Reading about Pat Borzi’s MinnPost article about the on-street parking system ($15 to park on street for Vikings game? Minneapolis smart meters raise rates for big events) hit me right at home. I read this as a raging left-winged Michael Moore fan might watch an O’reilly Factor broadcast – exasperated, frustrated, and wanting to throw [...]
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Minneapolis Should Focus on Data When Selecting Car-Sharing Provider
As a transportation researcher and a student of urban planning at the University of Minnesota, I am interested to learn of the City Council’s current efforts to select a provider for a city-wide on-street car sharing service. On May 1, the Star Tribune reported that city staff had recommended that the Council “authorize staff to negotiate terms [...]
The road to Maple Plain is legislated with good intentions
As the legislature slogs through another session, the House Transportation Finance Committee has a queue of bills to sort through. Most of these would provide specific appropriations to fund a single transportation project. A few may succeed on their merits and statewide significance, some may gain popular support resulting in a project’s inclusion in a bonding [...]
The Metropolitan Council’s anti-urban headquarters
This is the headquarters of the Metropolitan Council, the Twin Cities regional planning agency. It’s located in downtown Saint Paul. Notice anything about how it’s laid out? If you ever walk past, it may take a moment, but you’ll soon realize that the building doesn’t have any entrances onto the street. There are doors [...]
What To Do with Pro-Car Populism?
I was catching up with an old friend the other day, an economic geography professor who moved away for a job at a big West Coast university. We were eating dinner and swapping stories. “What are you working on now?” I asked. We exchanged little bits about our lives, homes, friends in common. Somehow as [...]
All the ways we subsidize growth
A few weeks ago, I attended the ULI Minnesota program “Kicking the Habit: Unsustainable Economic Growth” that featured streets.mn contributor Chuck Marohn delivering his Strong Towns message. A brief plug – if you’re not a member of ULI, I recommend it. It’s one of the few professional organizations in the land use field that tends [...]
Poll Shows Support For Sales Tax Hike to Fund Public Transit
A new statewide poll conducted by Minnesota’s three largest Chambers of Commerce—Minneapolis, St. Paul, and TwinWest—shows for the second year in a row that support for expanding the transit system in the metro area is strong. Seventy-nine percent of respondents said that Minnesota “would benefit from having an expanded and improved public transit system, such [...]
Newflash: St. Paul isn’t Minneapolis (and that’s a good thing)
If you were to read the City of St. Paul’s legislative wish list, you’d see a list of big projects such as: $14 million to improve the Children’s Museum $7 million for parking and transportation improvements at Como Park $32 million loan forgiveness tied to the Xcel Energy Center (in an effort to not pay [...]
Best Current Plan: Access Minneapolis Transportation Action Plan
We are almost there, good readers; 2013, and the end of our gilded series on your opinions on where our fair cities are headed in the next year and beyond. Unfortunately, I have the task of reporting on what was least popular subject: the Best Current Plan. Woe is me. Of the 10 subjective and [...]
Tax Land, Not Buildings
Earlier this year, the city of Minneapolis received a grant from Met Council to study possible strategies for doing away with its over-abundance of downtown surface parking. For lots of reasons, the fact that surface parking covers one-third of the entire surface area of downtown is bad news for the city. (You can find an [...]
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Bikes and Businesses Must Unite
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Minnesota Vikings Stadium Needs Better Urban Design
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Washington Avenue proposed layouts are posted
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Why I’m proud to be “offended” by the judgemental map of Minneapolis
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No Parking and De-Signing Streets
From the network
- Amazon sales tax is imminent: The Deets Tom Webb at the Pioneer Press reported that the Minnesota is reaching the end of an era when it comes to sales tax collection for online purchases. It was a good run,...
- 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...
- 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...
- Mostly Empty Syndrome: If you have been following this blog, you may have detected a theme, I don't like the public wasting money on un-needed infrastructure. Of course no-one endorses "wasting" money, we just dis...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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,...
- Full Cycle: A Bike Shop Working With Homeless Youth: Ten years ago an outreach worker started picking up discarded bikes from the bins and alleyways of Minneapolis. He gave them away to the homeless kids he was trying to reach. Bikes change lives be...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
