Beyond 2030: Looking at Intercity Rail in Minnesota
A look at the future of Minnesota’s intercity rail beyond Duluth and Chicago
Category: Greater Minnesota
Streets.mn Virtual Happy Hour: Rethinking Duluth’s Core
Beth Evanson Makhoul • April 9, 2021 Have you ever driven, ridden or walked around in Duluth and noticed how Interstate 35 cuts through the city almost impenetrably? Perhaps you have noticed the sheer scale of the freeway and overpasses and their seeming lack of relation to the context of the human-scaled surroundings? Maybe you wish there were more natural spaces, softer […]
What MnDOT Can Learn from Main Street
Alex Schieferdecker • December 28, 2020 By one count, there are over 7,600 streets named “Main Street” in the United States. But there is only one that became the title of Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis’ 1920 classic “Main Street”, and that’s the one in Sauk Centre, MN (alias “Gopher Prairie”), the writer’s hometown. Main Street—the novel—is about a progressive and […]
Stitching Together Duluth’s Downtown and Waterfront – Part Two
Jordan van der Hagen • October 16, 2020 The Duluth Waterfront Collective is a group of planners, designers, thinkers, and others united in our desire to create a more livable, equitable and sustainable Duluth. Our plan, entitled Highway 61 Revisited, takes an eraser to a one-mile stretch of Interstate 35 and will use a community engagement process to draw in the blank space […]
Amtrak’s Empire Builder: The Train that Deserves Better
Eric Ecklund • September 28, 2020 Amtrak’s Empire Builder, the only intercity rail service in Minnesota, will be reduced from daily to tri-weekly service beginning in October due to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. I decided to take it one more time before the cuts went into effect, as there’s no way of knowing how long it’ll be before daily […]
Stitching Together Duluth’s Downtown and Waterfront – Part One
Jordan van der Hagen • September 7, 2020 The Duluth Waterfront Collective is a group of planners, designers, thinkers and more, united in our desire to create a more livable, equitable and sustainable Duluth. Our plan, entitled Highway 61 Revisited, takes an eraser to a one-mile stretch of Interstate 35 and will use a community engagement process to draw in the blank space […]
Intercity Rail Would Bridge Minnesota’s So-called “Rural-Urban Divide”
A few months ago, I was privileged to be a guest lecturer for a colleague’s environmental sociology course at the UW-La Crosse. For those unfamiliar, La Crosse, Wisconsin is one of the larger small cities in the region. It’s a city with a metro area of about 130,000 people located in a magnificent spot on […]
Notes From the Minnesota Statewide Passenger Rail Plan Meeting
On Jan 7, a meeting on the Minnesota Statewide Passenger Rail plan was held at the McColl Pond Environmental Learning Center in Savage, and streets.mn was invited to join other local media outlets and elected officials to hear about updates to the plan. No one else from streets.mn said they were going, so, because I […]
Winter Is Here: More Winter Biking Tips
Last month, Alicia Valenti wrote about her tips and experiences bicycling in the winter as a Minnesota transplant. “I got into summer biking and then didn’t want to stop once it got cold,” Alicia told me recently. Like Alicia, I’m a transplant who didn’t want to stop biking once it got cold, partly because biking […]
Urbanist Twitter on Northfield’s Roundabout
Note the Catch-22: If Northfield could increase the number of students getting to school under their own power that would reduce rush minute congestion created by adults chauffeuring kids to school…and if it reduced demand during peak times then the over-engineered roundabout would not be needed. But how could Northfield increase walking and biking through […]