Streets belong to you…and me…and everybody else; streets are public spaces – like parks – and might just be our most undervalued and underutilized community resources. Northfield and Rice County are beginning to plan a reconstruction project on Woodley Street and this particular street is a golden opportunity to add value and change the conversation, too. What […]
By U.S. standards we have fairly good pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure around the Twin Cities. For many years Minneapolis was ranked number two in the nation and quite proud of it. In 2011 we even jumped up to number one briefly. How times change. We were back to our comfortable number two in 2012, the […]
For the folks who missed the West 29th Street Reconstruction Open House in May, you missed the ultimate rarity: a public meeting in which everyone seems to agree on something! 29th might in fact be the most pot-holed and least attractive street in the city, but this didn’t seem to sway folks’ decidedly pro-pedestrian enthusiasm. […]
The Minnesota Department of Public Transportation has released a draft of its new five-year Strategic Highway Safety Plan (SHSP) at http://www.dot.state.mn.us/safetyplan/pdf/2014_SHSP_060914.pdf I encourage people to read the plan and comment on it. The public only has until July 8 to make comments. Comments should be sent to safetyplan@state.mn.us Below are my own comments. They’re super wonky […]
St. Anthony Village is an interesting suburban town. It has an excellent school district. It has pretty good “bones” – a solid grid system which has worked for centuries. Not much of the twisting, un-navigable dead-ends found in a traditional post WWII suburb: St. Anthony Village has sidewalks(!). And the intersections even have stuff like […]
Some of my recent posts have seemed to bemoan some of Minneapolis’ public realm or proposed projects, asking for better. I intended to shake that up, but I couldn’t swing it. Instead, I’ll keep the theme going by bringing up a place near and dear to me as a U of M alum – Dinkytown. […]
If you grew up in Minnesota, you may have heard the story of Saint Paul’s narrow streets—In downtown, the streets were so tight that the city eventually decided to shave off the fronts of buildings downtown, in order to make the streets wider. Today, however, many of downtown Saint Paul’s streets are too wide, or […]
The Hennepin/Lyndale Bottleneck: Not great by any measure. The City of Minneapolis is working on a plan to, basically, repave it. Many well-written thoughts about that project and whether or not it’s a good idea and what we’d do if we had exponentially more funding for it can be found here. But as with many […]
For Streets.mn’s “Our Fair State” series during the Minnesota State Fair, I don’t really have a good story to tell about an out-state event. I do, however, live less than a mile from the State Fairgrounds and wanted to share a little of what this heavily pedestrian-oriented event is like to be around the other […]
We’re going to take a bit of a break from the hard-hitting issues to discuss my newest pet peeve: Newsboxes. Newsboxes are the (usually) colorful boxes that sit within the public right-of-way where various publications are distributed, sometimes for a price, but usually free. They’re on my mind lately after a friend tweeted the following […]