I’m very tired of white people using the words “bulldozing” and “eminent domain” to spread ...
The draft Minneapolis comprehensive plan, Minneapolis 2040, is both a bold proposal at odds with the direction of the past century of American municipal policies, and yet unfortunately deferential in places to existing power structures. In other words, it’s a totally normal political document. The bold part, in housing policy, is to do away with […]
We can’t wait to see you this year at the streets.mn Annual Summer Picnic on Saturday, July 28th! The picnic will be held in the outdoor area of Lake Monster Brewing in St. Paul from 2-6pm, and is guaranteed to be fun for all. Bring yourself, bring your family, bring a bicycle if you want, […]
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. […]
After years of administering a complex and largely self-policed permit parking system, Saint Paul hired a consultant to do a study of the topic and might be making a few changes. And yet, it seems to me that these policy changes are too little and probably won’t make much difference to anyone to help achieve […]
This post is the first in a series originally posted by Neighbors for More Neighbors that will take a deeper dive into the draft Minneapolis 2040 Comprehensive Plan. The city is soliciting feedback on the plan until July 22nd, and it is important that they hear input on the elements that will help support N4MN’s […]
Here’s a fun video, via Kottke, about some strange geographic alignment perceptions having to do with the United States. It includes a shoutout to Minneapolis, which is at roughly the same latitude as Venice, Italy. Here’s the vid: The latitudinal alignment should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to […]
After living in Minnesota for four years, I decided last year to focus on getting away from the metro area and exploring greater Minnesota. I also decided to take up camping for the first time since childhood in 2017. As someone who is car-free, accomplishing these goals required some creativity on my part. I purchased […]
Here’s the week on streets.mn, a week in which free-range motorized scooters descended on the Twin Cities along with heat and humidity. We’ve got a hot take on those scooters, some thoughts on ping pong tables plus some continuing discussion of Minneapolis 2040, transit, bicycling, and a bit more: Scooters! Bill Lindeke announces I, For […]
When controversy happens… when tempers flare… we read the comments, so you don’t have to. We decided to read the comments on multiple articles and rate each article’s comments section on a scale of 1-5 stars, where 1 means “reading these made us feel dumber,” and 5 means “we have hope for our civilization and perhaps […]
In the last post, I discussed which foreign cities are most like Minneapolis in terms of population distribution. In this post, I’m going to present some numbers about the transit systems of those cities, in order to determine how extensive Minneapolis’ transit system could be, given the distribution of its population. Transit share in New […]
Visiting neighborhoods in alphabetical order generally means jumping around, often to quite different areas. But the Hale neighborhood is due east of Fulton (where I last walked), so I experienced some definite continuity. Not that the two neighborhoods are contiguous: Lynnhurst, Tangletown, and Page intervene. But the mere fact of being equally far south implies the neighborhoods […]
As I predicted a week ago when I submitted my piece on dockless bike share for City Pages, scooters have arrived on the streets of Minneapolis. Even more surprising, scooters have also arrived on the streets of Saint Paul, which means that I got a chance to ride them! Note: apparently Department of Public Works […]
[This post originally appeared on the Our Streets Minneapolis blog.] Many bike commuters cite reducing carbon emissions as their reason for biking. Does switching from a car or bus to a bike reduce one’s carbon footprint and by how much? Japan, China, the Netherlands, and Denmark collect the most data on carbon emissions and bikeable […]
Here’s a cool project by Geoff Boeing, a planning postdoc in California. Check out this street grid chart: The tiny part the center is the river-oriented part of downtown Minneapolis, where the streets are aligned to the Mississippi instead of the ordinal directions. Even better, Boeing made charts for a whole bunch of US cities. […]
It’s a maddening time lately, with political actors denying obvious truths and using scare tactics to sidestep honest dialogue. In any debate about change, political winds favor the side with the simple message: NO. It’s easy to fearmonger, deceive, and put words on lawn signs that conjure impending annihilation. I like to think Minneapolis is […]
I used to say the internet was suburban. Theory: Facebook (and possibly the Internet) is suburban. Twitter is urban. — Chris Steller (@chris_steller) April 13, 2013 The idea being, both on the internet and in the suburbs you get the feeling you could be anywhere. Nowadays I might offer some serious quibbles with that proposition, […]
The most recent transit-and-jobs “Access Across America” report came out this week and here’ s the latest map. It’s a heat map showing “jobs within a 30 minute transit ride” of any given location on the map. Blues are 0-5K, greens are about 10-50K, and yellows and oranges denote 100-500K jobs. (Other cities have even […]
A somewhat light week on streets.mn thanks to the Independence Day holiday (click here to read or reread the Declaration of Independence; one excerpt tripped the Facebook acceptable content filtering…worth reading the Declaration past the first few oft-repeated paragraphs to see the demands made and how the language might get flagged by Facebook). In the […]
This week’s episode features Trista Matas-Castillo, who is running for Ramsey County Commissioner in the 3rd District, which covers a big chunk of the northern neighborhoods of Saint Paul. Most people in Ramsey County cannot even name a County Commissioner, and yet county governments do a ton of work to help people and govern transportation decisions […]
There are many cities in the world that are roughly the same size as Minneapolis. There are many cities in the world that have high transit ridership. But do these two sets of cities overlap? This article series is an exercise in two things: determining which cities are most like Minneapolis and determining what is […]
