Prior Avenue and the Merriam Park Freeway Fight
Community activists engaged in a three-year-long fight to block freeway ramps at Prior Avenue — and won.
Category: Freeways
Your MN United Midway Stadium Parking Explainer
Where will Minnesota United FC fans park? That question promises to be with us for a while. Brian Quarstad and Alex Schieferdecker examine where fans will park, and why Midway redevelopment the site plan doesn’t seem to provide it. “But what about the parking?” Brian: The question of parking is one we’ve seen a lot […]
How to Really Fix Cedar/Franklin/Minnehaha
The exact intersection of the Phillips, Seward, and Cedar-Riverside neighborhoods is at the center of this photograph: We all know the story. These neighborhoods were sacrificed for the convenience of newly minted suburbanites. It’s weird how vigorously the government reshaped our patterns of living in the era of urban freeway building, and how timidly it now approaches […]
Introducing the Twin Cities Metro Area Future Highway Map
This is one idea of what the state trunk highway system could look like in the future, perhaps 30 years out. I’ve pointedly avoided calling it a “fantasy” map, since it’s based mostly on official planning documents, not me drawing lines wherever I think a new freeway would be cool. I’ve also excluded the “I-894 […]
Fixing the 280
Minnesota 280 was first opened in 1959, an element of a freeway network that was not fully realized. It was designed before Interstate standards became standard. It is an important route, providing access from I-94 west-bound to I-35W northbound, a link that is otherwise missing from the network. Wikipedia writes: Highway 280 was authorized on […]
Chart of the Day: User Revenue vs. Highway Spending Gap over Time
This is something we’ve written about many times before, but here’s a straightforward chart for you this Friday afternoon. The cumulative “general fund” spending on highways, from an article in City Observatory: The author, Joe Cortright, makes the case that we need to move towards better user fees for roads and driving, which is again something […]
Mn-Pass Lacks Electronic Toll Collection Interoperability and Technology
On Oct 1, 2012 the federal Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21) legislation came into effect, which among other things mandated that all Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) facilities on federally funded highway be interoperable by Oct 1, 2016. That would mean that someone from Maine could use their toll transponder in California. […]
Chart of the Day: Road Funding by Source
Via the Strong Towns Podcast, here’s a chart from a report called “Who Pays for Roads?” by a public policy think tank called The Frontier Group. Note that this shows all levels of government: Here’s what the report says about the chart: By the early 2010s, road user fees accounted for less than half of current highway […]
Hwy 100 and I-494 Interchange Ranked 2nd Most Iconic Place in MN
Each day 142,000 people drive through the interchange at I-494 and Highway 100 in Bloomington and Edina on their way to work, shop, or otherwise. What they don’t realize is, as of today, they are driving through the second most iconic place in the state. That’s because UrbanMSP has placed the interchange in the number […]
Would You Pay $876 to Cut 6 Minutes Off Your Commute?
There were some mighty big numbers in the annual Urban Mobility Scorecard that the Texas A&M Transportation Institute and data company Inrix released Wednesday. Twin Cities residents, the study found, spent an average of 47 hours in 2014 stuck in rush hour congestion. That put us at 23rd among the 101 ranked metros. Washington, D.C., led […]