Once upon a time, sometime in 1989, the city of Saint Paul drafted a sustainable take-out container ordinance. It wasn’t called that, as the terms “sustainable” and “sustainability” weren’t widely used yet. It was written to help achieve city, county and state recycling and waste reduction goals through increasing the types of take out containers […]
I don’t know how to write this post to ask you to join the streets.mn board. This is supposed to be my rousing invitation, and every time I start typing, I find myself writing about the IPCC instead. But that’s not actually all that far off. Climate change–our role in causing it, the consequences we […]
When Rectangular Rapid Flash Beacons (RRFBs) started appearing in Bloomington and Edina I thought they would be a huge improvement for pedestrian safety, but having used them numerous times I’ve realized they’re a compromise on safety and neither motorists or pedestrians are the winners. RRFBs are a safety device used at crosswalks in which a […]
An Open Letter to Minneapolis 2040 Planners and Politicians: Donald Trump crossed the ocean to London, England this past summer only to land in a sea of local outrage and demonstrations, including signs and a comically small Baby Trump protest blimp. I’m glad to see people exercising their free speech rights but Trump’s visit clouded […]
[A variation of this blog first appeared on the Our Streets Minneapolis blog.] I spent the last year of my life working for Our Streets Minneapolis, a bicycle and pedestrian advocacy organization, as part of a year-long service program called Lutheran Volunteer Corps. I went into Our Streets as a casual biker who had never […]
I think a wild blind spot at StreetsMN is the idea that there are only two possibilities for residential property development. A) Private ownership by young growing Single Family with golden retriever and infinite sums of cash to refinish the cool old house. B) Private ownership by profit driven private developer. Considering the golden retriever […]
Writing about the 5th “E” of implementing Vision Zero – Encouragement – is long overdue, perhaps a symptom of a lack of encouragement in general. The other “Es”: Evaluation, Engineering, Education, and Enforcement, have been covered previously, with suggestions, sometimes contradictory, on the multitude of ways that St. Paul could become a model Vision Zero […]
After years of administering a complex and largely self-policed permit parking system, Saint Paul hired a consultant to do a study of the topic and might be making a few changes. And yet, it seems to me that these policy changes are too little and probably won’t make much difference to anyone to help achieve […]
[This post originally appeared on the Our Streets Minneapolis blog.] Many bike commuters cite reducing carbon emissions as their reason for biking. Does switching from a car or bus to a bike reduce one’s carbon footprint and by how much? Japan, China, the Netherlands, and Denmark collect the most data on carbon emissions and bikeable […]
Last week was the inaugural Bike+Walk MN conference in Rochester, MN. I heard about the conference here on Streets.MN and so I wanted to circle back and share just a couple of highlights. Hopefully others who have been more deeply involved in the conference will also chime in, as I think it was a great […]