I spent three mornings in the last week volunteering to wear a yellow vest and hold a fluorescent poster board, just down the street from my local elementary school. The sign said “SLOW You’re Almost There,” and it was addressed to parents who were driving their children to school. As they approached the curve where […]
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. […]
By my count there are six schools on or one block off of Jefferson Street in Northeast Minneapolis. From the trail at 18th Avenue NE to 4th Avenue SE, there’s Spero Academy/Heartwood Montessori, Sheridan Elementary, Webster Elementary, Aveda Institute, Marcy Open School, and the University of Minnesota. 5th Street NE is a bicycle boulevard and […]
When I was in school as a child I took the bus. Nearly everyone I knew took the bus or walked. Now, my children are in the very small minority who walk or bike to school. Many children are still bussed to school, but my memories of 1985 do not include a long line of […]
My 7-year-old sibkid “K” spent a week with me in the Big City so she could go to day camp. I registered K at a “nearby” program (that K loved). But Lake Harriet Upper Elementary School isn’t THAT nearby. I’d hoped we could practice riding bikes initially, as K is still working on that skill, but […]
The following is in response to a column that appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press last week. — Dear Joe, You called me out. I have three children (ages 1, 3, and 5), I drive a mini-van (red 2010 Toyota Sienna) and I’d love to make the call on bike lanes. But you probably […]
The free-range kids movement has been seeing a lot of press lately, both pro and con. Some say that giving kids freedom is great. Others suggest that not every freedom-giving parent shows great judgment and is foisting responsibility to other adults in complex situations – and while it takes a village, there are reasons the […]
While looking around for some data for another project, I ran into Minneapolis Health Department’s Reports. There’s a lot of great data there, but not all of it is necessarily in amazing condition for people to build off of. One data set, entitled Minneapolis Birth Data, caught my attention. Locked away in mostly tabular PDFs are a […]
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 […]