It’s The Crank again, and today I’m going to talk about bicycle lighting or the lack of it, and the various ways I find it annoying. When I ride at night or in low-light situations, I like to have at least a rear light to make me more visible to motorists. A front light is […]
I am hereby naming this column “The Crank.” That’s because I’m cranky, I like bicycles, and a crank is the part of a bicycle that makes it move. With this in mind, I’d like to offer the following cartoon shout-outs. This one goes out to the Mall of America and “American Boulevard” in Bloomington: In […]
In some ways, Christianity and other faiths created the concept of tourism. They created sacred sites and encouraged their followers to make pilgrimage trips to visit them. This created the need for food, lodging, souvenirs, and various other goods and services that form the backbone of modern tourism. My wife recently got a small grant […]
On July 17, The Minnesota Department of Transportation and Saint Paul mayor Chris Coleman apologized for bulldozing the Rondo neighborhood of Saint Paul to build Interstate 94. Beginning in 1958, the freeway destroyed nearly a thousand homes and businesses and it displaced thousands of people at the core of a predominantly African American neighborhood. It […]
This coming Wednesday, June 17, at 5:30pm, the Saint Paul City Council faces its first test for implementing the city’s Bikeways Plan. The plan calls for bike lanes on Cleveland Avenue. The question is: Will they vote to implement the plan, or will they listen to claims of bike lane opponents and scrap a major […]
National Bike to Work Week is coming up and, for once, Saint Paul has something to celebrate. We passed a bike plan back in March and already we have three potential bikeway projects up for public discussion. We’ve moved from having public meetings about plans (many of which never got implemented) to having meetings about […]
This Wednesday, March 18, at 5:30pm, on the third floor of City Hall, Saint Paul may take a giant step forward in urban evolution. After years of planning and procedural hurdles, the Saint Paul Bikeways Plan is finally coming before the City Council for an up or down vote. I can understand why some folks […]
Last Wednesday (February 4) I attended a public presentation by Ramsey County engineers for a proposed redesign of the Randolph and Lexington Avenue intersection. They are proposing to spend a million and a half dollars to purchase four properties on the northeast corner of the intersection and bulldoze them to make space for a dedicated […]
Some people inside and outside the bicycling community believe that we should require cyclists to get licenses and/or register their bikes with the state. License and registration fees would help pay for bicycle infrastructure and ensure that all cyclists are adequately trained in correct riding techniques. Motorists like this idea because they think cyclists don’t […]
[Disclaimer: This post is clearly a late submission for Snark Week, which you can read all about here and here.] America was founded on parking. In the 1500s, the first white settlers came here from Europe looking for parking. When all the spaces filled up, they moved west in search of more parking. The search […]