Yesterday, I made plans with friends to go out for dinner in downtown Minneapolis. Although one of my friends has a car, she didn’t want to drive because “there’s never anywhere to park”. This seems to be a common sentiment towards driving downtown in Minneapolis and many other cities, so why is so much space […]
This coming Wednesday, June 17, at 5:30pm, the Saint Paul City Council faces its first test for implementing the city’s Bikeways Plan. The plan calls for bike lanes on Cleveland Avenue. The question is: Will they vote to implement the plan, or will they listen to claims of bike lane opponents and scrap a major […]
Minneapolis Bike Week is here! It’s all about inspiring new people to try biking (or biking more). I hope you can help inspire new bicyclists this week by being a Bike Buddy (& get free goodies!), sharing Bike Week events with your friends, or more (here are 5 easy ways you can help!). Monday, May 11: […]
Minnesota Transportation Bill Basics The Republican-controlled House has passed a transportation bill that uses General Fund money to support billions in new road funding, cuts transit, and ignores walking and biking. The DFL-controlled Senate has passed a transportation bill that uses a gas tax increase to support billions in new road funding, a metro-area sales […]
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 […]
When I draw cartoons about imaginary bicycles, I try to make the designs believable and think about how they might actually be constructed. In this first example, the projector bike would be pretty complicated to build, perhaps impossible, but the other three designs wouldn’t be that hard and they might produce bikes that would be […]
This experience was from two years ago, so the landscape has probably changed since then, but from what I gather, probably not. My friend got a job with Google Labs in New York and uprooted his family to move to Brooklyn. I was going to be in Annapolis, Maryland while touring with Minnesota Brass, so […]
The wave of new “Complete Streets” laws require cities to develop “Complete Streets Plans” and new street design manuals. Street design manuals are like smart phone contracts or software download agreements. They tend to be so mind-numbingly boring and full of technical jargon that, rather than read them, we just click “agree.” Later on, we […]
3M’s Maplewood campus is a place that I have long thought has one of the best opportunities in Minnesota for employee bicycling. The 12,000 employees at the 28 building campus account for a significant number of extremely short trips by car each and every day. Trips that just about anywhere outside of the U.S. would […]
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 […]