Tag Archives | featured

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 [...]

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Minnesota Vikings Stadium Needs 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 Odyssey. This is not a compliment. However, be this as it may, preference on architectural styling, no one should [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Washington Avenue proposed layouts are posted

Bill, David, and I have all written posts about the upcoming reconstruction of Washington Avenue, primarily to comment on questions we have with the traffic analysis.  In advance of the public open house meeting on Tuesday (at the Mill City Museum, you should attend), Hennepin County has posted four potential street layouts (thanks to @mplsbike for [...]

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Minnesota Rail Heritage

Streets Weekend: Hooray! Hooray! May 11 is National Train Day!

Saturday, May 11 is National Train Day. In the past, I wrote a post about local train-related activities for the wee ones and their posse of elders. Today, there are a number of local activities of interest to rail fanatics, kids, and the curious to celebrate National Train Day. Amtrak has a National Train Day [...]

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2035 Predictions for Washington Avenue Offer Precision Without Accuracy

Yesterday, Brendon Slotterback (my colleague here on Streets.mn) tweeted something that caught my brain. It was about the plans for Washington Avenue through downtown Minneapolis: The comment was a reaction to a debate taking place online this week (in admittedly small circles) about the recently released Hennepin County study on over traffic projections and alternatives [...]

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The electric future is quietly arriving

Something remarkable happened last year: The country’s mix of alternative-fueling infrastructure for cars suddenly flipped from being dominated by biofuels and lighter fossil-fuel byproducts to being primarily composed of electric charging stations—at least if you go by the pure numbers.There is an asterisk by “Electric” in the legend of the chart above, and the footnote [...]

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Let’s stop calling people “NIMBYs”

In my first post here, I come to you, oh humble readers of streets.mn, hoping to change your mind about one of the trendy words we urbanists throw around too often. The acronym NIMBY, which of course stands for “Not In My BackYard”, popped up at some point a few decades ago and has since [...]

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Lakeside Commons Beach

Too Little Parking? It Does Happen, In Fact

I’ve written previously about the angst and mayhem surrounding the parking situation at Blaine’s Lakeside Commons Park. To recap the history of this park and its parking situation: Lakeside Commons Park was opened in 2010 and built using standard set-aside land and monies from housing development in Blaine. The park has many features and amenities, [...]

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