it?

Because it is not a street. The Midtown Greenway is a 5.5-mile former railroad corridor, and for most of its distance it sits in a gorge passing under bridges that carry the street grid overhead, or on a levy with traffic passing underneath. There are almost no at-grade motor-vehicle conflicts to score. The Midtown Greenway Coalition says the trails are plowed in the winter, lit at night, and open 24/7, so the score holds up in February as well as July. Lake Street, one block south, carries the crossings, the turning traffic and the crash history.

How much of the Minneapolis bike network is actually protected?

Less than the map suggests. At the end of 2025 Minneapolis had constructed 89 miles of trails, 36 miles of curb-protected bikeways and paths, 24 miles of bicycle boulevards and 140 miles of painted bike lanes. Trails and curb-protected bikeways score highest; painted lanes are the largest single category and are scored as exposure rather than protection. The Transportation Action Plan aims to build all low-stress routes on the All Ages and Abilities Network by 2030 — a total of 140 miles of new or upgraded bikeways including 80 miles of protected bike lanes and 51 miles of new neighborhood greenways.

Which Minneapolis trails score highest?

The fully separated ones. The Midtown Greenway runs 5.5 miles across south Minneapolis, connecting to paths around the Chain of Lakes and the Southwest LRT Trail at its west end and to paths along the Mississippi River at its east end. The Cedar Lake Regional Trail is 4.5 paved miles out of downtown and is known as the first "bicycle freeway" because it carries separate one-way bike lanes plus a parallel two-way pedestrian lane for most of its length in Minneapolis. The Hiawatha LRT Trail runs 4.7 mostly-concrete miles alongside the Blue Line. The Grand Rounds carries 102 miles of trails — 51 walking, 51 biking — along roughly 55 miles of parkways.

Which Minneapolis streets does Brakeaway flag hardest?

The city's High Injury Streets. Minneapolis Vision Zero reports that these are 10% of city streets and yet are where 64% of the fatal and serious injury crashes happened between 2020 and 2024. The same data shows people in Minneapolis make 3% of their trips by bicycle while bicyclists are 10% of severe traffic injuries and deaths, and that speeding was a contributing factor in 80% of fatal crashes in 2024. Brakeaway penalizes both riding along those corridors and crossing them unprotected, which is why an otherwise quiet residential route can lose a band at a single arterial crossing.

Does Brakeaway account for Minneapolis winter conditions?

Surface condition is one of the five scoring factors, and winter changes it. The Transportation Action Plan commits the City to prioritize clearing snow and ice on the All Ages and Abilities Network, including trails and protected bikeways, within 24 hours of a snow event — but the same plan notes the City still has to determine the best way to give neighborhood greenways and standard bike lanes the same quality of snow and ice clearance as trails and protected bikeways. That gap is real, and it is why a December score and a July score on the same painted lane are not the same number.

Is there bike share in Minneapolis?

Not in the docked form riders remember. Nice Ride shut down in 2023 after 13 years when its primary sponsor withdrew, and MinnPost reported in June 2026 that a large, seamless scalable bicycle system has been missing since 2023, with the Great Plains Institute holding the former Nice Ride assets and studying a relaunch built around e-bikes. Dockless shared bikes and scooters are licensed in the meantime. Brakeaway scores a shared e-bike trip identically to a trip on your own bike — pedal assist does not change the infrastructure under the wheels.

How often is Minneapolis route data updated?

Infrastructure data is refreshed monthly from OpenStreetMap and published City of Minneapolis, Park Board and regional datasets. Openings such as new curb-protected bikeway miles, the reopened Kenilworth and North Cedar Lake trails, and future All Ages and Abilities Network segments are reflected in scores within about 30 days of appearing in the source data.

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Last updated: September 24, 2026.