I’m coming up on my two-year anniversary of being car-free in Minneapolis. But it didn’t happen at the snap of my fingers. Selling my car was the last step in a gradual, deliberate process that involved becoming aware and making decisions based on how I move around the city (and the world), and no small […]
There’s a great chart-laden essay on Yonah Freemark’s “Transport Politic” blog that seeks to explain the reasons for the decline in transit (especially bus) ridership across the country. Here’s one of the charts that features the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metro: Minneapolis is the red line, the second from the top. As you can see, transit […]
The Riverview Corridor study made news last week, after planners revealed the six alternatives that have survived the study’s analysis from which a final recommendation will be chosen. At the Pioneer Press, Frederick Melo has a good summary of what remains, and the paper ran a separate article on the absence of light rail from […]
It’s Easter, Passover, almost Tax Day, and finally really Spring (and construction season is starting, too). Locally, its election season, too, so streets.mn is starting to work on its 2017 Voter Guide. If you have questions you’d like asked or issues you want discussed during the Minneapolis (mayor and Council) and Saint Paul (mayor), please […]
From the first expression of interest to the actual hauling of passengers, the gestation period for light rail transit in Minneapolis/Saint Paul turned out to be 44 years. When the Twin Cities Metropolitan Transit Commission (MTC) was created in 1967, the prevailing vision for rail transit was what we now call “heavy rail”, completely grade […]
Here’s a chart that was tweeted out today by Alex Cecchini, who argues that US cities should be doing much more to grade separate transit modes and make them safer. You can read the Twitter exchange here. https://twitter.com/alexcecchini/status/774252739954040837 While writing an article on light rail safety a few months ago, I researched some of the […]
Every day at The Direct Transfer 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 DC region. […]
The road was dedicated to Northside resident and socialist Governor Floyd B. Olson in 1951, but it was older than that. As near as I can tell, construction of the modern-day Olson Memorial Highway began in the late 1930s. That makes it one of the first urban freeways in the Twin Cities. (For some reference, it’s earlier than the very early Hiawatha […]
Planning transit takes a long time, and there are so many ways it can go wrong. For my money, the best remaining urban transit project in Saint Paul is the so-called “Riverview corridor” running from downtown along West 7th street down to the airport. As the latest ridership numbers show, rail has been the key to […]
Since I started serving on the Technical Advisory Committee for the Riverview Corridor transit project, I’ve had a front row seat from which to view the planning process here in St Paul. This isn’t the first time I’ve served on a group like this, but it is the most intensive and serious effort so far. […]