Summarizing a busy week on streets.mn as the snow melts quickly:
Audio: Last Week in MPLS Episode 6 is a wide-ranging recap while Podcast #60 – The Pros (and Cons) of the Move MN Bill continues coverage of MoveMN and its proposed legislation.
Visual: How to Bike in the City: Tips for the Bicycle Curious is a video intro to everyday urban cycling plus there’s a video answer to What causes congestion? The regular features include the Charts of the Day on Downtown Minneapolis Surface Parking Lots, Minneapolis St. Paul Airport Statistics and 2 on recent metro forecasting 2040 Growth Forecasts – Total Population and 2040 Growth Forecasts. There’s a striking map of Minneapolis in Friday Photo and the Sunday Sketch documents Twin Cities snow piles’ size and character along with the bicycles in some of them and, as usual, helps us notice things we’d probably miss.
Specific places/things illustrating general issues: Accept the Consequences of Opposing Density where Blaine misses out on benefits of density like neighborhood commercial areas; Preserving Despair at 24th and Colfax gets the most comments this week, but is less about despair than the story of two parcels in the Wedge neighborhood which illustrates struggles with preservation (and what’s “historic”), affordable housing and neighborhood diversity, and redevelopment/gentrification; The Bus Complexity Tradeoff uses Metro Transit’s Route 21 to show how transit planning trades ease of use (especially for riders who are not familiar with particular routes or the system as a whole) by increasing route coverage or route service hours by adding variations to the route.
What if? department What If Interstate 94 Was a Park? dreams about the effect on St. Paul if I-94 became the Twin Cities counterpart to New York City’s High Line or Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon Highway Restoration Project. Same Old Minneapolis? speculates about a Minneapolis where a bicycle and pedestrian coordinator is not needed (to replace the first such coordinator Shaun Murphy who recently left the position) because good design has been built into the entire planning and development machinery.
Other good stuff: One Small Step for Walkability — One Giant Leap for Mankato. describes a Mankato project to improve bike/pedestrian facilities as part of reclaiming Mankato’s downtown. Dogs Make Our Neighborhoods Better by encouraging walking, promoting human interaction and getting the humans to look around the place at the pace of dogs. Garage Logic—Cars Are Good – or rather, cars are often the right tool for the job in a post which tries to balance pro-bike principles and frequent cycling with using (and really enjoying) cars at other times with comments which highlight the difficulty of finding the right balance in both rhetorical tone, principled position, and actually getting around. Twin Cities Rapid Transit, Southwest LRT, and Prospect Theory or how we fear the loss of something and how that colors decision-making or stops it in its tracks.
Finally, streets.mn has been nominated by City Pages: Best Local Blog. You can see the other nominees and vote here.