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. […]
Check out this new mapping project from Quartz, showing the average life expectancy for every zip code in the US. [You can search any city in the state or the country using the map!] The differences in life expectancy are striking, and nowhere more so than right in Saint Paul. The Quartz team found that […]
With more cities developing Vision Zero initiatives to eliminate road traffic fatalities, more people are seeing the way streets that are designed as a life-and-death issue. That entails seeing things that used to look fairly benign – a 13′ lane width, for example – as hazardous. We should start seeing the absence of mature street […]
The Dawn of Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) Previously I covered the cobrahead streetlights of the Twin Cities. Well, they’re almost gone. The thousands of high pressure sodium MnDOT lights on the freeways have been converted to LED (light emitting diodes) and the 90,000 Xcel energy lights are in the process of being converted. So it’s […]
One number stands above all others as the best indicator of good health. It’s not your blood pressure, cholesterol level, average daily calories or even the age at which your grandparents die. It’s your zip code. This fact has sent shockwaves across the county. The chief aspiration of American democracy is that everyone deserves an […]
Editor’s Note: One of the missing voices in bicycle planning in the Twin Cities is college students. This series aims to include the perspectives of a generation that is much less likely than their parents to own vehicles. The authors are Macalester students enrolled in the “Bicycling the Urban Landscape” course. The overarching objective is […]
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.
This chart from the Financial Times is impossible to pass up, showing the health benefits of urban bicycling at different levels of particulate pollution. The article includes a helpful cycling benefits chart generator, where you plug in the current Twin Cities’ PM2.5 air quality measurement and it gives you a cool chart showing the relationship between exercise […]
Here’s a podcast conversation with Linda Feltes, the workplace wellness coordinator for the state of Minnesota Office of Management and Budget. I first met Linda when we both testified in favor of the Saint Paul Bicycle Plan earlier this year, and so we met up later at Claddagh Coffee on West 7th Street. We sat down […]
Here’s a bit of encouraging news, at least if you happen to live in Minnesota. According to the CDC, Minnesota is alone in the upper midwest in keeping obesity in check. Here’s the chart, via MN Dept of Health: Why are we bucking the trend? In 2013, approximately 18,600 Minnesotans covered by state health care […]