The Twin Cities is gearing up to spend quite a bit of money on transit infrastructure over the next five-to-ten years. By my count, the Blue Line Extension (Bottineau LRT), Green Line Extension (Southwest LRT), Orange Line BRT, and Gold Line BRT will run a tab of nearly $4 billion. Some of these lines are more […]
Having recently moved away from downtown, I’m spending more time in other parts of the city, which means I find new things to critique/complain about. Case in point, a problematic intersection that stands between my new home and the closest grocery store: Cedar Ave & East Minnehaha Parkway. Let’s set aside for the moment how […]
Alleys! They’re in the news! To be honest, they’re generally pretty boring places, perhaps undeserving of a love letter. Most people might even dislike them, even avoid them at all costs. As with most small, mundane details of the built environment, I think we sometimes take alleys for granted in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and it’s […]
I’ve got a very long list of posts that I’d like to write but I don’t have time to write them and I’m sure most readers don’t want to take that much time to read them. So, here are a few in brief. Would Removing Kmart Harm Nicollet Avenue? Nicollet Avenue is a fairly nice […]
MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota, USA It was Saturday afternoon and I needed to mail a letter to Japan. Most post offices close at 1 p.m. on Saturday, but I figured at least one would be open. Minneapolis is a big city after all, right? The USPS website directed me to the following branch, open until 11 p.m. on Saturday. […]
I’ve always loved road trips. On my old, long defunct North Star Highways site (still the name of my Flickr account), I would do what I call phototours, road trips focusing on “roadgeeking.” Flickr is a good place for photos, but not for narrative, and I thought this would be an appropriate place to for […]
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the psychology of driving (Warning: this post contains no actual science). Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how humans react, primarily emotionally, to the experience of driving and the circumstances in which we find ourselves driving. I’d bet there are actual studies out there on this topic, but for the […]
I came across this news story last week about a public works proposal in Brooklyn Park, a northern suburb of Minneapolis (and future host to the end of a planned light rail line). As far as things go, this proposal is a pretty mundane function of local government: reconstructing a few 30+ year old streets, replacing some […]
The recent hubbub around operations on a decade old runway at Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport (MSP), operated by the Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC), have unearthed a few interesting nuggets. I’m not really an airport or airplane operations buff. I mostly just appreciate that we have a fairly nice airport that I use relatively infrequently (though […]
The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) has published an updated Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) Scorecard. Now I know this post is about Light Rail Transit (LRT), but the scorecard was rewritten in a way that makes it easier to evaluate rail systems as well as bus systems, and after all they are only […]