The biggest transit show in Minnesota: The State Fair

By |

If you want to see the biggest transit show in Minnesota, or anywhere between Chicago and the West Coast for that matter, hop a bus to the new State Fair bus terminal between now and Labor Day. Almost half of fairgoers arrive by bus, and those are now concentrated on the northwest side of the fair grounds. In addition to the new entry gate that replaced Heritage Square (see above), the terminal itself is just temporary fencing and lines painted on the asphalt of the big parking lot that serves the U of M’s St. Paul Campus most of the year. Built on the cheap, the loading and layover areas will need improvement because the buses are crushing the thin asphalt. Even so, it’s a big improvement on the facilities it replaced. Continue Reading

Squaring a triangle: Rethinking Franklin/Cedar/Minnehaha in Seward

By |

For decades, the Franklin/Cedar/Minnehaha area of northwest Seward has been a thorny area, confusing for cars, unsafe for pedestrians, and generally lacking in the urban amenities residents of most Minneapolis neighborhoods desire. Though the area has had an LRT station on the blue line for 10 years now, little has changed where the three streets come together, with only one redevelopment (Seward Common) just now being built. A long-term vision from the Seward neighborhood aims to address this, but largely leaves the the root transportation problems of the Franklin/Cedar/Minnehaha area intact. Continue Reading

Thoughts on Target Field Station

By |

With the emerging debacle of The Yard prominent in the press (Strib and blogosphere), it is natural to overlook the fact that downtown Minneapolis just opened a brand new public space. It is called Target Field Station (formerly The Interchange), and despite Tom Fisher’s review on MinnPost, people actually use it and it is pretty nice. So considering downtown Minneapolis, with its skyway system, failed parks over the years, largely treeless sidewalks, and overall general inability to produce a good downtown park or public space, Target Field Station is a huge victory for the city. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Target Field Station shouldn’t win any awards (although it probably will) but we’ll take it because it does decidedly improve the public realm downtown. But the real litmus test of the success of Target Field Station will be how people use it over the years, so let’s capture an early snapshot. Continue Reading

“I’m not opposed to development”

By |

Last Wednesday I found myself in a nearly empty meeting room, observing the Lowry Hill East Neighborhood Association (LHENA) at work. This has been an all-too-frequent circumstance for me in recent months, as I work the Wedge-beat for a fake news organization called @WedgeLIVE. I was there to watch the proposed development known as Frank-Lyn inch its way closer to the finish line. Supporters of the development achieved a sort of moral victory in hostile territory, falling just one vote short (4-3) in a bid for LHENA’s largely symbolic approval (on its way to meeting the approval of the City Planning Commission late Monday, as I write this). Continue Reading