Here’s a chart from the Met Council’s latest regional growth forecast, which is full of ...
Melvin Carter is the latest of the Saint Paul mayoral candidates to return our joint questionnaire that was developed in partnership with the Saint Paul Bicycle Coalition and Transit for Livable Communities. We are still looking forward to responses from candidates Pat Harris, Tom Goldstein, and Tim Holden. 1. How do you get around in Saint […]
I took a trip on the Red Line today to check out the new Cedar Grove station, and see out how the Twin Cities’ first BRT is doing. It’s fast and frequent, but it runs through a landscape that is designed to impede transit use. Thanks to the new station, which eliminated a very irritating detour, it’s […]
Every day at The Direct Transfer 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. […]
I don’t want to step on your shoes too much, folks, because critiquing Twin Cities transit planning is a noble effort. There are lots of nits to pick when it comes to how investment is playing out in the Twin Cities metro area, many of which you can find on this very site. To make […]
‘Tis the dog days of summer when hot dogs pant furiously, ice cream cones melt and fall on sidewalks (to be licked up by hot dogs), and lucky dogs get to go swimming. A light week here on streets.mn, but here’s what we’ve got: Look and listen Here to There Episodes 7 (SOCIAL COHESION […]
After a brief hiatus, Here to There is back with two new episodes. In episode 7, we take on the complex issue of social cohesion and the ways in which mobility and transportation impact the ability of individuals or groups to thrive as members of society. In the first half of the episode, we join […]
My first and second days in Columbia Park covered nearly all of the streets east of University Avenue. Therefore, on my third day, I focused on areas further west, although not as far west as the neighborhood extends. (From St. Anthony Parkway north to 37th Avenue, the neighborhood goes all the way to the river, […]
As another marathon CLIC (Capital Long-Range Improvement Committee) session wraps up, I thought it’d be valuable to share some of the projects that came up through the process and were proposed for funding or not, and what that decision process looked like. I recommend reading this blog post to familiarize yourself with the CLIC process […]
It’s been a good few weeks for electric cars. Elon Musk’s first Model 3s are about to roll off the assembly line. Rival automakers are lining up to prove they’re not out of the game, with VW claiming they’ll undercut the Model 3 on price and Volvo declaring they’ll be phasing out the internal combustion engine […]
The streets.mn Summer Picnic was July 15. It was hot and there was the little problem with double booking of the shelter, but there was also food, fun and some fine conversation about the website, people’s places, and what’s happening in the world. We might have picked up a few new writers, too (you can write, […]
One of the more popular ways for progressive candidates to excite a crowd or for pro-housing advocates to frame their arguments is to assert “Housing is a human right.” We should stop saying this, and call out candidates when they say it. It’s a lie. Housing isn’t a human right—at least not in practice. I […]
The Riverview Corridor study made news last week, after planners revealed the six alternatives that have survived the study’s analysis from which a final recommendation will be chosen. At the Pioneer Press, Frederick Melo has a good summary of what remains, and the paper ran a separate article on the absence of light rail from […]
Maryland Avenue is currently in the midst of a 4-3 conversion trial. You can read more about what led to the trial here and here. Part of the trial includes pedestrian refuges at two intersections. At these locations people walking across have a safe space to wait while drivers notice them and stop their vehicles. […]
The Dawn of Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) Previously I covered the cobrahead streetlights of the Twin Cities. Well, they’re almost gone. The thousands of high pressure sodium MnDOT lights on the freeways have been converted to LED (light emitting diodes) and the 90,000 Xcel energy lights are in the process of being converted. So it’s […]
The podcast this week is a conversation with Leif Pettersen, a travel writer and tourist public relations professional who lives in downtown Minneapolis. We sat down a few weeks ago in the Minneapolis skyway system to chat about a recent op-ed he wrote in the Star Tribune, calling for the creation of pedestrian-only streets downtown. We […]
By the next Sunday Summary, the annual picnic will be over and I can summarize what you missed. Wouldn’t it be more fun to join us at The streets.mn Summer Picnic is July 15! (and the short, informal meeting with the board beforehand) than just read about it later? A short holiday week means a smaller haul of […]
Although this walk covered about the same number of miles of street as the previous one, it covered several times as many square miles of area. That’s because I walked the perimeters of two large, roadless areas. The northern part of this walk looped around Columbia Park itself, that is, the park (largely a golf […]
In a recent post, Jason Brisson highlights the conflict between “top-down” planning, where experts provide the direction for a project, and “bottom-up” planning, where community members drive (ha, ha, drive, get it?) the project. I do not think this is an either/or issue where technocrats tell a community what it needs versus a community, no […]
This question is implied or encroached upon in nearly every modern planning conversation, but is not as often discussed directly. I think we should acknowledge it and talk about it openly. I will discuss this question in the context of the model city planners refer to as “bottom-up” city planning, give an example and then briefly […]
President Trump has a plan to pay for $1 trillion in infrastructure improvements over the next 10 years through various pseudo privatization schemes. There are still a lot of unknowns but the basic gist is; a private corporation is given rights to build and maintain some bit of infrastructure (or given existing infrastructure to care […]
