Have you ever tried to cross Hiawatha at East Lake Street on foot or by bike? If you ever do, remember to budget some extra time to cross the five lanes of traffic, which include two lanes where right-turning cars are not required to stop. As if there was any question about who is welcome […]
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 […]
The City of Minneapolis is asking citizens for input on the signals at major intersections of Hiawatha Avenue. Yesterday evening, when the “smart” pavement sensor recognized my car and gave me a green light, I passed a pedestrian stranded on a porkchop island who should have had a Walk signal as part of that light phase. As […]
In my work as a librarian, I have the extreme pleasure to curate my branch’s local history collection. Since I took up that charge, Mary Losure’s Our Way or the Highway: Inside the Minnehaha Free State (U of M Press, 2002) has been staring me down, begging me to pluck it off the shelf and check […]
The City of Minneapolis can salvage the Hiawatha Crosswalk “Improvement” project. All they have to do is send out a traffic engineer to reprogram the signals so the Walk signals automatically appear. Pedestrians deserve the right to an automatic Walk signal, particularly in a city-designated Pedestrian Overlay Zone near the Blue Line, a nearly $800 million transit investment that is […]
The Hiawatha Avenue crosswalk improvements at 38th, 42nd and 46th Streets are largely complete. For a reported cost of $850,000, curb bumpouts have been created in most places to reduce crossing distance, pork chop islands have been enlarged and center refuge islands widened, curb cuts are now ADA compliant, the crosswalk along the south side of […]