Members of the Greater 70th Homeowners Association have created a computer rendition of West 70th Street with the improvements they would like to see executed. The Greater 70th Homeowners Association is requesting repaving the road with asphalt to reduce noise, reducing the number of lanes in the street to only two, adding a bike lane in the side of the road to accommodate cyclists, and lowering the speeds to 25 mph

Dangerous Edina street recieves attention from worried residents

By Katherine Schleiss

For years, the Edina residents living on West 70th Street have experienced noisy traffic, speeding cars and dangerous trucks on their residential street.
Taking a stand against the current conditions of the street is the Greater West 70th Street Homeowners Association, currently working to build support in the Edina community for their movement to renovate West 70th Street and restore the residential integrity of the area.

Many parents are too afraid to let their children cross the street by themselves, even though West 70th Street is right next to a grade school and two parks. Horror stories of a child being hit by a car and cars being rear ended as they pull into driveways are common on West 70th Street.

“There are many driveways on West 70th Street, as it is first and foremost a residential street. It’s extremely dangerous, especially for the children. There have been many accidents, a child was even hit once, but so far all have been nonfatal,” said Kris Norton, representative of the Greater 70th Homeowners Association.
Even so, the people of West 70th Street would like to see extensive changes made to their corridor.

Specific requests of the Greater West 70th Street Homeowners Association include repaving the road with asphalt to reduce noise, reducing the number of lanes in the street to only two, adding a bike lane in the side of the road to accommodate cyclists, and lowering the speeds to 25 mph. Also, the Greater West 70th Street Homeowners Association hopes to rename West 70th Street as Arneson Parkway.

Kris Norton founded the Greater West 70th Street Homeowners Association after attending an Edina city council meeting, when she began the movement by recruiting a few likeminded neighbors. The group started out small, including only about six people. All were residents of the street who felt that West 70th Street was becoming too busy for a residential street.

The Greater West 70th Street Homeowners Association worked to gather comments from the residents of West 70th Street, collecting signatures for a petition to protect the future of West 70th Street. According to the Greater West 70th Street Homeowners Association’s official website, out of the 600 target homes, the Greater West 70th Street Homeowners Association received over 530 signatures from 400 households.

Today, the Greater West 70th Street Homeowners Association has grown in support and is now a complete bonafide operation. The Greater West 70th Street Homeowners Association has been receiving increasing attention from the media, especially after their series of road signs that draw light on the dangers of West 70th Street and list a web address, www.save70th.org.

Norton hopes that these measures will allow children to cross the street more easily to attend the grade school and parks in the area. On the corner of West 70th and Cornelia there is a grade school, Cornelia Elementary, and a park, Arneson Acres, located nearby.

The Greater West 70th Street Homeowners Association have been attending numerous Edina committee meetings, hoping to elicit a response from the city’s lawmakers. Currently, the city of Edina is conducting a one-year study to survey the street and decide what must be done.

“If the City of Edina were to remove in state aid and the conditions laid out by the Greater West 70th Street Homeowners Association, we would see an increase in home value for sure,” said Josh Sprague, Chairman of the Greater West 70th Street Homeowners Association.

If the city of Edina agrees to the measures laid out by the Greater West 70th Street Homeowners Association, West 70th Street would lose state aid funding. State aid, considered to be soft money because it can be allocated to different roads in different years, holds a variety of guidelines that is preventing the Greater 70th Homeowners Association’s hopes from taking effect.

Unless the state can obtain a variance from MnDOT, state aid roads cannot go below 30 mph. The Greater West 70th Street Homeowners Association hopes to reduce speed around Cornelia School to 25 mph.

Also, state aid roads must accommodate truck traffic, again thwarting the Greater 70th Homeowners Association’s plan to ban truck traffic on West 70th Street.
However, if state aid were to be removed from West 70th Street, money would have to be drawn from the transportation money included in Edina’s budget, according to Josh Sprague.

The Greater West 70th Street Homeowners Association wants to drop state aid in order to remove the red tape surrounding their operation. According to Sprague, trucks would be redirected to 77th Street, a street run by state aid.