In a departure from transit and housing, today we present a map created by Imgur user Fejetlenfej. ...
Upon reading this recent post by Alicia Valenti, I decided to take a walk with my camera around my own neighborhood. Here is a “slide-show” (pun intended) of the proceedings: On my walk, I was able to talk with some others about their bipedal experiences of the day. Outside the MPD 3rd Precinct, I spoke with […]
Metro Transit has 14 lines that they advertise as high-frequency. According to Metro Transit, these lines, or the portions of them that are high-frequency, will have service every 15 minutes from 6 AM to 7 PM on weekdays, and from 9 AM to 6 PM on Saturdays. But do they? To find out, I checked […]
Randy Shaw’s new book, “Generation Priced Out“, is full of info about housing affordability in the US. It’s a complex topic, and Shaw is well versed in housing debates, patterns, and studies from his perch dealing with preserving low-income housing in San Francisco, the nation’s most expensive market. One of the challenges I always face […]
Presumably you’ve read my first and second article regarding the potential ordinance amendment for “Sustainable To-Go Packaging” for restaurants, coffee shops, grocery stores and other establishments. If you haven’t please stop reading this article and go read the first 2. Welcome back! The vote in favor or against the Sustainable To-Go Ordinance update was supposed […]
Previously I’ve written a six part series of Minnesota’s trunk highway system. Now it’s time to go back periodically for topics that were skipped as outside the main story arc, or that were deserving of separate articles. One of these is the story of our interstate system. The Dawn of the Dream As late as […]
July 22, 2017 Macalester-Groveland, Summit Hill, Downtown, Lexington-Hamline (Union Park) 16.7 miles The very unconventional home at 1523 Sargent Avenue prompted my first pause, shortly after jumping on the bike. There are so many shapes, colors, angles and materials to take in. Summit Hill Downtown Pleasant Avenue became home to new townhomes in 2017 dubbed […]
Home & Garden Television (HGTV) recently announced a new special called Rock the Block. The premise of the show is that four of the network’s top designers will be given four nearly-identical houses on a suburban block and each a budget of $150,000 and four weeks to turn them into dream homes. The designer that […]
A cartographer living in Madison, Wisconsin, Daniel Huffman makes maps as an art form. He has created typewriter maps, a chart of islands called “Round Island,” a wine country map in the style of the Oregon Trail, an unfurled map of Lake Michigan’s shoreline and an entire series of River Transit Maps. It’s fascinating to see our waterways […]
It wasn’t always like this. This changed roughly five years ago. I’m talking about the parking restrictions, that is. See that sign? As I said, roughly five years ago my neighborhood’s sixty-year-old streets reached their functional end. When we moved in about 11 years back the streets were horrendous. Every Spring potholes were patched. The […]
February 2019 was a record-breaking month for snow in Minnesota with 39 inches of snowfall in just four weeks, an amount shattering the previous record of 26.5 inches in February 1962. Students have missed several days of school and some workers have shifted their commute mode to cross-country skiing, but the snow has been less […]
Check out the new experimental feature Forum Friday: Threads of the Week. Did you know about the Forum? Somewhat hidden from the rest of the website, lots of good conversation happens on the Forums and this feature aims to bring a little bit of that into the blog space. Let us know what you think. […]
Welcome to the new, experimental streets.mn feature: Forum Friday! We’re hoping to highlight some active discussions around current affairs on our forums. We encourage everyone to check them out! This week on the streets.mn forums, long-running threads on several ongoing projects are back to life as breaking news brought them to the forefront again. Here […]
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. […]
This podcast is an interview with Terri Thao, who is running for City Council in Saint Paul’s 6th Ward, on the East Side of the city. Terri Thao is a long-time non-profit professional, former Planning Commissioner, and community organizer, among other things, who has spent years working on issues around housing, transit, and economic development […]
The Metropolitan Council is proposing to eliminate Route 614, which operates Monday-Friday between Ridgedale Mall and apartment complexes in Minnetonka Heights (just north of County Road 101 and Townline Road/Highway 62). Frequency of this route is around every hour. The first northbound bus leaves at 5:16 AM, and the last northbound bus leaves at 5:35 […]
The percentage of people of color and renters serving on the boards of Minneapolis neighborhood organizations has remained flat since 2014, far below their share of the city’s population as a whole. This is according to a demographic survey conducted by the city’s Neighborhood and Community Relations department. The results were presented to the City […]
One of my old roommates used to be in charge of quarterly safety drills at his workplace. He liked to say, “Safety is not just another word here on Friendship Street.” We lived on Friendship Street. When we gave directions to our place, we told people to look for the street where everyone was hugging. […]
Using US Census data, Bloomberg recently published an analysis of the time we spend commuting in the US. Washington DC tops the chart of large metro areas (>10 counties; >60,000 people), with an average daily commute of 73.4 minutes. Minneapolis, MN metro area comes in seventh, with 53.8 minutes daily. The article also […]
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. […]
At the corner of Portland Avenue and Third Street in Minneapolis, I stood in a large sneckdown corner, no tire tracks in the area since the snow had started falling only a few hours previous. (For the uninitiated, a sneckdown “is effectively a curb extension caused by snowfall,” according to Wikipedia, which calls this charmingly […]
