I just got back from spending a week in West Palm Beach, meeting with New Urbanists and, together, plotting a makeover and economic revival of America. My voice is gone and after successive nights of little sleep and 14 hours of travel Sunday, not much stamina either, but I’m left with one thought that I [...]
Trunk Highway Main Streets
One of the more challenging issues facing Main Streets in Minnesota is situations where that ...
An alternative design for Park and Portland
The Minneapolis Bike Coalition has put forward their preferred design for a redesigned Park & Portland (for background on these streets, see here and here). Full disclosure: I helped with the street rendering. From the Bike Coalition blog: Key features: Remove a traffic lane that isn’t needed. The core of this proposal is transforming one of [...]
Experiencing City Streets: 30 Days of Biking
Another year of 30 Days of Biking has come and gone. In addition to miserably failing to tweet regularly, I missed a few days of riding while I was traveling on the east coast. All the same, for me, this was the best year of 30 Days of Biking to date. For folks who haven’t [...]
Sprawl and the Big Crunch
Almost all of us are guilty of living sprawling lifestyles, either now or in the past. Sprawl is a huge urban planning problem, but it’s a difficult one to handle simply because it’s so prevalent. There’s little will to change when everyone shares part of the blame, but we must find ways to do so [...]
Removing our Least Useful Bridges
There has been a lot of discussion across the internet lately about how we’re digging ourselves into a financial hole by overspending on infrastructure that isn’t very productive. Chuck’s post a few days ago called Paved with good intentions is a good example. For the purposes of this post, let’s just assume we agree with [...]
Hooray! Hooray! FHWA Non-Motorized Transportation Pilot Project Report Released Today!
We finally have the report on SAFETEA-LU’s Non-Motorized Transportation Pilot Program! The FHWA released the report today, and it is now available to all for their delight and edification (PDF). This final report has been being promised since 2009 or so, with delivery dates being pushed later several times. This report has been of great [...]
The Benefits of High Speed Rail
[V150 train, modified TGV, conventional World speed record holder at 357.2 mph from WikiCommons] The following post is by guest writer Matt Sindt, a recent graduate of the Hamline University School of Law who has worked in both state and local government, serving as a staffer on both the Business, Industry and Jobs Committee, and the [...]
Paved with good intentions
How can a country that is so wealthy be in such enormous debt? How can a country that can build such marvelous transportation systems not find the money to sustain them? How can a people that enjoyed decades of unrivaled economic hegemony — staggering levels of growth beyond anything seen in human history — be [...]
How the neighborhoods got their shapes
Once upon a long, long time ago, Minneapolis didn’t have any neighborhoods. Well, of course the city had neighborhoods, but they were the sort of organic shorthand referring to important intersections, like Cedar-Riverside or Chicago-Lake, you know, the kind of place that in the old world would have been called a square and given its [...]
Why urbanists (and others) should love the coming of the robot car (Part 1)
Much has already been written on the robot car, but streets.mn’s own Bill Lindeke posits that they “will not save us“, citing three problems. While I agree that we probably can’t be saved (from what exactly I can’t say, there are many options), but in my opinion Bill and other urbanists should welcome the robot [...]
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The Magic of Streetcars, The Logic of Buses
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Urban Highway Removal in Minneapolis?
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The Problem of Hiawatha Avenue
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A Typology of Beg Buttons
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Time for a change on Park and Portland
