A year after the Minnesota Zoo monorail ceased operation, we look back at another short monorail in Dakota County that was a prototype for grander plans that never materialized. Enos Electric Railway Company of St. Paul, an excerpt from Larwence A. Martin’s Railroads in Minnesota page. Check it out for more fascinating history. “Businessmen sought […]
Earlier this week, news surfaced that the Kellogg Ave-3rd Street bridge connecting Lowertown and Dayton’s Bluff is structurally deficient. The bridge, built in 1982 by MnDOT, has four vehicle lanes, the outer two largely supported by concrete cantilevers with pier supports built in the middle. It took only one day before the Infrastructure Opportunists in […]
Earlier, Nate Hood outlined the blunder being committed by Southwest LRT planners at the Belt Line station in St. Louis Park. It’s not a blunder limited just to this station – plans are to build over 3,500 park and ride spaces along the corridor. Large parking lots will displace transit oriented development at human scale […]
Here on Streets.MN, much has been discussed about pedestrian crossings, signage, and traffic signals on the Green Line. Because of this, it may be useful to look at what our European peers are doing. This urban railway in Slovakia is more of a tramway, but as you can see it has some dedicated right of […]
Ever wish the walk to your neighborhood grocery store was just a little more convenient? Here’s a map of groceries and corner stores in Minneapolis’ Longfellow neighborhood back in 1939. Created by Paul Strebe and shared via Old Minneapolis on Facebook. Click the map to explore in Google Maps.
In today’s installment of Anatomy of a Proposed Urban Railway, Adam Miller takes a close look at the Royalston station area. Just to the south of this station area is an area of land isolated from its surroundings, but which has the potential to be a prime link between Royalston, North Loop, Loring Park, Downtown, […]
The StarTribune reports today that Hennepin County is planning to expand West Broadway (known as Hennepin County State Aid Highway 103 for our traffic engineering readership) which will create a large median for the planned Blue Line extension (Bottineau LRT) to Target North in Brooklyn Park. In a variant of our Chart of the Day […]
Back in 2012, Reuben Collins wrote about the the Cedar Ave bridge over Lake Nokomis, “a clear example of a roadway that went over when it should have gone around.” Fast forward to 2014, and there’s a revision underway to the Park Board’s master plan for Nokomis Hiawatha Regional Park (well, everything except Hiawatha Golf Course, which Bill […]
After decades of studies, high speed rail connecting the Twin Cities with Rochester continues to inch forward. Last June, Mike Hicks wrote a solid background piece on ZipRail ahead of the first Environmental Impact Statement public meetings. In it, he recalls going to a public meeting for an older Minneapolis-Rochester-Chicago study public meeting back in […]
The Kenilworth Corridor (3A) was selected as the Locally Preferred Alternative for Southwest Light Rail in 2009. During those discussions, national transportation blog The Transport Politic published three maps comparing the chosen 3A alignment with the 3C Alt 2 alignment which would have served Uptown and Whittier. The decision is far in the rearview mirror, […]