Category: Safety

A Preventable Death on Nicollet, Make No Mistake

    Another one down It’s part of the price to pay They say but no more         Pedestrians die and no one blinks. We consider it to be an individual accident and thus an individual error but it’s time to connect the dots. We consider it the price to pay for […]

Saved By The Bell

Editor’s Note: One of the missing voices in bicycle planning in the Twin Cities is college students. This series aims to include the perspectives of a generation that is much less likely than their parents to own vehicles. The authors are Macalester students enrolled in the “Bicycling the Urban Landscape” course. The overarching objective is […]

A Better Washington Avenue Now, Not Later

  When Hennepin County opens the new stretch of Washington Avenue between Hennepin Avenue and 5th Street in 2017, it will debut a safe and accessible environment for pedestrians and bike riders alike in Minneapolis. However, the infrastructure will be largely stranded. Along Washington between 5th Street and I-35W, the County plans to install unprotected bike […]

A Miraculous North Minneapolis Bus Ride

A work meeting, an oral surgery consult, a volleyball game, and five other commitments. It had been a coffee-to-go and a wolf-down-a-handful-of-trail-mix-at-the-stoplight kind of day. And now at six o’clock, I fought through the evening rush hour traffic in downtown Minneapolis, each minute at a standstill twisting my stomach into a tighter knot. I would […]

Delivering Safety in Saint Paul’s Bike Lanes

This summer our car broke. It was old and tired and just decided it didn’t want to cart us around anymore. The good people at the American Diabetes Association came and towed it away for us, and we took to our bikes. Every morning, my 8-year-old son and I would bike from Prospect Park to […]

Why Aren’t There More Crashes at the Airport?

If you have ever witnessed first-hand the glorious vehicular chaos that is dropping off or picking up someone up at a major airport terminal, you may have wondered how there’s not constant, complete system breakdown. This video of LAX illustrates nicely just how many moving parts there are all around at an airport drop off. […]

Chart of the Day: Projected Statewide Pedestrian Fatalities

Here’s a grim chart from the Star Tribune’s data desk showing the 2016 rising trend in pedestrian deaths from crashes. The chart below looks at death counts for the past ten years adjusted for the first nine months of the year: You should read through the article. The author, Eric Roper, interviews a public safety expert who points to the […]

Chart of the Day: Occupant and Non-occupant Fatalities by Mode

Here’s a chart that was tweeted out today by Alex Cecchini, who argues that US cities should be doing much more to grade separate transit modes and make them safer.   You can read the Twitter exchange here. https://twitter.com/alexcecchini/status/774252739954040837 While writing an article on light rail safety a few months ago, I researched some of the […]

#SaferStreets are better for businesses, families, and the community

One of the biggest challenges in our current transportation system is the way our streets are designed. In many parts of our communities, the only safe option for people to get around town is to drive a car, raising costs and limiting options for businesses, families, and the community as a whole. Last year, St […]