A Visit to Quarry Island
Dan Marshall • June 2, 2022 Quarry Island lies in the middle of Gun Club Lake in Mendota Heights, just north of the 494 bridge and beneath the roar of MSP Airport runways.
Author: Dan Marshall
Dan Marshall • June 2, 2022 
A Bicycle Tour of Twin Cities Lift and Swing Bridges
Dan Marshall • November 19, 2021 From the beginning, the key to coexistence of rail and river traffic has been a half dozen movable swing and lift bridges. Unlike Duluth’s and Stillwater’s lift bridges, many Twin Cities lift and swing bridges operate in underappreciated obscurity. Let’s take a bicycle tour!
Embracing Ruins as Historic Preservation
Dan Marshall • June 10, 2021 For the most part, these sites are hidden behind railroads, below river bluffs, or at the end of gated dirt roads. We tend to either ignore or look at them as failures, awaiting either a visionary creative reuse or the wrecking ball.
Summer of Detours for City Cyclists
Dan Marshall • May 14, 2021 A record numbers of cyclists is facing a record number of Twin Cities trail closures. Viewed as a network of transportation infrastructure, it is incredibly disruptive.
Saint Paul’s Charles Avenue Bikeway and the Unfinished Promise of Bicycle Boulevards
Dan Marshall • February 8, 2021 Depending on who you ask, the Charles Bikeway has either succeeded or failed since construction began in 2012. Despite strong neighborhood support along its 3 1/2 mile long run, only some of the features of a proper bicycle boulevard have actually been built.
The Robert Piram Trail Completes a Major Missing Link in Saint Paul
Dan Marshall • October 29, 2020 In a few weeks, the Robert Piram Regional Trail will officially open between Saint Paul and South Saint Paul. Here’s why it just might be the Twin Cities cycling community’s new favorite trail.
Notable Tunnels of the Twin Cities Suburbs
Dan Marshall • September 17, 2020 Many suburbs have retrofitted bicycle infrastructure, usually so that vulnerable users won’t slow automotive throughput. Along the way, many of these projects have spawned tunnels, which are always fun.
Every Tunnel Tells a Story: the Underground Passageways of Saint Paul and Minneapolis
Here’s a question: Why does Saint Paul have so many more tunnels than Minneapolis? Because we keep Saint Paul boring! Indeed, Saint Paul’s geography has featured the subterranean since the very beginning when Pierre “Pig’s Eye” Parrant staked his claim at Fountain Cave. And although Saint Paul was well positioned at the northernmost navigable point […]
An Appreciation of the U of M Transitway
Living in the Midway, I consider the U of M Transitway to be the best bike route in the Twin Cities–even better than the Midtown Greenway. It’s our neighborhood’s safe link with the U of M and downtown Minneapolis. We need many more routes just like it. Yet, for some reason, the Transitway is the […]
A Few Streets St. Paul Would Be Better Off Without
New streets are being built every day, mostly in the exurbs, where forests and farmland continue to give way to new subdivisions. Here in Saint Paul we pretty much stopped building new roads half a century ago. The problem is, there seems to be a law of nature that once those roads are built, they […]