Green Line, green lights
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Suppose you have a train moving along (parallel to) an East-West (EW) signalized arterial. Continue Reading
Squaring a triangle: Rethinking Franklin/Cedar/Minnehaha in Seward
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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
Pick up an orange flag and cross a street!
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Pick up an orange flag and cross a street. That’s how revolutions get started. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Continue Reading
“I’m not opposed to development”
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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
Did you know? Transit challenges affect St. Paul’s East Side
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The Green Line may be up and running, but that is only the beginning of new transit development in the eastern metro. Did you know that there are three potential transit projects that could have a direct impact on the future of Dayton’s Bluff?
Sympathy for the Devil?
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It may seem strange to work up much sympathy for a booming industry that killed 47 people while virtually leveling their Quebec town last year and later touched off a giant fireball over Casselton, N.D., on the Minnesota border, but that’s what I’m feeling these days for the railroads. Continue Reading
Recalculating a life
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Like Dorothy who was whisked away from drab Kansas to exotic Oz, I daily confront the complications of living in a new and strange land. I keep learning that things I thought were a normal part of the world were actually regional characteristics. For example, Midwest roads and streets are laid out in an orderly grid, crossing each other at 90-degree angles in predictable intervals. As a Flatlander, I took that grid structure for granted. I was amused but also reassured by Minneapolis’s alphabetical street names (Colfax, Dupont, Emerson, Fremont, Girard, Holmes). Continue Reading
A DMV grows in Saint Paul (inside the Sears department store!)
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Saint Paul is a weird city. One of its many quirks, which may go largely undetected, is that it has a DMV located deep in the recesses of a Sears Department Store. Continue Reading
A Southwest Light Rail explainer
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August 03, 2014, back seat of a Toyota 4Runner, Highway 169, Central Minnesota:
“So what’s going on with that train stuff?”
“Ah, it’s kind of a long story at this point.” Continue Reading
Refining an idea: 26th/28th Streets
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Starting next year, Minneapolis plans to repave 26th and 28th Streets between I-35W and Hiawatha Ave, continuing west to Hennepin Ave in the future. Though nominally a repaving project, the city has also budgeted $400K for bicycle improvements on the two streets and is undertaking a planning study on how to potentially reconfigure the street, with a public meeting to share design concepts scheduled for this Wednesday, the 6th. Continue Reading