Here’s an important chart for you, showing something that the City Observatory cooked up called the “storefront index.” It measures the number of “customer-facing businesses” along city streets. Here’s the ranking [in absolute, not per capita, terms]: It looks like Minneapolis is punching a bit below its weight, though that might be accounted for by the […]
I live in an old neighborhood, by Minnesota Standards. The West Side dates back to the territorial era, the flats were settled back then and a few homes were built up on the bluff, though the “city” remained distant from booming 19th century Saint Paul until at least the 1870s when the toll was finally […]
Check out this fabulous chart! It’s from a UK bike blog by Joe Dunckley called “At War With the Motorist,” and outlines what the author calls the “is it worth asking for” metric. Here you go: Obviously this is a subjective thing dealing with politics and opinions about systems change. Also, this particular chart relates […]
Here’s a fun-to-peruse map that emerged out of the process for creating Saint Paul’s almost-completed Complete Streets Design Manual. It’s an attempt to make a comprehensive map of Saint Paul’s streets ranked according to all the different safety factors. Check it out: This map is a few years old. It was part of an “overlay analysis” […]
“Why do you think I planned it for April Fool’s Day?” The question hung in the air like a dirigible during yesterday’s press conference in front of Stephen Patrickson’s Elk River apartment building, as the press and bicycling fans, many of whom were not wearing helmets, listened with dismay. According to Patrickson, the so-called “30 days of […]
I like the Pioneer Press. They do a lot of good work, and I’ve read a lot of quality articles there over the years. But over the last month or so, a narrative keeps popping up about cost over-runs for infrastructure projects. Mirroring the “fiscal hawk” critique at city hall, they tend to frame infrastructure news […]
A while back, while reading Daniel Hertz’s recent article about Chicago in City Observatory, I came across the work of Robert Sampson, an urban social psychologist at Harvard. The work is over a decade old, but I still find it compelling and relevant. Sampson’s basic thesis is that perceptions of disorder, i.e. a chaotic or blighted neighborhood, […]
Here’s some just-released census data. Scott Shaffer made this lovely chart breaking down population change in Minnesota’s 87 unique and individual counties. Here you go: Here’s what Shaffer says about it: I made a chart showing the relation between the rate of population growth for each county and the population of each county in 2010. […]
Here’s a chart that shows bus costs according to “systems hour”, the costs “per hour” for different transit systems as they relate to ridership. Looks like the Twin Cities ranks around average for a system its size. I don’t even remember where I found this chart, to be honest. It was in a folder on my […]
OK, so Boston isn’t in Minnesota. But I found this chart on a fascinating discussion of “social stratification in transit” a while ago on the Itinerant Urbanist blog, and thought I’d share it. Heres’ the chart showing the per-passenger trip subsidies for the different subsets of Metro Boston transit system: Note: If you look at the ridership numbers […]