Too bad, you missed it (for this year). Yesterday was the annual streets.mn picnic and, for the first time, a flash membership drive. You can still join streets.mn anytime by clicking the big orange square on the right.
Shelter C is your picnic target. pic.twitter.com/46jbquvRtZ
— streets.mn 🛴🚴🚌🚃🛶 (@StreetsMN) July 13, 2019
Here’s last week on the website:
Burning questions
Data and mapping maven Scott Shaffer asks Who’s Filing All These Property Valuation Appeals? and “I found that more than three-quarters of the variation in appeals can be explained by racial composition and educational attainment, and that roughly, you should expect to have one more appeal for every 42 more white residents with bachelor’s degrees.” And, in the process, asks about how to make the system more transparent and more equitable.
Property Appeals map
Bikes and where to put them
Bike Lanes and Signs at the University of Minnesota – East Bank Construction Projects by Paul Jahn looks at the construction underway on the East Bank and how bikes and people walking are protected and directed through and around the activity: “The University of Minnesota seems to do a better job than the city of Minneapolis in providing proactive signs for detours and bike lanes during construction projects. What’s your take? Here’s a shared Google photo album for all of the pictures taken.”
Conrad Zbikowski provides coverage of University Ave SE and 4th St SE Restriped in “Protected Bikeway Study”. The bikeway study has resulted in this project: “Within the last two weeks, University Ave SE and 4th St SE, both arterial one-way roads, have been restriped to reduce the lanes of vehicular traffic and to start to create a protected bike lane in each direction on the corresponding roads. The bike lanes as of June 26 are only buffered bike lanes, without protective bollards, but plastic bollards will be, “installed over the next week or so,””
Shared ER and Main Entrance
Vehicles of different sorts
Bill Lindeke provides Six Reasons Scooters are Good and One Reason They’re Not. Read the post for the itemized list, but. “In short, when scooters are everywhere, I think drivers slow down and pay attention because it seems so dangerous. And for that very reason, the streets become safer. I believe that a city that’s designed well for scooters will also be a city that is great for bicycling, walking, and transit. The only real change would revolve around drivers of personal cars, who would see their freedom to lackadaisically speed around dramatically curtailed.”
#eBikeThoughts: Battling Congestion with eBikes by James Kohls is his third #eBikeThoughts post asking “What if, instead of spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on increasing road capacity, we bought people a means of getting off that road completely.”
Alex Schieferdecker continues thinking about bus rapid transit (see also his inventory of possible corridors, current transit performance in those corridors, and proposed network) with Building a Network of Rapid Buses — How to Serve Northeast Minneapolis. This post responds to a criticism about serving Northeast Minneapolis with a deeper dive into the thought behind the proposed Q Line.
The Q Line, highlighted in red among other proposed aBRT routes.
Streets
Walker Angell advocates for Safer, Saner Roads by Design saying, “When it comes to safe roads, we (the United States) come in last. We have the most dangerous road system of all developed countries with the highest fatality, crash and severe-injury rates. Drivers in the United States kill three to five times as many people per capita as drivers in Europe. That is unconscionable.” The post itemizes differences between US road design (focusing on Ramsey County) and European standards.
US Road design (photo: LocalMile.org/Walker Angell)
Regular features
Map: Map Monday: Minnesota Changes to Median Age showing “As you can see, there are distinct patterns when it comes to the metro area versus greater Minnesota, and that is especially true when you look up at the northern iron range area. In greater Minnesota, the “young” counties are pretty much limited to college towns and American Indian reservations.”
