One of the places that planners have been talking a lot about in the past decade is Tysons Corner, VA. A Washington D.C. suburb known for having a big mall where world’s first Apple Store opened, Tysons Corner had also managed to attract a number of major office tenants, and was something of a regional […]
I’ve been learning about what the Americans with Disabilities Act requires when it comes to our sidewalks. Here, I want to share my single favorite discovery. Hennepin County has an interactive online map with photo images and descriptions of every intersection, curb cut, signal actuation/beg button, and sidewalk obstruction on county streets. That map is […]
As of right now, Thrivent Financial owns a collection of surface parking lots and one uniquely shaped 18-story tower in Downtown Minneapolis. For what seems like ages, their tower loomed over a vacant corridor of the city where even surface parking was off limits, contracted only to the employees of Thrivent Financial. But following the […]
The intersection of Cedar/Franklin/Minnehaha is the second most dangerous intersection in Minneapolis, with the second most bicycle crashes. It is also one of the most dangerous intersections in Hennepin County, with vehicle crash rates more than two and a half times the “critical rate.” Hennepin County, the City of Minneapolis, and other local groups worked […]
This week’s podcast is a conversation with Debbie Goettel, the mayor of Richfield and a candidate for the Hennepin County Commissioner in the 5th District, which encompasses Richfield, Bloomington, and a big chuck of Eden Prairie. We sat down at the Southdale Library this week, right on the Edina border, to talk about the role […]
The city of Saint Paul has long envisioned extending the Minneapolis Midtown Greenway across the Mississippi River and along the Canadian Pacific railroad line into Saint Paul. Engineers at the city’s Public Works Department began actively exploring the idea in 2003. It was on the city’s Comprehensive Plan at least as far back as 2008, […]
If you have ever traveled through the intersection of Franklin/Cedar/Minnehaha, you know how confusing, wide, fast, and unfriendly it feels. With the second-most bicycle crashes, this is the second-most dangerous intersection in Minneapolis. It’s also one of the most dangerous intersections in Hennepin County, with crash rates more than two and a half times the […]
For a couple of months now, local route buses heading north and south through Downtown Minneapolis have been detoured off Nicollet Mall while a $50 million dollar rebuild of that street has gotten underway. Right now buses are running three blocks away on 3rd Avenue South, but they’ll be moving over to Hennepin Avenue next month. […]
Sunday’s Open Streets on East Lake Street was the biggest ever. (Or so I hear; I wasn’t there, I was off doing this.) A while back I was interviewing an East Lake business owner for a story I was working on, and a neighborhood organizer came up to the table to chat. We ended up talking about […]
Out in the world, there exist all sorts of theories and ideas that are generally correct, in a broad, often academic sense. But you’ll find that those theories and ideas can’t always be applied to all possible situations in the universe. You can say, for example, that lower taxes are good for an economy. More people […]