I had a spicy Twitter exchange the other day with Max Nesterak, who has been doing great work at his new website, the MN Reformer. The question he posed rekindled some long-simmering thoughts I’ve been having about the eternal question “are new buildings bad?” Here’s the tweet: Who’s going to write an op-ed for @MNReformer […]
Last week’s article calling for a ban on slip lanes in Saint Paul is spot on. Too many of our city streets are built like highways, endangering pedestrians and bicyclists by design. The comments on the article, however, turned toward pedestrian bridges, in particular the bridge at Aldine over I-94, as an alternative to walking […]
Here is a fun and graphically minimalist approach to mapping cities in different states, from the Barely Maps website created by Peter Gorman. These “maps” show the largest cities in any state as stars in constellations, with the largest city as the large star, the lines demarcate a larger distance): Here is Minnesota: And our […]
Today I’m bringing you our 118th episode, a conversation with Dr. Nichole Morris. Dr. Morris is the director of the HumanFIRST Laboratory at the University of Minnesota, and is a researcher and scholar who focuses on the intersection of transportation, technology, and behavior. We sat down a few months ago in her office at the […]
September 18, 2015 9.8 Miles Macalester-Groveland, Merriam Park, Lex-Ham From out of the patchy grey sky came intermittent sprinkles and the threat of heavier precipitation, but none of that was enough to keep me from my 2 p.m. appointment. Working in my favor was the ride wasn’t long, so I’d make it, even in a […]
In small and mid-sized towns across the United States the daily decisions on design are literally making our health worse. We need to go back to a system where we designed cities for humans. Below is a link to my PechaKucha presentation from the Mayo Clinic Transform 2015 Symposium.
The intersection of Ninth Street and Nicollet Mall is one of the busiest in downtown Minneapolis. As a pedestrian mall, Nicollet caters primarily to pedestrian traffic and also offers a roadway for buses and bicycles. Ninth Street is essentially an urban highway, stretching 55 feet across and featuring three lanes for cars, as well as an unprotected bike […]
I’m on vacation in a part of the world where major towns (population 24,000) have weekend train service every other hour, including stops in many towns of just a few hundred.* I’m using my fair share of this convenient Norwegian transit, including buses, streetcars, and ferries. Here for a reunion, I’m seeing many friends. This […]
The following City staff counterpoint is a response to Tom Fisher’s recent article, “Enough visual interest, already!” The article was published online February 13, 2015, and appeared in print the following day. This counterpoint is co-authored by Jason Wittenberg, the Manager of Land Use, Design and Preservation for the City of Minneapolis and Kjersti Monson, the Director of […]
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 […]