Here’s a fun historical map showing how land use changed during the boom time heyday of the I-494 strip on the south edge of the Twin Cities. It’s from a chapter out of a book called “The Geography of Urban Transportation,” edited by Susan Hanson and Genevieve Giuliano. The chapter, by Peter O. Muller, is […]
There’s a very cool new report out from the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy titled “Indicators for Sustainable Mobility.” The study attempts to boil down what makes a transit-friendly city into a few simple measures, attempting to solve what they call the “black box” problem of many transit metrics. The study looks at Minneapolis […]
Why do we have parking minimums in the City of St. Paul? The current city ordinance is copied at the bottom of this post for reference, but it provides no justification. Parking Minimums = Control I once asked an employee from DSI (Department of Safety and Inspections) why a bar should have more parking space […]
Two years ago my family of three adults, a polyamorous family with my wife and husband, bought a three bedroom, two bathroom house in south Minneapolis. It’s charming and has fantastic 1940s details like coved ceilings, stucco exterior, and a smallish footprint at about 1600 sq ft. I work from home full-time and we have […]
The current debates over the Minneapolis 2040 comprehensive plan and inclusionary housing raise some interesting ideas for consideration about the city and Twin Cities metro area overall. First, more housing at all levels of affordability is critical to the future of the city, not for the sake of density itself but rather the city’s ability […]
Hands-down my favorite part of downtown Minneapolis this past summer was the pianos on Nicollet Avenue. Not necessarily a new idea, to be sure, but I was struck by the talent of seemingly random players and the joy it gave passers-by. Any given morning on my walk from the train to the office I’d pass […]
Via the Met Council comes this interactive map of transit-oriented public parcels that can be developed. It allows you to search and view publicly owned parcels of land within 1/2 mile of select existing and planned transit facilities. The parcel dataset used for this map was derived from the MetroGIS Regional Parcel Dataset, and is the result […]
Like many of the maps I find I came across a webpage via Twitter, hat tip to @stateofthecity. The webpage takes data from the Global Human Settlement Layer and runs it onto Google Maps. This is the result, Human Terrain by Matt Daniels (@matthew_daniels). I immediately panned to tool over to Minnesota and geeked out. Something I […]
A friend compiled this series of Google Earth images. I scanned them, and intended to get on with my work, but I just couldn’t. I went through them again. And then again. I found myself rethinking the city I live in. Most people think Minneapolis looks like this: Or this: But, when you step back, […]
Once upon a time, sometime in 1989, the city of Saint Paul drafted a sustainable take-out container ordinance. It wasn’t called that, as the terms “sustainable” and “sustainability” weren’t widely used yet. It was written to help achieve city, county and state recycling and waste reduction goals through increasing the types of take out containers […]