urbanMSP

A Line BRTOD continuing to hum along.

"Small but loud and well-connected group of opponents" is the definition of handwaving away the opposition. You know who has a good read on the size of the opposition? The elected officials making these compromises.

I love how easily people here handwave away the deep public opposition to some of this stuff. It's charming in a way.

If the school were made of quartzite like that courthouse is, there would be no issues at all.

With the dedicated sales tax funding, and with Ramsey County able to take the lead without political interference from others, I'd hope that they'd be optimistically thinking they could start construction in four years or so, putting an opening date more in the 2029-2030 range. Bear in mind that th...

The shades of orange and red they chose also look terrible right next to each other, for what it's worth.

Do people actually abide by left turn bans? Even if it's 90%, the 10% that ignores it could really grind that street to a halt. I think you would really need a more drastic change (either making the E/W street one-way, or closing the entrance, or building a median to block the turn) to make that via...

Question is does the Twin Cities make the cut for Amtrak's other goal of expanding short haul routes since the 400(ish) miles to Chicago is kinda pushing it and the nlx might have been quietly taken out behind the shed at this point. Amtrak is very committed to the second train, and they have been ...

I don't think it's hard to imagine an open-seat race becoming very contentious about Broadway, in ways that get tied into larger area narratives about investment and gentrification. That's not a surefire win for an anti-Broadway-LRT candidate by any stretch, but I don't think it's a slam dunk agains...

McKnight should definitely not be a wide, fast moving four lane road with few signals indefinitely into the future. That's another issue that local government policy has to fix.

McKnight is being repaved to a three-lane road as we speak.

Main Street, at least southwest of Ensemble/HCC Station, seems to be 80' ROW and a very pleasant pedestrian environment, even with a large landscaped median of station-width between the tracks for the entire stretch and in some places some really excessive sidewalk planting. I apologize for the con...

The point was that suitable sidewalks, car lanes, and LRT lanes and stations can co-exist in a 80' right-of-way, which they do in downtown Houston and many other places around the world. I specifically said that I was not literally applying the city's modal framework, I think car lanes on Broadway ...

I'd been largely dismissive of early discussions about a full subway through North Minneapolis, but I could envision a routing that would follow N 7th St at grade across I-94, and then enter a tunnel near Plymouth and re-emerge at the Broadway crescent, where the Broadway ROW relaxes I don't think ...

In relative fairness to Sherman, I can't imagine any developer staking their building on an entrance from Broadway when that street remains Hennepin County's absolute worst urban stroad.

Anecdotally as well, the light rail is a great place to hang out for bored teens with nothing to do. That can both create a perception of more crime (because teenagers are scary) and also actually create it or concentrate it.

I've seen a planning document that the city commissioned back in the 1970's proposing daylighting much of the creek. Not sure if this pre-dated the I-94 construction that diverted most of the waterflow to the new tunnel?

Perhaps this one? https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a133795.pdf

There aren't a lot of data points to look at in the Twin Cities context.

I live there now and I wonder if most of the speeding is due to many of the streets being one way.

Maybe, but I just remember people flying down 22nd and (to a lesser extent) 25th, and those are two-way.

No, not lane widths alone, but if you haven't, go drive on Lyndale between 66th and 76th. I regularly do not get up to 30 and don't have the person behind me riding my bumper. But that was a huge change from what was there before. We need changes like that pretty much everywhere. I think the new Ly...

Lane width can drop significantly with reduced speed limits. The difference between 10' and 12' lanes is not miniscule. This is talked about a lot, but in practice the correlation with projects in the Twin Cities has been pretty minimal. Saint Paul several years ago stopped advertising lower traffi...