Early this week, after five days in critical care at Regions Hospital with major head trauma, Erin Elizabeth Dunham succumbed to her injuries and died. Her story is a terrible but predictable tragedy: a woman tried to cross the street in a legal marked crosswalk when one driver stopped for her but was hit by another […]
Perpetuating the status quo is sadly the way things are done in Saint Paul. The inertia of what has always been carries a lot of weight here. The latest example can be found on Summit Avenue in the form of the annual repainting of the door zone lane. Below is the current Summit lane sizing: […]
A recent blogpost by the Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research charts out some recent trends in crash statistics. In general, US roads have been getting safer. But at the same time, as more cities encourage walking and biking, pedestrian and bicyclist crashes, injuries, and deaths have become a greater share of the whole […]
On Saturday, May 7, Scott and I walked a stretch of the Midtown Greenway, a 5.5 mile bicycle and pedestrian trail that runs parallel to Lake Street. Traffic was heavier than usual because of the Bike MS: Twin Cities Ride. The trail had a race day vibe with lots of cyclists playing music and pedestrians cheering on the racers (OK, […]
I have recently had the pleasure of watching two people learn to ride a bicycle. I have vague memories of learning to ride a bike around age five. Like many people I rode as a child and stopped as a teenager. I took it up again in my late 20s and have now been riding […]
If St. Paul wants to be accessible to people from ages 8 to 80, as it claims, then it needs to accommodate pedestrians in construction zones.
In the conversations leading up to the City Council vote today on the 3rd Ave S redesign, it seems we’ve gotten focused on the wrong questions. The most important question isn’t “will the downtown businesses agree to replace greening by a large enough percentage?” It also isn’t “but how do downtown business owners feel about this?” The […]
Here’s a fun-to-peruse map that emerged out of the process for creating Saint Paul’s almost-completed Complete Streets Design Manual. It’s an attempt to make a comprehensive map of Saint Paul’s streets ranked according to all the different safety factors. Check it out: This map is a few years old. It was part of an “overlay analysis” […]
This past Saturday afternoon, a cyclist was struck and critically injured on Excelsior Blvd west of Lake Calhoun, in a section where the roadway is surrounded by the Minikahda Club. This section of Excelsior Blvd is a 4-lane undivided roadway, what some colloquially label a Four Lane Death Road. There are no bicycle facilities and […]
The road was dedicated to Northside resident and socialist Governor Floyd B. Olson in 1951, but it was older than that. As near as I can tell, construction of the modern-day Olson Memorial Highway began in the late 1930s. That makes it one of the first urban freeways in the Twin Cities. (For some reference, it’s earlier than the very early Hiawatha […]