The Long Goodbye to a Bike Commute, and Its Return

For west-side cyclists, the Kenilworth Trail closure reshaped daily commutes from 2019 until the corridor's final reopening in March 2026.

When the Kenilworth Trail closed in 2019 for Metro Green Line Extension construction and stayed closed for nearly seven years, west-side cyclists who relied on it had to find another way downtown, and a temporary detour slowly hardened into routine. The reopening came in stages: the Cedar Lake Trail between Cedar Lake Parkway and Target Field reopened Nov. 28, 2025, and the last Kenilworth segment, between the Midtown Greenway and Cedar Lake Parkway, reopened March 25, 2026.

Over that span, the workarounds stopped feeling like workarounds. Riders who once rode a quiet, car-free corridor into downtown adapted to busier streets and longer ways around, rebuilding their commutes around the closure until the detour was simply the way to work. "This part of the trail has been, for the past few years, a little bit of a headache," Minneapolis cyclist Lacey Morgan told CBS News at the reopening. "These types of trails are so integral for, I mean, not just leisure riders, but commuters, tourists." A whole cohort of newer commuters never knew the trail as anything but closed.

The reopening of the Kenilworth and North Cedar Lake trails restored the easy link to downtown from St. Louis Park, Hopkins and Southwest Minneapolis. For longtime riders, it was the return of a route they had nearly given up on, and it came with a period of relearning: after years away, riders had to fold the corridor back into their routines and unlearn the detours that had become second nature.

The Green Line Extension is now slated to open in early 2027 after its budget climbed to about $2.86 billion.