It is 2am on a hot Wednesday morning. We are at 7th & Nicollet, onboard ...
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 […]
After posting about potential rapid transit routes in the Twin Cities here and potential regional rail routes in the Twin Cities here, now is the potential for intercity rail in Minnesota. History of Intercity Rail in Minnesota Post-Amtrak Like most states, Minnesota had a large intercity rail network operated by private freight railroads. With the […]
Tick, tick, tick…almost Election Day and Your Vote Matters – Get Out And Vote! Voting is the first, best form of citizen engagement, and Henry Pan writes, “the Your vote has the power to influence so many things transportation-related. For example, like how Metro Transit is run. There are very important races at the Federal level, […]
A glorious spring day made for an enjoyable walk through the eastern part of the Howe neighborhood, including the Mississippi River bluff. Indeed, I enjoyed the walk so much that I didn’t take as many photos as usual. Perhaps that’s just as well. Regular readers will already have seen quite a bit of the neighborhood […]
A friend compiled this series of Google Earth images. I scanned them, and intended to get on with my work, but I just couldn’t. I went through them again. And then again. I found myself rethinking the city I live in. Most people think Minneapolis looks like this: Or this: But, when you step back, […]
Zero score and seven years ago, the @streetsmn Twitter account was created, an anniversary we think is cooler than the Halloween blizzard: Today is the 7th anniversary of @StreetsMN on Twitter. We think @natehoodstp or @trnsprtst are to blame. pic.twitter.com/OkYszohQJn — streets.mn 🛴🚴🚌🚃🛶 (@StreetsMN) October 31, 2018 And the first posts on streets.mn were published […]
Here’s an a propos chart. It shows the number of children killed by cars by day of the year: A quote about it the data: BestPlaces analyzed more than four million records of auto fatalities from the Department of Transportation Fatality Analysis Reporting System. As the graph below shows, there have been 133 child pedestrian […]
