This is “Meet a Roundabout,” a new series of posts about roundabouts in the Twin Cities area that are improving traffic efficiency and safety. Posts include pictures and video of the roundabout and a history of how they came to be. This is the first post in the series. On a recent beautiful Wednesday night, […]
Via Slate, here’s an interesting map that shows automobile ownership per capita across the Twin Cities’ metro. It’s from a recent Trulia dataset that does this for the whole country, and lets you easily glimpse the car ownership rates across the country. Here’s the TC: Two basic patterns emerge: the low-car areas correspond with both […]
Starting May 13, electric scooters have returned to the streets of Minneapolis. The city green-lit contracts with four network operators, Jump, Lime, Lyft, and Spin, and as of May 13, Lime and Spin are operating in the city. Jump is a brand of Uber Technologies Inc. and Spin is owned by Ford Motor Co. Lime, […]
On Thursday, the Minneapolis Planning Commission was supportive of a proposed ordinance from Council President Lisa Bender that would prohibit new drive-throughs for banks, drugstores, and fast food restaurants (or any other “facility which accommodates automobiles and from which the occupants of the automobiles may make purchases or transact business”). It’s important to emphasize: if […]
I was reflecting on the May 8 Chart of the Day post on micro-mobility that mapped the middle 68 percentile of trips for 18 modes of transportation, and I collected a few thoughts on the future of mobility. I have written several posts recently on bike share, ride share, and electric scooters, the rented side […]
Previously I’ve written about how I don’ t think Transportation as a Service (TaaS), the rideshare model of electric self-driving cars will become as universal as soon as some optimists have predicted. Loss of the pride of ownership, privacy, and the “yuck” factor of shared vehicles are some factors working against it. Yet the economics […]
Here’s a chart about cars, showing the changes since 1975 in some key dynamics about how cars use energy and how big they are. It’s from the EPA’s latest report on automotive trends, and it pegs these three variables at 1975 levels, charting the changes. Check it out: As you can see, there were big […]
A Minneapolis resident and daily pedestrian ponders whether the intersection of Hennepin and 1st Street downtown could be redesigned for all travel modes.
After my last class today, I took a ride on the route 4 bus–including the slow crawl along Nicollet–from Minneapolis College to the Central Library, where I was able to attend the downtown Community Workshop for Minneapolis’ Transportation Action Plan. This workshop was one of a series of community engagement opportunities to interact with the […]
The shooting of Justine Ruszczyk Damond, by police officer Mohamed Noor could have happened in many contexts, but the fact that it happened in a car tells us a lot about the problem of car culture in our society. Ruszczyk, an Australian living in a fairly affluent neighborhood in Minneapolis had called the police to […]