Whatcha’ doing this Friday night at 5pm? Nothing? Oh, that’s cool. Kinda. Join local urban and transportation celebrity bloggers on the 1st Annual Minneapolis Bike ‘n’ Brew Tour. The route is a simple 8 (eight) miles that start at Harriet Brewing Company at 5pm. The route will then progress up through Northeast as the night goes on. [...]
“Downtown is For People” Fifty-five Years Later
I discovered Jane Jacobs rather late. It was 2003 a few years after college. Due to insufficient funds, I’d recently moved home from New York City, into my mother’s basement back in Saint Paul, and was spending much of my time reading books. The way I remember it, I was reading through a book of [...]
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 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. [...]
Washington Avenue Traffic Projections
Hennepin County is preparing to reconstruct a portion of Washington Avenue between Hennepin Avenue and 5th Avenue South. There has been much discussion of this project, in part because the reconstructed road may or may not include some sort of bike facilities. Today I got an email about an upcoming public meeting for the project, and I noticed [...]
Podcast #32 – Talking Walking with Members of the Minneapolis Pedestrian Advisory Committee
The podcast this week is a conversation with two members of the Minneapolis Pedestrian Advisory Committee, Scott Engel and Peter Janelle. The Pedestrian Advisory Committee, or PAC, is one of the city’s citizen committees, and the PAC advises city staff and elected officials on how to improve walking in the city. Scott, Peter, I sat [...]
Why Beards are like Good Urbanism
I always enjoyed a good challenge. “A man doesn’t grow a beard. A beard grows a man” – Internet Proverb A beard isn’t something you grow overnight. Neither is a city. Both these seemingly unrelated entities need to mature, fill in and be properly groomed, yet still maintain their distinct ruggedness. But why when it comes [...]
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 [...]
Why I’m proud to be “offended” by the judgemental map of Minneapolis
I’m sure the frequent readers of streets.mn have already viewed last week’s buzz map of Minneapolis. It depicts Minnesota’s largest city with a solid touch of satire and preconceived notion poking-fun-of. If you haven’t seen it, here it is below: Obviously, this post may make you feel differently from your next door neighbor. You may [...]
Why Do We Need Laws To Prevent Parking in Bike Lanes?
Seriously, why? Today’s Star-Tribune features an article about current legislative activity at the state Capitol oriented to banning parking in bicycle lanes. Really? Why is this even an issue? It’s already legal to park there? Why? Is it legal to park in traffic lanes? No. Is it legal to park blocking alleyways? Don’t think it [...]
Podcast #31 – Minneapolis Ward 13 with City Council Candidate Linea Palmisano
The podcast this week is another in our string of city council candidates interviews, a conversation with Linea Palmisano, who is running for City Council in Minneapolis’s Ward 13. Ward 13 is made up of the neighborhoods in the South West corner of the city, on the far side of Lake Harriet to the Richfield [...]
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 [...]
Bikes and Businesses Must Unite
Like the Streets.mn Voter Guide, the Minneapolis Bicycle Coalition has posted answers to bicycling related questions posed to city council and mayoral candidates. Question six asks “when would you vote against or overrule a BAC recommendation?” I read those responses carefully, and as expected, most candidates didn’t really take that one on or provide a [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Living in Car Country
For most Americans, driving is routine. This isn’t to say that it’s impossible to get around by other means—by bus, say, or by bicycle—but in most places, compared to driving, such alternatives tend to be inconvenient, uncomfortable, inefficient, and sometimes even unsafe. As a result, when most Americans need to go somewhere, they reflexively reach for [...]
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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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No Parking and De-Signing Streets
From the network
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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,...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
