Streets.mn has a new Events Calendar for upcoming land use and transportation happenings such as presentations on particular projects, interesting speakers, open streets events and more. You can submit upcoming events, too.
In the News Department: In case you missed it, the Super Bowl will be coming to Minneapolis in 2018. Less well-publicized than the winning bid, however, were the change in plans for the park next to the new stadium – at least until now: Super Bowl Bid Bust: Why Are We Destroying The Yard With The Pole Building?
Particular projects: What would Theodore Wirth do? Perhaps he’d agree that Removing the Cedar Ave Bridge: Now Is The Time as part of the Nokomis Hiawatha Regional Park master planning process. SWLRT continues to generate posts – the next stop on the line is Anatomy of a Proposed Urban Railway: Penn Station (last week Van White station). Washington Avenue SE Revisited follows up on a post from 2012 and flags some issues just before the Green Line opens on June 14. Across the Atlantic, the EU BICI series continues with a stop in one of my favorite cities: Cycling Tradition Dominates in Cambridge (UK).
Particular projects, Greater Minnesota edition: Travel to Mankato – Mankato’s Civic Center Expansion Could be Worse – and Northfield – Urbanism in College Towns without leaving home (but come visit in person sometime soon, too). Read about the possibility of traveling from the Twin Cities to Rochester someday by high speed rail in High Speed Rail to Rochester Moves Forward at Slow Speed.
Photos, drawings and videos: The Sunday Sketch, Memorial Day edition, shows us some inhabitants and details of local cemeteries. 6 Old Baseball Players with Appropriate Reactions to Target Field Station is an exercise in strategic noticing while My Two Sense: Gas Station in Saint Michael, MN conveys a sense of place and mood. Plus another short transportation economics video this week: Is congestion pricing fair? (find earlier videos in this series here)
Charts: An eclectic group of charts this week with Travel Efficiency (Calories per Gram per Kilometer), Child Road Fatalities in Different Countries, Induced Travel Hypothesis, and Bike Compliance and Traffic Signal Design
Big ideas:
- Still Too Many Pedestrians Killed in the Twin Cities uses the recent release of the latest Dangerous by Design report to ask when we will begin paying more than lip service to zero pedestrian deaths in the Twin Cities.
- Saint Paul’s Downtown Renaissance Begins on the Sidewalk reports on the Great River Gathering and keynote speaker Gil Penalosa’s bottom-up thinking applied to St. Paul. One application of this sort of thinking is detailed in The Great Stop Sign Experiment (in Minneapolis at 42nd Street and 28th Avenue).
- The runaway comment winner (more than a hundred comments so far) is Who Wants Vehicular Cycling? which is the second part of a series on the cons and pros of vehicular cycling (Part I is here).
On streets.mn, we usually pay attention to traffic fatalities, but tomorrow is Memorial Day when I hope we’ll all take at least a moment to also remember the men and women who died serving their country and protecting our freedoms.