A street with no sidewalk got a walking path. Did people use it?

Mora is a city of 3,665 people and the county seat of Kanabec County, about 72 miles north of the Twin Cities at the junction of Highways 23 and 65.^[8] Portage Avenue runs east from the highway past Coborn’s grocery store and into residential streets. It has no sidewalk. People walking to the store, walking dogs or riding bikes share the road and its shoulder with cars, pickups and buses.

The city wanted to change that, and to show residents, partners and funders that the change mattered. A ribbon-cutting shows that a path exists. It does not show whether more people walk, or whether they walk where it is safer. For that, Mora needed a count of pedestrians on the street before the project and the same count after it.

In January 2025, MnDOT selected Mora as one of ten Minnesota communities for Active Transportation Planning Assistance, to build a community-wide active transportation plan.^[1] The program does not hand cities cash. MnDOT hires a consultant and grants the city its services, an estimated $100,000 of technical assistance per community, while the city covers any construction.^[5]

The plan was led by a coalition of the Mora Bike Club, Mora Ski Club, Mora Public Schools, the City of Mora, Kanabec County, MnDOT District 3, the East Central Regional Development Commission and residents. Its draft goals were to connect key destinations, to use MnDOT’s upcoming reconstruction of Highways 23 and 65 to add walking and biking improvements, and to center residents with disabilities, routes to school and the aging population.^[2] Walking and biking audits and community conversations ran in August 2025.^[2]

The City Council adopted the plan unanimously, making it an official city planning document that strengthens Mora’s case for state and federal transportation grants.^[4] Community Development Director Kirsten Faurie later told MnDOT that what pleased her most was that the suggested actions were “right-sized for our community.”^[5]

One of those actions was a demonstration project: a temporary, low-cost change to the street that tests a design before the city invests in a permanent one. On Portage Avenue it added an 8-foot shared walking and biking path on the south side between Frankie Lane and Walnut Street (County Road 17), separated from traffic by flexible delineator posts, plus painted curb extensions and marked crosswalks at Frankie Lane and at Walnut Street.^[3]

The timing matters. MnDOT plans to reconstruct Highway 65 through Mora in 2030 or later, and the design realigns Portage Avenue’s connection to the highway.^[6] The earlier corridor study estimated about $25 million of work and recommended paved trails on both sides of the highway.^[7] Evidence from Portage Avenue now can inform what gets built permanently then.

Most pedestrian counters are infrared beams or sensors built for trails. They see a 4 to 8 foot path and register anything warm that crosses it: a person, a dog, a deer or a car. On Portage Avenue, people walk on the shoulder and the new path a few feet from moving traffic. An infrared counter would have counted the trucks.

Waypoint’s cameras look across the whole street and classify what they see. Each passage is labeled as a pedestrian, cyclist or vehicle, by direction of travel, with an image behind every count that the city can open and check. Identities are not recorded and faces are never analyzed. Read more about multimodal activity classification and vision versus infrared counters.