urbanMSP

There's a big difference between hiring someone who lives in Hennepin County but prefers to do a majority of their white collar leadership work from home, and someone going through the entire job life cycle of recruitment, hiring, working, and departing for another position without ever setting foot...

There's value from a tax perspective, value to the parties I highlighted with a direct financial stake in the status quo returning, political value to people aligned with the Downtown Council, I don't doubt that you can find a lens through which a push for RTO has added value for the city. But I thi...

I truly don't understand the motivation for otherwise non-affected people to try and browbeat organizations (public or private) into returning to downtown commuting. It doesn't make the city any better by forcing city or Target employees to have to drive downtown, pay for parking, and order lunch fi...

I don't know if the crash wall allows them to keep construction moving even when BNSF trains are in the corridor, but when I took one of the tours they said that they basically had to stop fifteen minutes prior to every train arriving, and then could only start up fifteen minutes after it fully left...

There's things to dislike about it (personally I think the Bass Lake Road station being treated like a highway grade separation project first and a transit station second is the most egregious) but I don't think it's so disastrous that it warrants hoping for it to fail. It looks like they're leaning...

I get not running an initial revenue service on the western end, that would be a maintenance nightmare without access to a OMF. But what about the eastern end? Are the structures/track/systems so far behind on the Downtown - Tunnel section that we couldn't get even a year of interim service to the M...

173,254 tons of CO2, 404 tons of nitrous oxide, and 21 tons of PM2.5 in 2019. I don't know. I wouldn't like to live next to it. I guess if the people who put a concerted effort into getting this result also don't want to live nearby a garbage burner, I'm not going to "well actually" about ...

I think the challenge with environmental projects is that there's different lenses through which to view environmental problems. It's easy to fall into a binary of "more emissions bad/less emissions good" (or in a worse example we're all familiar with, grass lawn good, concrete tall buildi...

The people in the room knew who was absent and why. That was enough information to know not to do what they did. You accommodate other people's faith, regardless of whether the outcome would change. Oh I agree. The people who were in the room decided to take this opportunity despite how it would lo...

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. However, some of the people on the council routinely blame mediocrity as a reason to do nothing (see: Palmisano's logic that because we do a bad job plowing streets, we shouldn't even try to plow sidewalks), so it's not a maj...

I don't think Minneapolis is any less unknown to the world than Seattle and San Antonio were in the 1960s, or Spokane and Knoxville continue to be, and they managed to win their bids. However, the unique part of our bid is that it was Minnesota's bid, not Minneapolis. This comes back to an issue tha...

Losing to Spain would be understandable.

Losing to Serbia feels more like a pointed "you can't just snub us for decades and then come back and get an Expo" message that should be carefully considered before investing more time and money into these efforts.

I was really skeptical about the competitiveness of a few empty lots near MOA, but apparently because of the strict limits on the size of site you can build on for a Special Exposition, having MOA directly next door allows them to take direct advantage of that extra retail and entertainment space an...

Not just businesses. I don't think the MAC would even entertain talking about closing STP, let alone taking the steps to plan for that capacity to be absorbed at other airports. At the bare minimum, I think you'd need another east side airport to be expanded to at least the size of Flying Cloud, pos...

It also sounded like there was some pushback against the train being elevated on the east side of I-94 on community division grounds. Which if we were building this on pristine green field sites where elevated tracks would create a barrier that doesn't exist, that would be a valid concern. But when ...

I think it's also worth remembering that Brightline views their efforts in California/Nevada (and to a lesser extent Florida) as pioneering projects. They believe that having a 180mph train in operation and a demonstrable business model will help to inspire other companies to start picking at their ...

They do like their own stations, but mostly for land development reasons. I could see two scenarios where they would be open to using existing infrastructure: - Union Depot gives them the space and means to create their own customer experience at the station, similar to airport lounges for preferred...

Brightline seems to be building their entire brand on the theory that if there's enough travel demand between two cities that the airlines are competing over the customers with low prices, there's enough demand to support frequent, high quality rail service, and that they will draw enough customers ...

Or, for a cheaper and far more effective solution, we could automate enforcement, as we should have done a decade ago after it was determined the constitutional issues could be resolved by ticketing the car instead of the driver.

Hope Hines has an appetite for more. Either a private project or stadium development would help to kick off another decade worth of expansion for the North Loop, but I'd much prefer the version of events that doesn't include the whole "We love this city, that's why we're going to ask you to giv...