Today’s chart of the day comes from a post at City Observatory by Daniel Kay Hertz highlighting a nationwide trend of average urban bus speeds dropping since 2000. The piece goes into the trouble in dealing with nationwide data in evaluating cause and effect of this reduction and questioning if bus service cuts play a significant […]
The notion that we could, as a society, choose to buy vehicles for those who need to get to school, jobs, or other opportunities requires grossly oversimplifying the goals of urban transit.
Buses and bikes go great together. Perhaps your commute requires a bus transfer and you’d rather get 15 minutes of exercise twice a day. Maybe you reverse commute to the suburbs and a bus brings you within a mile or two of your destination. These are real scenarios and I’m sure we can put our heads […]
We talk about safety quite a bit on streets.mn. Rightfully so, it’s one of the biggest threats to public health, a leading cause of injury deaths in many age groups. It’s sometimes helpful to take a step back and look at the big picture, even if we see charts like this all the time. Below […]
I watch the show House of Cards, as I assume many of you do. If not, go check it out, maybe (the third season wasn’t so great). There’s a rather jarring moment in the first season when Claire Underwood gets yelled at by a nun for running through a cemetery, calling it disgraceful. Later in […]
You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Thought Experiment Zone! A few months back I made the case that Minneapolis’ zoning code keeps us from building the type small-scale infill most people say they want (I’m […]
Imagine your city had miles of publicly-owned, mostly grade-separated right-of-way. A long, linear stretch of land formerly carrying trains through it every day. A “sub-way,” if you will. What would you do with it? Minneapolis has such a place. You all know it as the Midtown Greenway. Between 2000 and 2006, over 5 miles of multi-use trails […]
This week, Walker wrote an excellent post comparing crash statistics and the structural responses to incidents by mode in the wake of the Amtrak derailment. It’s a great read with great questions, and we are reminded once again how safe we’ve made rail and air travel relative to other modes. But one thing sticks out to me […]
We’re coming to the close of the 2015 legislative session in Minnesota, and that means some scrambling to get comprehensive bills passed. The DFL and GOP plans couldn’t be further apart in how they plan to fund roads, but at least they agree on the amount we should spend. Bipartisanship! There’s a (perhaps growing) minority […]
Buried in a recent post on the Southwest Light Rail situation was a suggestion: Let’s create a sales tax in Hennepin and Ramsey counties for building transit specific to those counties. Since the House and Senate started negotiations this week on their very different transportation packages, it might be a good idea to float a compromise to […]