In today’s fast-paced and over-scheduled world, people don’t have the time–they just don’t have the time. Especially the young people. Between Netflix, taking pictures of sandwiches, and padding resumes, these young people (often referred to as #Millennials by marketers and other less obvious shysters) have quietly developed a new, improved method of communication that saves […]
On the outskirts of many large, expensive, complicated public works projects, there are often examples of easy little things we could do to improve our cities for very little money. A couple blocks from my humble apartment, the City of Minneapolis is moving ahead with a rebuild of the Hennepin/Lyndale bottleneck that looks to be […]
Earlier this week, the StarTribune published a dynamite survey of the transit usage of the 17 members of the Metropolitan Council. As it turns out, not many of them use transit particularly often. The Metropolitan Council, established by the Minnesota Legislature in 1967, is charged with things like land use planning, transportation planning, and sewage […]
Streetcars: They’re hot right now. However, in Minneapolis, in 2014, in the places they are proposed, they are also probably not a good idea. Or at least, they are certainly not a good use of hundreds of millions of dollars in transit funding that’s already too scarce and ill-budgeted. Will Not Improve Mobility The specifics […]
For you, what’s the most obvious sign that time is passing and has passed? Like when you look around at the average scene in your everyday environment, and you’re able to determine that it’s not the same as five years ago, or a decade ago, or twenty years ago? With one notable exception, I’d have […]
America! The birthplace* of democracy! In the words of notable non-American, Winston Churchill, Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. You’ve got your governments Here in the good ‘ole U.S. of A., we use a form […]
All rankings are final.
Our transit maps are getting more colored lines! We now have three different routes in the METRO system, plus a commuter rail line. In the spirit of adventure, on Monday, August 18th, I took off of work to ride the transit rails and tires across the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area from Big Lake to Apple […]
August 03, 2014, back seat of a Toyota 4Runner, Highway 169, Central Minnesota: “So what’s going on with that train stuff?” “Ah, it’s kind of a long story at this point.” Without Even Mentioning Light Rail The contentious portion of our story begins in the 1990s, when the intersection of Hiawatha Avenue and Lake Street […]
Minnesota Winter: You’re probably intimately familiar with it. The Weather Channel, the MySpace of weather, noted earlier this year that the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area has the coldest average winter temperature of any large metropolitan area in the country. And you complained! And your friends and your coworkers and your neighbors complained, because if it […]