Municipal Shoveling Won’t Solve Winter Walking Woes — But Other City Investments Can
Assigning the city to shovel sidewalks may work in a dense, anonymous metropolis. But here in community-minded St. Paul, we can do better.
Category: Sidewalks
Benchmarking: a 3:2:1 Recipe for Success
Streets.mn contributor Pine Salica has a fresh zeal and appreciation for benches, and a pitch for streets that make space for more of them.
Assessing the Stadium Village Green Line Public Space
There’s a the public space on Washington Avenue between the tracks of the Stadium Village Green Line station. What’s it like as a place to hang out in? What can it tell us for other spaces like this, which some of us wish for in the future, as in the Twin Cities Boulevard vision?
Lots to Love About the Hennepin Avenue Reconstruction
Starting in 2024, the City of Minneapolis will reconstruct Hennepin Avenue from Lake Street to Douglas Avenue. In line with the City’s progressive climate, transportation and comprehensive plans, Public Works has recommended a redesign of Hennepin Avenue that puts the climate and people walking, biking and rolling first. In this post, I will highlight some […]
Federal Highway Administration’s MUTCD May Flout Requirements
A document search suggests agency failed to consider safer and more sustainable designs, as required by the FAST Act, in engineering manual update.
Minnesota’s Deadly Pedestrian Refuge Islands
The way St. Paul Public Works and the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) design pedestrian refuge islands is awful. It’s symbolic of how oblivious and uncaring they are about pedestrian and bicycle crashes. It’s also one of many indicators that little has changed in this state during the past 20 years. Consider these pedestrian refuge […]
A Street Not for People
Like many transit riders, I have been riding much less since the pandemic, mostly because I have been sticking closer to my home and neighborhood. (Though note: there is starting to be evidence that transit-riding is not a big contributor to COVID-19 rates.) That decrease is a personal sadness because of the lost human connections […]
The Gauntlet of Construction Signs: A Neighborhood Walk
“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.”
Old Shakopee and 98th: From Death Road to Multimodal Corridor
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 […]
National Links: Fast Trains, Bad Sidewalks and Rezoning Miami
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. […]