Riding Across the City, Riding Across the Country
A day’s ride through St. Paul offers lessons on the physical, mental and spiritual aspects of cycling.
Category: Travel
National Links: A New Metric for Traffic Safety
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. […]
Take it on Down to Highway 61: A Book Review
Nathan Johnson’s Highway 61 Through Minnesota is published by Arcadia Press in their Images of America series. The series has, according to their website, a whopping 8,223 titles. Just 69 of these are from Minnesota. It’s a proven format, almost certainly a commercial success, and yet I’m sad to report it doesn’t really work for […]
National Links: Joining the Zoning Club
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. […]
Amtrak’s Empire Builder: The Train that Deserves Better
Amtrak’s Empire Builder, the only intercity rail service in Minnesota, will be reduced from daily to tri-weekly service beginning in October due to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. I decided to take it one more time before the cuts went into effect, as there’s no way of knowing how long it’ll be before daily […]
E-ZPass Electronic Toll Collection Comes to Minnesota
Nationwide Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) Interoperability has been an elusive goal for some time. In practical terms that would mean you’d be able to use your MnPASS transponder to pay tolls on a road trip to Chicago or in your rental car in Florida, and in turn, residents of those states would be able to […]
Notes From the Minnesota Statewide Passenger Rail Plan Meeting
On Jan 7, a meeting on the Minnesota Statewide Passenger Rail plan was held at the McColl Pond Environmental Learning Center in Savage, and streets.mn was invited to join other local media outlets and elected officials to hear about updates to the plan. No one else from streets.mn said they were going, so, because I […]
Reader Survey Results: Economics of Amtrak from Minneapolis to Duluth
On March 27, we posted about the numbers surrounding the proposed $600 million investment to bring Amtrak rail service along a corridor between Minneapolis and Duluth. Many of you shared your stories of rail and bus travel, and many expressed a deep appreciation for the comfort and conveniences of travel by rail. To learn more, I created a […]
Trip Report: Amtrak Empire Builder Chicago-St. Paul
How about the train? Way back in December I had already planned most of my 3-month summer tour of Europe, but I hadn’t decided on how I would return home. I narrowed my options to a flight from Europe directly to Minneapolis (boring, but the quickest), fly from Europe to Chicago and then Amtrak to […]
Bikepacking Is Great
I went bikepacking again! That makes Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend, the perfect bookends to summer for bikepacking. Our destination this time was a hike-in site at beautiful Afton State Park. We weighed the pros and cons of taking such a roundabout route, and decided that this route was better than the one […]