I was traveling down St. Anthony Boulevard with my then 3 year old daughter. She was learning her alphabet and noted the P on a lot of street signs. Every time she saw it, she shared her observations. “P with a slash through it”, “P with a slash through it”, “P with a slash through [...]
About David Levinson
David Levinson is a faculty member of the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota and Director of the Networks, Economics, and Urban Systems (NEXUS) research group. He also blogs at The Transportationist and can be found [@trnsprttnst]. Levinson has authored or edited several books, including Planning for Place and Plexus: Metropolitan Land Use and Transport and numerous peer reviewed articles. He is the editor of the Journal of Transport and Land Use.
The Yard at Downtown East
In a veritable bacchanalia of developments, we have seen three major inter-related activities in Minneapolis’s Downtown East: Washington Avenue has been covered extensively on Streets.MN already, so I won’t go further into that now. The others are the Star Tribune site and the Stadium. The Yard The Ryan proposal for redeveloping the Star Tribune site [...]
SPUD
This post will be unpopular. I went with my family to an event for National Train Day (as suggested by a recent post by Julie). We drove to St. Paul since the Green Line is not yet open. Driving is break-even with paying for 3 fares on the bus round-trip, and my once non-driving, Amtrak-riding [...]
Traffic on Washington Avenue – Raw data edition
Prompted by Brendon’s recent post (and a Twitter conversation with Ethan and Janne), I got interested in some of the traffic counts and engineering on Washington Avenue. I looked at the Washington Avenue Traffic Operation Analysis by Alliant Engineering for Hennepin County. On p.11 of this document are traffic “counts” the report said were collected [...]
Time Evolution of Twin Cities
Google Earth Engine lets you see the evolution of Landsat photos. We did this for the Twin Cities. Go here: Timelapse of Minneapolis – Saint Paul Andrew notes: I think the most amazing thing is seeing the path of the Minneapolis tornado appear in 2011
The case for (and against) public subsidy for roads
This post is co-authored with David King (a displaced Minneapolitan who lives in New York, and who blogs at Getting from here to there) In recent weeks we have thought about public subsidy for transit and university subsidy for parking. But what about roads? Are roads worthy of public subsidy? Let’s think about our framework of excludability vs. [...]
We are Car Country
Join local author Chris Wells (recent Streets.MN podcast interviewee) for a reading and discussion of his new book, Car Country: An Environmental History, at 7 p.m., April 30, at Common Good Books in St. Paul. “Witness the emergence of [America's] automobile-dependent landscape in the pages of this book, and you will never again see the world around you again [...]
The case for (and against) public subsidy for public transport
This post is co-authored with David King (a displaced Minneapolitan who lives in New York, and who blogs at Getting from here to there) In most of the United States and much of the world, public transport is publicly subsidized. Everyone in an area pays for transit whether or not they use it. This was not always the [...]
Mis-structuring employee parking charges: An example from a local university
Parking in a structure is the quintessential private good. It is excludable (no pay, no park), and it is rivalrous (if I park in a space, you cannot). Someone at Metropolitan State University does not understand this, and is instead trying to get all employees and students to pay for a parking structure at the [...]
Forums
You may have noticed we have added a “Forums” tab to our menu. If you are adventurous, you may have clicked on that and been taken to UrbanMSP. Unlike Streets.MN, UrbanMSP is a forum, meaning anyone can talk about a variety of topics, not just what is posted on the blog. We are happy to [...]
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Bikes and Businesses Must Unite
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Minnesota Vikings Stadium Needs Better Urban Design
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Why I’m proud to be “offended” by the judgemental map of Minneapolis
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Washington Avenue proposed layouts are posted
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No Parking and De-Signing Streets
From the network
- What is the Constituency of a Local Land-Use Decision?: cross-posted at Streets.mn In the Linden Hills neighborhood of Minneapolis, a local entrepreneur put together a proposal to develop a surface parking lot into a 5-story condo building with retail s...
- Pedestrians prohibited on streets.mn: Today on streets.mn I examine Bloomington’s latest bungle. Bloomington is the suburb I lived in the longest, it has some really nice topography for the Twin Cities that great parks like Hyland,...
- Financial Deformation: I'm in the final quarter of The Great Deformation - The Corruption of Capitalism in America by David Stockman. If the book was not so long I would want to do it twice because I feel like half of...
- 2012 Nice Ride flows revisited: For the last two years, I’ve mapped the flows of the Nice Ride bikes. I’ve always been slightly dissatisfied with the results, since bikes were obviously shown taking routes that any san...
- Let’s Get the Urban Details Right in Downtown East: On our way to the ceremony unveiling the plan for the five-block Star Tribune property in Downtown East, my son Shaw and I got off the train at the Downtown East/Metrodome station and I was asked dir...
- David Harvey on CIty Monopolies and the Art of Rent: David Harvey is wise and usually has interesting things to say. I'm no Marxist but I agree with many of the things he brings up in this interview with Spiegel. I agree with this especially:SPIEGEL ONL...
- Washington Ave Public Meeting Recap: The Washington Avenue public meeting was held on May 14 from 5-7pm. It was an "open house," which means that people could drop in anytime in that two hour window to see the four different op...
- Bank regulation that makes sense: Barataria RKO Pictures“Too Big To Fail” (TBTF) is the standard for socialized risk and privatized profits. The biggest banks enjoy an implied bailout under D...
- Bikeway Functional Class: I’ve been reading a lot of bike plans lately, and there seems to be a pretty wide variety of frameworks used by agencies to categorize bikeways. In particular, I’m intrigued by the variet...
- Minneapolis to use Value Capture to help pay for proposed Nicollet Central Streetcar line: The Strib reports: State gives city new tool to fund streetcars : "One provision in the state tax bill could have a significant impact on Mayor R.T. Rybak's dreams of building a streetcar in Minn...
- Twin City Street Musicians #11: [Guitar. T station, Somerville MA.] [Chinese instrument. Harvard Square, Cambridge MA.][Bass and guitar, West Bank Campus, Minneapolis.] [Guitar. Santa Monica Pier.] [Guitar. Lyndale Avenue, Minneapol...
- Minnesota Vikings Stadium FAIL – We need better urban design: The architecture of the Minnesota Vikings Stadium: take it or leave it? Personally, I think it looks like a cross between a laser jet printer, a drunk Frank Gehry and something out of 2001: A Space Od...
