Every day at The Overhead Wire we collect news about cities and send the links ...
July 10, 2016 Downtown, West Side 18.3 Miles I frequently look at maps of Saint Paul. Call it a “blogupational” hazard. Sometimes I’ll plan a ride with the help of Google maps. Occasionally I’ll use an official City of Saint Paul paper map. Street maps from the mid and late- 1800s to the 2010s are […]
The Jordan neighborhood in Minneapolis’s Near North community forms a herniated right triangle thanks to the role of West Broadway Avenue as its southwestern border. In the route map, the light blue tint indicates the full extent of the neighborhood. My first day’s walk was restricted to the western tip of the triangle. The darker […]
It is 2am on a hot Wednesday morning. We are at 7th & Nicollet, onboard the 5 to North Minneapolis. There was a mother and their baby, seated on their stroller, playing peak-a-boo. Towards the back, four guys ran off at the last minute because someone they knew was in the area. Still, others were […]
As southwest Minneapolis takes a strong stand against density by arguing for the preservation of the “character of their neighborhood”, let’s take a look at the inefficiencies of living in a single-family house. Take me, for example. I live in south Minneapolis in a single-family house. It’s 1,800 square feet. The occupants of the house […]
Editor’s note / correction: The original post did not state that Bob Roscoe is a paid consultant on this project. Per streets.mn editorial policy #14, possible conflicts of interest should be disclosed before publication. streets.mn regrets the error. Many places of worship are built for unambiguously ecclesiastic use for the religious function of its […]
Sometimes the fun is the journey, not the destination, and thus my series of phototours of scenic, notable, or historic highways and the sights found on or nearby. After a few much shorter ones for my former North Star Highways site, I did a full one on US 14 across southern Minnesota. Next up is […]
Hands-down my favorite part of downtown Minneapolis this past summer was the pianos on Nicollet Avenue. Not necessarily a new idea, to be sure, but I was struck by the talent of seemingly random players and the joy it gave passers-by. Any given morning on my walk from the train to the office I’d pass […]
Every day at The Overhead Wire we collect news about cities and send the links to our email list. At the end of the week we take some of the most popular stories and post them to Greater Greater Washington, a group blog similar to streets.mn that focuses on urban issues in the DC region. […]
Via the Met Council comes this interactive map of transit-oriented public parcels that can be developed. It allows you to search and view publicly owned parcels of land within 1/2 mile of select existing and planned transit facilities. The parcel dataset used for this map was derived from the MetroGIS Regional Parcel Dataset, and is the result […]
If you are interested in Twin Cities history, one of the more amusing things this year was the parallel development in Minneapolis and Saint Paul of dockless bike sharing systems. Dockless bikes are a big leap forward in bike sharing technology — the use of which is something that tech blogger Kottke recently compared to bluetooth […]
The streets.mn Board Development Committee is extending the deadline to apply for the streets.mn board by 48 hours to 8:00 a.m. Wednesday morning. Express your interest here: Deadline 8am Wednesday, November 14 We’re working hard to make sure our board looks more and more like the people who live in Minnesota’s communities. We’re building our capacity […]
Join us! Support us! Tomorrow is the last day for you to apply to join the streets.mn Board; here’s Why You Should Apply for the streets.mn Board of Directors. Not ready to join the Board? There are more ways to support streets.mn, including Give to the Max Day this Thursday, November 15, 2018; here’s more information […]
Winter is coming. So is Give to the Max Day, which will take place Thursday, November 15, 2018. We realize that Give to the Max Day is really noisy on social media, so we thought we’d lay out our case early here: streets.mn is a 501(c)3 non-profit, fully registered with state and federal tax authorities. Your […]
The Humboldt Industrial Area has hardly any public streets to walk. The interior is devoid of them aside from one cul-de-sac portion of 47th Avenue North, shown in red on the route map. Even the perimeter isn’t all public right-of-way: the southern border is the historic Soo Line, now Canadian Pacific Railway. That railway is […]
Via the City of Minneapolis, here is a chart of greenhouse gas emissions from citywide activities. Greenhouse gas emissions decreased 3.1% in 2016 compared to the 2015. Increases in emissions from natural gas consumption, solid waste, and wastewater were offset by decreases in emissions from electricity consumption and on-road transportation. The City adopted goals in […]
If you’re reading this, chances are good that you like streets.mn. For seven (!) years now, we’ve been leading conversations about the future of our streets, neighborhoods, and cities here in Minnesota. If you can think of a urban design issue, you will probably find articles and ideas about it here in the archive. Depending on […]
Where do people want to live? The short answer: Minneapolis. Millennials don’t want to spend their lives inside cars, and older residents don’t want to be dependent on driving for simple tasks like getting groceries or picking up a few things at Target. People increasingly want to live near the amenities of a city as […]
There have been a lot of posts about the Minneapolis 2040 Comp Plan, including many, many public hearings in which YIMBYs and NIMBYs stand up and fight for more housing, or less housing, or neighborhood character. Every city in the Met Council is supposed to have a 2040 plan. Meanwhile, we are all frogs in […]
Every day at The Overhead Wire we collect news about cities and send the links to our email list. At the end of the week we take some of the most popular stories and post them to Greater Greater Washington, a group blog similar to streets.mn that focuses on urban issues in the DC region. […]
Like many of the maps I find I came across a webpage via Twitter, hat tip to @stateofthecity. The webpage takes data from the Global Human Settlement Layer and runs it onto Google Maps. This is the result, Human Terrain by Matt Daniels (@matthew_daniels). I immediately panned to tool over to Minnesota and geeked out. Something I […]
