Jenny Werness • September 30, 2020 “We eventually made our way back home after accomplishing our goal, braving the complex gauntlet of signs, barricades, broken pavement, noisy machines, and dangerous drivers.”
Joseph Totten • September 24, 2020 Sweeny’s Saloon has a parking lot across Dale Street from the bar. While COVID-19 might reduce the bar’s crowding, it should not prevent safety improvements! My parents and I live relatively close to each other, only about a 3 block walk separates my apartment and their townhome. As such, when my printer is giving me […]
Pat Thompson • September 18, 2020 It was sunny and not quite 60 degrees when I unfolded my camp chair at the northwest corner of Energy Park Drive and the U of M Transitway on the edge of Saint Paul to count people walking or bicycling on a Thursday afternoon in September. I placed the chair right next to the beg […]
Jeff Wood • August 12, 2020 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. […]
Planted medians are one of those “nice things” people always seem to be referring to in snarky social media posts. They bring visual relief to people near them and inspire traffic calming. We all know this. But where there’s soil, there’s also a place for weed seeds to fall, and those seeds grow into plants […]
The Old ShakopeeRoad/98th Street Corridor is one of the east-west thoroughfares of Bloomington. It’s also an outdated roadway. Several segments are a four-lane death road, the sidewalks are narrow and buckling, and traffic typically goes 5 to 10 miles per hour over the speed limit. The route has several high-traffic destinations, including the Mall of […]
In my recent streets.mn article, “Want Equitable Cities? We’ll Need More Women in Transportation Planning,” I argued that women’s under-representation in transportation planning and policy making leads to the creation of urban spaces that fail to meet the needs of girls and women. I ended the article with a bold question: What would cities look […]
By popular demand, we moved the recent streets.mn Happy Hour (a good time was had by all) over to Lyndale Avenue earlier this month to team up with the group of courageous and dedicated folks who are trying to make it safe to cross Lyndale Avenue South on foot. They held what they called the […]
Former Streetsblog USA writer Angie Schmitt has recently been making the point on Twitter that, despite the extremity of our climate crisis, the transition to sustainable transportation can’t be instantaneous because of our sprawling built environment. We therefore will need both EVs (maybe including ebikes, though she doesn’t address this) and smaller/safer vehicles for people […]
I wanted to take a moment to pause and look back at 2019, which was a brutal year for people walking in Saint Paul. Last year, five people were killed by automobile violence, making it an especially tragic year. For every name here, there were many more people hit and injured by people driving cars […]