Monte Castleman • November 29, 2021 E-ZPass Electronic Toll Interoperability is Now Here As I’ve written about several times before, there was a 2012 federal mandate to have electronic toll collection be interoperable nationwide by 2016. In practical terms this would mean you’d be able to use your same toll transponder to pay tolls nationwide. That deadline came and went without […]
Evan Roberts • July 27, 2021 Nathan Johnson’s Highway 61 Through Minnesota is published by Arcadia Press in their Images of America series. The series has, according to their website, a whopping 8,223 titles. Just 69 of these are from Minnesota. It’s a proven format, almost certainly a commercial success, and yet I’m sad to report it doesn’t really work for […]
A look at the future of Minnesota’s intercity rail beyond Duluth and Chicago
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]