Up here in Saint Paul, the Mississippi River passes within blocks of where I live and work. As the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approached, I started looking toward the other end of this waterway that links the Midwest to the South because I wanted to better understand the lasting impact of the storm on […]
Reconstruction of Minneapolis’ Hennepin/Lyndale bottleneck has begun. There will be traffic tweaks and some much needed bike/pedestrian improvements, but this reconstruction won’t be a radical makeover of the kind Scott Shaffer proposed over a year ago. Scott suggested we “drop the spaghetti bowl” (a “mess of undulating streets and arcing flyover ramps to and from the freeway, […]
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 […]
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 […]
I’m a huge fan of Judd Apatow – from his TV show Freaks and Geeks to films like 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up. I’m at least as big of a fan of Amy Schumer’s comedy. So I was excited beyond measure to see that they were teaming up to create Trainwreck. The movie, which did […]
Like a vestigial twin growing its own weird, hairy tumor, the already complex Washington Avenue transit mall has sprouted a new unsightly appendage: The Oak Street protected bike… whatever this is. I was very skeptical of protected bikeways for a long time and this is exactly why. For someone who is relatively comfortable biking in traffic, […]
In 1979 Sandra Soucheray asked her mom Marsha for a ride to an afternoon event at nearby Chippewa Middle School. Little did she realize what she was setting in motion. With the school only a mile away Marsha wasn’t buying Sandra’s argument that it was too scary and dangerous to ride her bike. At mom’s […]
12.5 Miles Macalester-Groveland, Merriam Park, South Como The warm October continued for another day, which gave me another chance to ride. Like yesterday, Halloween ornamentation and leaves were plentiful. On my bike rides I often see an object I otherwise wouldn’t lay eyes on. Many times it’s the unusual, but occasionally, it’s objects so commonplace […]
Time to continue my series on traffic signals with the red-hot topic, the right turn on red, and some ideas for improving things. The Right Turn on Red We all know right turn on red (RTOR) is extremely dangerous, leading to motorists mowing down workers carrying plate-glass and old ladies pushing baby buggies. Or is it? Well, it […]
Here’s a map I put together using the Federal Railroad Administration’s Highway-Rail Crossing Inventory database, focusing on the number of main tracks at public grade crossings across the country. The main thing to see is that the vast majority of our rail infrastructure is single-tracked, only allowing trains to travel in one direction at a […]