Lyndale neighborhood, the only place I’ve lived and known as home in Minnesota, hosts the Fifth Precinct of the Minneapolis Police Department three blocks north of my apartment and garden on Nicollet Avenue. There is a community room meeting the corner of 31st Street with floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides, an architectural manifestation of the […]
Here’s an a propos chart. It shows the number of children killed by cars by day of the year: A quote about it the data: BestPlaces analyzed more than four million records of auto fatalities from the Department of Transportation Fatality Analysis Reporting System. As the graph below shows, there have been 133 child pedestrian […]
When Rectangular Rapid Flash Beacons (RRFBs) started appearing in Bloomington and Edina I thought they would be a huge improvement for pedestrian safety, but having used them numerous times I’ve realized they’re a compromise on safety and neither motorists or pedestrians are the winners. RRFBs are a safety device used at crosswalks in which a […]
An Open Letter to Minneapolis 2040 Planners and Politicians: Donald Trump crossed the ocean to London, England this past summer only to land in a sea of local outrage and demonstrations, including signs and a comically small Baby Trump protest blimp. I’m glad to see people exercising their free speech rights but Trump’s visit clouded […]
Insight Brewery. Familia skatepark. Five Watt Coffee. Headflyer Brewing. What do all of these places have in common, besides being almost unbearably hip? They’re all sitting on a death trap street named East Hennepin Avenue. Here’s a fun experiment: Next time you drive down East Hennepin, actually drive at the 30 miles per hour speed limit […]
If you subscribed to the Minneapolis Daily Star in 1923, you could get a year’s worth of pedestrian insurance for an extra 75 cents. The add-on deal was just what it sounds like: insurance coverage for injuries (including fatal injuries) you might incur while walking across the street. The offer, through the North American Accident […]
Today I’m bringing you our 118th episode, a conversation with Dr. Nichole Morris. Dr. Morris is the director of the HumanFIRST Laboratory at the University of Minnesota, and is a researcher and scholar who focuses on the intersection of transportation, technology, and behavior. We sat down a few months ago in her office at the […]
This weekend I had the pleasure of visiting New Ulm, MN, for the first time. Friends had suggested I hike up to see Hermann the German, listen to the Glockenspiel at an appointed time, and of course drink plenty of Schell’s beer. However, one of the things I was looking forward to most was the […]
Writing about the 5th “E” of implementing Vision Zero – Encouragement – is long overdue, perhaps a symptom of a lack of encouragement in general. The other “Es”: Evaluation, Engineering, Education, and Enforcement, have been covered previously, with suggestions, sometimes contradictory, on the multitude of ways that St. Paul could become a model Vision Zero […]
The recent death of Alan Grahn on Summit Avenue at Snelling has provoked widespread calls for improvements to the Summit Avenue Bikeway. His is not the first death, the first crash or even the first crash of that type at that intersection. A gentleman named David Wuest was similarly hit by a motorist turning northbound […]