Daniel Choma • July 26, 2021 “If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to breakIf it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to breakWhen the levee breaks, I’ll have no place to stay.” -Excerpt from “When the Levee Breaks,” a traditional country blues song first recorded by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie “Warmer air also can hold more moisture, leading to […]
Emily Wade • July 7, 2021 The City of Minneapolis is set to renew their bike share contract sometime in the next year. In this contract, I think the City should require bike share providers to more equitably distribute bikes, and provide some public funding for the system. I also created a survey to gather what other folks thought.
Jeff Wood • July 1, 2021 Every day at The Overhead Wire, we collect news about cities and send the links to our email list. At the end of the week we take some of the most popular stories and post them to Greater Greater Washington, a group blog similar to streets.mn that focuses on urban issues in the D.C. region. […]
Evan Roberts • June 25, 2021 This post is co-authored with Nathanael Lauster, Author of The Death and Life of the Single-Family House: Lessons from Vancouver on Building a Livable City. The authors met when Lauster lived in Minneapolis from 2005-6. Lauster is now an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. This post is cross-posted from https://homefreesociology.com/. Exciting […]
Andy Singer • May 6, 2021 From the FHWA website:“The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways or MUTCD defines the standards used by road managers nationwide to install and maintain traffic control devices on all public streets, highways, bikeways and private roads open to public travel”. It is “a compilation of national standards for all traffic control […]
Elissa Schufman • April 16, 2021 This article is based on a co-presentation by Elissa Schufman and Abigail Johnson to the Transportation & Public Works Committee of Minneapolis City Council on March 31, 2021. We have to transform our streets to live out commitments to racial justice, to economic justice, to accessibility—and to meet our climate commitments, we have to do it […]
Christa Moseng • April 8, 2021 This editorial on disparities in property valuation in the New York Times is drawing attention and commentary, for good reason. The editorial finds nationwide, systemic valuation errors disproportionately affecting lower-value residential properties which shifts property-tax burdens towards those property-owners and away from higher-value residential property owners. Racial disparities in wealth and homeownership, and the persistent […]
Fred Kreider • April 5, 2021 It’s possible you’ve heard this joke before: A motorist, a pedestrian, and a bicyclist are sitting at a table that has a dozen cookies on it. The motorist grabs 11 of the cookies and when the other two are reaching for what they each assumed was their cookie, the motorist exclaims: “Watch out! The bicyclist […]
Fred Kreider • March 1, 2021 On December 29, 2019, seven people met at Dual Citizen Brewery in St. Paul, and there we created the streets.mn Climate Emergency Committee. We had a few in-person writing meet-ups before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, and even though none of us could anticipate the events that followed throughout the year of 2020, we maintained […]
Dan Marshall • February 8, 2021 Depending on who you ask, the Charles Bikeway has either succeeded or failed since construction began in 2012. Despite strong neighborhood support along its 3 1/2 mile long run, only some of the features of a proper bicycle boulevard have actually been built.