I’m optimistic and excited about 2015. We have a whole new year of opportunity laid out before us and it looks to be a good year for bicycling in MN. We’ll likely see some new and better bicycling facilities around the Twin Cities and elsewhere in Minnesota. That will mean a few more people walking and […]
In considering how to make Cathedral/Summit/Crocus Hill a safe place for everyone to walk and ride bicycles we need to rebuild Grand Ave. Grand Ave has an 80’ right-of-way (building face to building face) and in most sections a 12’ sidewalk on each side resulting in 56’ curb-to-curb. There are a few critical elements that […]
This coming Saturday, October 25th, elected leaders, transportation officials, business leaders, non-profit groups, community leaders, and transportation enthusiasts from around St Paul and the metro area will come together for a first-of-its-kind event: a day-long convening “designed to educate, engage and empower Saint Paul residents from diverse backgrounds to play an active role in shaping […]
A topic that has arisen a few times is the New Urbanism concept of a using a grid street system to disperse traffic rather than concentrate most traffic on a few major arterials with a hierarchical road system. This is one element of New Urbanism that I disagree with. I’m not at all opposed to […]
Here’s the week on streets.mn raked into tidy piles for easy reading: Look and listen Videos this week include the fun tour of some of Saint Paul’s new bike boulevards with Bikerlapse: Dayton to Griggs to Charles and two somber and shocking safety-related videos with Saturday Music Video: White Bike (Me For Queen) and Hit me at […]
Motivation is an interesting thing. As a manager I was always interested in how best to motivate employees to achieve what was most important for our company. Many people that I hired were motivated simply to do a great job and for these folks the best thing to do was to give them what they […]
Sometimes in designing walkways and cycleways and streets and roadways it’s easy to get caught up in details and lose sight of the overall goals. I even ran into this problem as I was writing this and had to continually de-detail. It’s human nature I guess. Fundamentals are important because it’s important that we understand […]
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 some time I’ve maintained that riding a bicycle safely on the road in the U.S. is, relative to driving a car, fairly safe. My reasoning was based largely on statistics indicating that bicycle fatalities generally make up about 2% of all road fatalities in the U.S., a modal share of about 1% (EG, about […]
A friend of mine recently had a bike-riding experience worthy of story-telling, and agreed to share it here. Della Kurzer-Zlotnick, the author, will be moving to Oberlin for college this fall. I’ve just gotten into biking as a primary form of transportation in the last year or two. As a car-free, environmentally conscious recent high school graduate, […]