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 [...]
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Clarifying the Minneapolis Event Rate Meter Parking Debacle
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 [...]
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 [...]
NIMBY: Park and Ride? But Think of the Children!
Now, sure. In general, parking lots are an urban blight. Streetsblog is doing a March Madness bracket of parking craters. Streets.mn has repeatedly covered the issues of subsidizing parking over investing in responsible alternatives. Meanwhile, in the suburbs? We learn that Park-and-Ride lots make intersections less safe, and apparently invite predators to watch baseball practice. [...]
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 [...]
Lowertown’s Parking Challenge
This map sparked a few disparaging tweets, including a small #twitterwar with a City Council member. As it turns out, people get riled up about parking. It is as if they feel they are entitled to parking and the benefits thereafter. These blue spaces represent off-street surface parking lots and parking garages; but do not [...]
Don’t be Misled by Parking Space Economics
Donald Shoup’s famous parking policy book arrived the mail last week. Even though I’m about 5 years late to the party, the book still seems revolutionary. I still remember the first time I realized that parking dominates local neighborhood conversation. I was young and naïve and just starting to pay attention to Twin Cities’ urban [...]
University Avenue’s Evil Twin: 4th St SE
Gather around, students and colleagues. I am going to tell you a story about a magnificent avenue called University, and its less acknowledged disgruntled twin, 4th Street. Once upon a time, these two thoroughfares happily ran side by side. 4th Street housed one of Twin City Rapid Transit’s most used streetcar lines, and University Avenue [...]
Kids, Carpools & Walking: How a Safety Mentality Creates Unsafe Spaces
In the long-ago days of my misspent youth, I lived in an absolutely flat suburban community named for one of the seven hills of Rome. As children, we all walked to school, crossing two moderately busy streets along the way. On days when it unexpectedly began hailing sideways during the school day, a parent or [...]
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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SPUD
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Podcast #35 – Twin Cities Greenways with Dacia Durham and Matthew Hendricks
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The Yard at Downtown East
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Minnesota Vikings Stadium Needs Better Urban Design
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Clarifying the Minneapolis Event Rate Meter Parking Debacle
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Podcast #34 – The Future of Car Sharing with Christopher Bineham
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Jeremy Bergerson: What about the fact that cyclists lost a reliable,...
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Bill Lindeke: Incidentally, I spend a lot of time down at the SP...
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Brendon Slotterback: If meters are free (or cheap) you are less likely ...
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Justin Foell: Better ways to go to a Vikings game:
1) Take Pu...
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Bill Lindeke: Everyone (including Justin):
Feel free to comm...
From the network
- 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...
- Friday News Digest: Four days on the road is about the max for me before homesickness becomes overwhelming. At least, if "on the road" is without my wife and kids. I feel really fortunate to have been able to spend the p...
- Riding Minnehaha with Kids. Or not.: A few days ago, I was out for a ride with Isaiah's dad, Michael. You might remember Isaiah. He's the now 10-year-old who rode 150 miles in two days as a fundraiser for the Coalition. O...
- 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...
- Why must I travel, why can't I tele-conference: Two times in two days last week I was asked to fly to an east coast city for a half-day meeting. The meeting organizers offered to pay my travel expenses. I asked to save the travel money and tele-con...
- 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,...
- 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...
- We Need Transit and the Urbanism that Surrounds It: Kate Wolford’s Star Tribune commentary calling for more transit was spot on. Our peer cities (Denver, Portland, Charlotte, Salt Lake City, hell, even St. Louis!) are ahead of us in terms of buil...
- MN Blog Cabin Roundup, 5/17: If the DFL wants to impress, leave earlyfrom Wry Wing Politics by Joe Loveland…of all the things that DFLers could do to impress Minnesota the swing voters who will determine in 2014 which party rem...
- 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...
- Has There Ever Been a Streetcar Feasibility Study That Found Streetcars Unfeasible?: I ask this as a serious question: Does a streetcar study exist that concludes that a streetcar is unfeasible? Check out the studies that show up from a Google search (link). Without spending too much...
- So, You're Addicted to GeoGuessr...: Don't worry. You're not alone....OK, that's a good point. You actually are alone, technically speaking, in the sense that you're sitting in your room staring at your computer, taking a break between r...
