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 [...]
Tag Archives | politics
Podcast #23 – Minneapolis Ward 10 with City Council candidate Lisa Bender
A special extra podcast for you, a conversation with Lisa Bender, who is running for the Minneapolis City Council in Ward 10, which stretches from Lake Calhoun and Uptown north-east to the Minneapolis Art Institute in the Whittier neighborhood. Among other things, Lisa has been an urban planner, nonmotorized transportation advocate, and coordinator of the [...]
Do Sidewalks Make You Vote Democratic?
A few months ago, I read the following tweet by über-famous polling guru, Nate Silver: @fivethirtyeight Heuristic: if a place has sidewalks, it votes Democratic. Otherwise, it votes Republican. It’s something I’ve heard before. Bill Bishop’s fascinating book about political and neighborhood also points to the deep connection between urban form and political affiliation. Central cities [...]
Five Years After the Bridge Collapse, Transportation Priorities are Even Worse
Today is the five-year anniversary of the 35W bridge collapse, and stories about it are all over the news. Entrancing tales of plummeting, accidental heroes, and seemingly random acts of engineering whirl about. But I’m interested in something else: what have we learned from the bridge disaster? Short of a Hollywood apocalypse, the image of the [...]
Sunday’s Openstreets: a temporary quantum leap into an alternate reality
What if there was a parallel universe (like in Quantum Leap or Fringe) where Minneapolis wasn’t almost completely dominated by the automobile? What if there’s a place where the city is almost the same, but ever-so-slightly different (kind of like Canada), subtly redesigned so that streets became a pedestrian paradise? What if you could say [...]
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 [...]
3/20/12 Minneapolis Transportation & Public Works Committee
The Transportation & Public Works Committee of the Minneapolis City Council discusses a lot of interesting stuff but seems to either use too many or not enough words to describe what they’re talking about. Here is an attempt to add some context to the dry but vital meeting topics. I’ve been summarizing them here at [...]
Anti-Anti-Light Rail: A Response to David Osmek
An op-ed is an op-ed, and I should know better than to respond to an anti-transit rural libertarian.* But the anti-light rail argument in the Star Tribune this week annoyed me all the same. It’s an argument that I’ve seen many many times, and no matter how many times you put it to bed, it’s a [...]
What is the Constituency of a Local Land-Use Decision?
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 space on the ground floor. The location is a commercial node in an affluent Minneapolis neighborhood that was first developed along a streetcar line in the early 20th [...]
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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
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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,...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
