No they wouldn't. Vehicles can drive over gutters.
Though I know you detest/oppose them (and Matt harps about them being coded in state law), 11ft lanes would also be needed to meet minimum state-aid standards. Short of convincing a GOP legislature to change them, you'll need to keep the lanes 11ft to have a snowball-in-hell chance of getting this approved.
And given the curves, keeping a curbed 10ft lane would cause trouble for buses and trucks (there are both school buses along this route and it's a city truck route).
According to the AA, exactly 321 people attended the two open houses prior to the elimination of the West Broadway LRT alternative. And I'd love to see what exactly was presented to them that they used to "decide" that this wouldn't work for their community.
Large numbers, actually, given the lack of interest most residents tend to have in attending transportation project meetings. But the bottom line is: the community did have an opportunity to comment, both in meeting and online...I participated in the latter.
For those of you who've never been to North Minneapolis, there are almost no businesses on this stretch of West Broadway. The city owns nearly all of it.
For those of you who've never been to North Minneapolis, most of the businesses are either at the Penn intersection or east of Humboldt. And for the LRT to be routed east of Penn, it also would have had to continue on West Broadway east of Humboldt, in front of those same businesses...
As for the parcels, I looked that up. There are 67 parcels total on both sides of West Broadway between Penn and James. The city owns 25 of them, with almost all of that concentrated in two areas: south side of Broadway between Penn and Logan, and the north side of Broadway from just north of Newton to Knox. Apparently, that wide open space on the northeast side and south of Logan is owned by an LLC and not the city.