By Catharine Richert

MPR.org/90.1 FM

Rochester has big plans to add 30,000 jobs over the next 20 years, driven by Mayo Clinic’s expansion. That rapid growth, however, could make downtown a mess if city leaders don’t figure out how to handle the traffic.

The city is spending $5 million now to craft an extreme transportation makeover. But even as developers plow ahead building new condos and hotels downtown, there’s no consensus on how to remake the transit system. Solutions are likely to revolve around getting people out of their cars. That may not be an easy sell.

“We need a game changer,” said RT Rybak, the former Minneapolis mayor who’s now vice chair of Rochester’s Destination Medical Center economic development board. “We have to be really smart about the way people move throughout Rochester. We can’t do it by just doing more of what we’re doing now because it would overwhelm the city with parking ramps and congestion.”

Rochester’s transportation plan, he said, has to support the huge influx of people envisioned in the Destination Medical Center, the massive downtown transformation effort expected to bring tens of thousands of new workers and more Mayo Clinic patients to Rochester’s core.

Some 200 residents recently got a first look at four prospective plans to make Rochester easier to navigate for residents and visitors. The mix of potential solutions included better bike lanes, unmanned vehicles and wider sidewalks. Armed with green and red stickers, residents told planners what they liked and disliked.

Jo Derouin put a green sticker on a picture of a bus equipped with a bike rack; an app to track bus arrivals also got her vote. But a picture of bike lane on the side of the road? Not so much. Derouin gave it a red sticker. She said she thinks they’re dangerous.

“Sometimes they’re between rows of cars, sometimes they are on the edge,” said Derouin, who lives in the downtown area. “There’s no continuity of what they do between different areas.”

Derouin also said she wanted to see more downtown parking. But that traditional approach is getting a thumbs-down from decision makers. More parking is slated for downtown, but the number of spots won’t grow in proportion to the growth of the city.

Rochester’s transportation options need to accommodate a growing work force in the relatively low-paying retail and hospitality industries, said Andrea Kiepe, who works for the St. Paul-based nonprofit Transit for Livable Communities. Those workers need flexible and affordable transit to get to jobs downtown, where housing is too expensive for them, she added.