Time once again for another update on the big picture of driving in the United ...
West Broadway Open Streets is tomorrow, and streets.mn will be there tabling, talking, and hanging out on one of Minneapolis most dynamic, historic, and interesting streets. Please stop by! We’re also putting on the first ever Open Streets scavenger hunt photo contest! We hope to do this for Open Streets event in the future, but […]
We talk a lot about housing costs. For many people who have children, the cost of childcare can be equivalent to another full rent/mortgage payment each month. Hotpads used data from Care.com’s Care Index and the Census Bureau, and found that the average monthly cost of child care in the U.S. – including at-home and in-center care – […]
The strip of the Hiawatha neighborhood between 46th Avenue South and the river is distinctly different from the portions I walked on my first and second days. That’s especially true of the northernmost two sections visible in the route map, each of which was developed later than the main grid of the neighborhood. Between 40th and 42nd Streets East, […]
Insight Brewery. Familia skatepark. Five Watt Coffee. Headflyer Brewing. What do all of these places have in common, besides being almost unbearably hip? They’re all sitting on a death trap street named East Hennepin Avenue. Here’s a fun experiment: Next time you drive down East Hennepin, actually drive at the 30 miles per hour speed limit […]
Minnesota’s most predictable seasons — winter and roadwork — are no joke to the thousands of commuters who travel Interstate 35W through South Minneapolis every weekday. The $240 million construction project, which has reduced lanes and is closing stretches of the freeway altogether some weekends, will last until 2021. Inconvenience means opportunity for Metro Transit, […]
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. […]
Two bridges spanning the Mississippi River — one connecting Minneapolis and Saint Paul, and a similar bridge crossing the river a mile and a half upstream — exhibit design characteristics reflecting significant changes in how people move across bridges throughout our cities. The Saint Paul-Minneapolis structure joining East Lake Street and Marshall Avenue was […]
Three Rivers Park District is a regional park system that is one of the Met Council’s partner park systems. Minneapolis has long had a phenomenal park system rated the best in the country by the Trust for Public Land. Three Rivers Park District is maybe best thought of as Hennepin County’s regional park system excluding Minneapolis. (That’s […]
It’s almost Fall – we’ve passed Labor Day, but for Northfield (where I live) we have to finish up the Defeat of Jesse James Days this weekend before summer really ends. Do not call it “Jesse James Days” because there relevant part is defeating Jesse James and his gang (and stopping them from robbing the First […]
As summer winds down, we here at streets.mn are ramping up for fall with a full slate of events for everyone. Here are the events we have on our calendar for September: streets.mn Happy Hour on Wednesday, September 12th Join your fellow streets.mn comrades for a fall-time happy hour get-together! Let’s gather in a particularly transit- and […]
We constantly hear that driverless cars are just around the corner. We’re told they will revolutionize transportation and enable us to continue using our car-based transport and land-use system. If they’re made by Tesla, they’ll be powered by magic, solar-powered, super efficient batteries and we’ll all be able to keep living our hyper-mobile, hyper-consumptive lifestyles […]
I returned to the Hiawatha neighborhood, having previously walked most of the area north of 43rd Street. This time I started at 46th Street and Hiawatha Avenue, where I could cross the avenue from the 46th Street Station. Initially I walked north on Hiawatha to 45th Street—that’s the block shown in purple—then did the main blue loop from […]
I first visited Hall’s Island first before it was and island, for the 2nd time. To me it was a big parcel of land that Wilco played at a couple years ago. Why was it an island over 50 years ago, why not in 2016, and why again today? A brief history. The first known survey of […]
Today I’m bringing you a conversation with Christian Huelsman, a public space preservationist who has, for years, been an advocate for alleys, public spaces, and urban history in Cincinnati Ohio and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Alleys are not always places that get a lot of love in the United States, especially in cities that have a legacy […]
This summer, for the first time, I had the opportunity to use the A-Line arterial bus rapid transit (aBRT) on Snelling Avenue. I don’t mean ride the A-Line. I’d done that for the first time during a visit to the Twin Cities (I live in Philadelphia) the summer before, soon after the service had started operating. But […]
“People will walk a lot more than they say they will”—that’s the final observation in Bill Lindeke’s list from the State Fair. I was curious how much I do walk at the State Fair, so this year I took my GPS along. How much did I walk? About seven and a half miles. For most […]
We spend more for healthcare per person than any other country. By a significant amount. Some of this extra cost is in better healthcare facilities, more personnel, higher pay that attracts better caregivers, and other things. These increase costs, but not by much. The biggest chunk, 50-70% of our total healthcare costs, is that we […]
Here’s a map from a recent presentation by the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs out of the University of Minnesota. It shows a different perspective on the typical way of viewing income inequality in the Twin Cities. Instead of showing the Racially Concentrated Areas of Poverty (RCAP), this map flips the categories on their […]
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. […]
The world faces rapid man-made climate change that some scientists are saying is now beyond our ability to control. Yet we have a con-man president who believes, despite overwhelming evidence, that Climate change is a hoax. This is hardly surprising given that he’s been getting his information about climate change and many other issues from […]
