We’re all doomed. As a Gen-X American, I grew up with entertainment and popular culture that reverberated with the notion that no crisis, or monster attack, or alien invasion, or government conspiracy is a match for Kids on Bikes, a belief recently reintroduced by TV shows paying homage to the stories of my youth, featuring […]
I spent half of a recent Saturday outside helping some friends do yard work in what most would call a working class to low-income neighborhood of Saint Paul. It’s a pretty diverse place, too, with U.S.-born black, indigenous, and white people living side-by-side with immigrant families from many countries. My friends’ duplex apartment is on […]
[This is part of streets.mn’s “transpo convo” series, which aims to to be an oral history of getting around the Twin Cities, one person at a time.] Growing up, I learned the Sesame Street song “Who are the People in your Neighborhood?” Living on a farm, my neighborhood looked quite a bit different from Sesame […]
I have previously written about what a fantastic urban bikeway the Bruce Vento Trail is. My family and I continue to use it frequently, including my now 5 year old daughter on her own two-wheeler. However, there are some major safety issues. At intersections we would like the travel of the bicycle to remain parallel […]
Mother’s Day was yesterday, but moms don’t get days off. Especially if you’re a working mom with children under 6. This map comes via the Humphrey School of Public Affairs’ Center on Women, Gender, and Public Policy and the American Community Survey. It shows that some of Minnesota’s most rural counties have the highest percentages […]
One morning in 2009, Husband pulled on his grubby work clothes and set out for the garage. He welded when he had the time, and that day, he needed to create a piece for the school’s art gala. Hours later, I glanced out the kitchen window. He had an audience. The two boys from down […]
On semifinal Saturday, as the game between Virginia and Auburn was about to begin, I followed the streaming crowds backward to Nicollet Mall, where the other half of the fan base was enjoying our new pedestrian mall, now vehicle-free! Traffic was relatively light, and visitors were taking to the sidewalk pretty well. One Final Four […]
Recently, I met with Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board District 4 Commissioner Jono Cowgill across the street from Gateway Park to chat about the current state and future of the park. Welcome to Gateway Park 🦖 Gateway Park is a plaza located at the intersection of Hennepin Ave and S 1st St and is bordered […]
Here’s an a propos chart. It shows the number of children killed by cars by day of the year: A quote about it the data: BestPlaces analyzed more than four million records of auto fatalities from the Department of Transportation Fatality Analysis Reporting System. As the graph below shows, there have been 133 child pedestrian […]
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 […]