On the whole, universities are a great thing for cities. They’re like modern day factories. They generate many economic benefits, providing jobs, attracting young people, fostering “innovation”, and other cultural linkages and synergies. Without its schools and universities (The U, Macalester, St. Thomas, Augsburg, St. Catherine’s, Metro State, and more) the Twin Cities would well [...]
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The Problem of Hiawatha Avenue
Hiawatha Avenue has been a thorn in the sides of south Minneapolis residents for years, and it has been the source of much discussion, including here on Streets.mn. In a recent post called The Urban Future of Hiawatha Avenue, Sam described the corridor as follows: Hiawatha is a “Stroad,” in the words of Chuck Marohn. Marohn [...]
Progress on Minnesota passenger rail projects, but funding is limited
For the past few years, the Minnesota Department of Transportation has been facilitating the Intercity Passenger Rail Forum, a monthly-scheduled meeting between policymakers at the state, city, and county levels plus various other organizations who are working on various projects to maintain existing passenger train service and add/restore other lines. Some meetings get canceled if [...]
Minneapolis, the Venice of the Upper Midwest
Special to streets.mn , April 1, 2012 The City of Minneapolis recently received Federal funding under the Advanced Quality Urban Waterways Initiative (New Starts) Retro-Transit program to investigate alternative scenarios for transforming city streets into canals. By revealing the underlying stream beds that have been paved over in more than 150 years of the city’s [...]
Transit-oriented political developments
The session’s not quite over, but probably all the bills that will pass this year at the MN Legislature have been introduced. I thought streets.mn readers might be interested in those bills that affect the state’s transit landscape, so here is a bowdlerized version of a summary from my personal blog. Warning: I am not [...]
Framing Regional Development
I was asked to talk to the Metropolitan Council on April 4 about their “Regional Development Framework“. This is what I plan to say. The goal of the region’s planners, and of the city itself, is to Maximize Accessibility. Cities (metros) have one purpose: To reach more things in less time. These things include jobs, [...]
Is Minneapolis Ready for Form-Based Codes?
Recent development debacles and near-debacles in Minneapolis have made me wonder if form-based codes could help the development process here. I’ve been researching form-based codes around the country lately, and I believe they may well have a role in my hometown. At a minimum, they can provide developers, city staff and elected officials, and neighbors [...]
Do Stadiums Bring Development?
Defense of the proposed Minnesota Vikings downtown stadium is typically accompanied by a handful of arguments. One of the most prominent being that of associated development. If we build it, the developers will come! Unfortunately this commonplace argument is based little in reality. “The mayor’s position is he believes that the site is really prime [...]
2/28/12 Minneapolis Transportation & Public Works Committee
The Transportation & Public Works Committee of the Minneapolis City Council is a not-very-interesting meeting where a lot of interesting stuff is talked about. Here is an attempt to add some context to the dry but vital meeting topics. I’ve been summarizing them here at streets.mn since the beginning of the year; here’s a list [...]
Upcoming Metro Transit Meetings
Big changes are coming up at Metro Transit, which in Minnesota means big meetings. Next week will be the first meetings on the new Rapid Bus concept, aka Baby BRT. I wrote about this last fall on streets.mn’s predecessor site, TC Streets for People, and twice on my personal blog. The following week will see [...]
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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
