As I write this, the 2016 Minnesota legislative session is coming to a close, and last-minute discussions are taking place to try and sort out transportation funding. One of the major options is the possibility of a 0.5% metro-area sales tax for transit, an increase from the 0.25% currently collected for the Counties Transit Improvement Board. […]
A couple weeks ago, I headed out to Colorado, the Centennial State, with buddy and fellow streets.mn writer Chris Iverson. It’s nice! Second time since the fall. Weather was good. We went out to wander around and also ride a new train line that just opened up, connecting Downtown Denver with Denver International Airport, which is […]
Sherburne County lies between the two metropolitan areas of St. Cloud and the Twin Cities. Highway 10 will take you directly from St. Paul to St. Cloud, passing through Elk River, Big Lake, Becker and Clear Lake. US Census data indicates that the county’s population more than doubled between 1990 and 2010, from roughly 42,000 […]
Recently, posts about the Riverview Corridor have been generating a LOT of comments on streets.mn. One of these posts suggested that, in order to ensure the old Ford factory in Highland Park develops in a way that would not be thoroughly suburban, that the Riverview Corridor should be rerouted through Highland Park on the old […]
June 26, 2015 19.96 miles (but I’m saying 20 miles) Macalester-Groveland, Summit-University, St. Anthony Park, Hamline-Midway When you mention Summit Avenue, most people think of the eastern part of the Avenue, home to the mansions built for industrialists like the Hills, Weyerhaeusers, and Ordways. Summit became the place favored to live by Saint Paul’s most […]
Imagine arriving at the Mall of America light rail station and seeing trains for both downtown Minneapolis and downtown St. Paul, and not waiting 20 years until the Riverview Corridor is built. When the Hiawatha Line (today’s Blue Line) opened in 2004, it had service every 7.5 minutes (8 trains per hour). [As of this writing, […]
It’s 2015 this year, and the Green Line feels like the future to me. Lot’s of people are riding it. How many? Take a look: According to the Metro Transit blog, “September’s strong light-rail ridership can partly be attributed to special events. More than 193,000 light-rail rides were taken to home sporting events last month.” […]
We at streets.mn have been fairly critical of the excess of traffic control devices on the Washington Avenue traffic mall [1][2][3]. We have questioned the purpose of all the lights, including mid-block walk signals, when there is no motorized cross-traffic. The response from users of the traffic mall has been a great many violations of […]
This week, a citizen group is holding a couple of public meetings to advocate for a passenger rail link between the Twin Cities and Eau Claire, Wisconsin, a corridor that MnDOT suggested in its 2010 State Rail Plan should be built before the year 2030. The meeting announcement has led me to dig into the […]
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 […]