urbanMSP

Don't know if this belongs here or in its own thread, but the FRA has been working on a long-distance passenger rail study and just released a new presentation. https://fralongdistancerailstudy.org/ Link to February 2024 presentation (preferred route map on page 53) I think this is just a list of re...

Hy-Vees close at 10pm here? I grew up in Hy-Vee country (Sioux Falls to be exact) and those things were open 24/7 except for the major holidays, probably 5 days a year tops. My high school freshman "hazing" involved being taken to Hy-Vee at 3:30am and singing I'm A Little Teapot over the P...

For reference, the recently-completed (2022) I-94 expansion project from Maple Grove to Clearwater cost $350M. A separate project to fill in the gap from Albertville to Monticello will cost $101M (starting this summer). Not to say that these Northstar estimates are cheap, but we are spending almost ...

Wow - if I'm reading that right, LRT + BRT accounts for ~22M rides out of ~48M rides system-wide (~15M LRT, ~7M BRT). aBRT is without a doubt the best bang-for-the-buck investment MT is making right now, and it's not even close. Keep those letter lines coming!

Has anyone seen the former zoo monorail at Sandland?
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYfdid ... f0Nx7ioOYw

Hmm, link doesn't seem to work for me.

Your story is pretty similar to mine - replace "Cities: Skylines" with "SimCity 2000/3000/4", replace "discovering streets.mn" with "discovering Minnescraper", ditto on StrongTowns, and add in "reading Jane Jacobs", and you've got the general contour...

A reminder that the zoo monorail was not removed because it was inherently bad or poorly performing at its purported mobility function - they literally couldn't service the equipment because decades later, no companies remained in business to repair or replace things as they broke. The Hyperloop wou...

When I went on a tour of the alignment last year, project staff told me the city of Eden Prairie does want to connect it all the way through with a future roadway project. That's actually really encouraging to hear. My pie-in-the-sky hope is that if the Walmart site were someday available for redev...

As long as we're complaining about design decisions... EP Town Center station is directly adjacent to an apartment building, restaurant, and bowling alley. The driveway for that area almost serves as a street grid-type extension but the cul-de-sac by the station cuts vehicle traffic (and there is a ...

So here's the billion-dollar question: to what extent does an elected Met Council provide enough political muscle/legitimacy to overcome these small loud voices? Because at some level, I think the unwillingness to fight those fights does come from not feeling that they have enough of a political man...

NIMBY-ism is almost always bad faith, but I don't know how even "sincere" NIMBYs can object to this. It's discontiguous with the rest of Arden Hills and bounded by freeways and stroads. It literally has no neighbors. I wonder why these nonsensical NIMBY voices get such a platform, while fe...

Strib article on the budget increase At minimum, it's terrible optics to have this keep creeping up and up and up, even if this increase is smaller in relative terms. There are some interesting metrics in the article in terms of construction progress: Project is "more than 75% complete" 1...

Man, if you were going to extend to Biwabik, Ely is so tantalizingly close that it would be hard not to imagine extending it there as well.

(As someone who used to work intermittently at the underground lab in Soudan, it would have been amazing to have had a rail option to get to the area.)

If we put an LRT Station at Broadway/Washington, can we shift the Lyndale Station to Fremont Station then for better connections with the D Line?

*Silently crossing out projected opening date and writing in "2040"*

The only reason I would oppose capping 94 anywhere between 394 and 694 is because it could make it harder to argue for full freeway removal of that stretch in the future. But I like this concept - and honestly, wouldn't be hard to integrate it with a Washington/Lyndale "grand boulevard" co...

Congratulations to OKC for finally unlocking Arcologies.

I still hold out hope that the 2027 estimate was an intentional over-estimate, so that they can wow everyone when they come in under. Is it possible to just visually assess the tunnel progress by measuring the amount of completed segments? They have to work it linearly, right?

My 4-year-old thinks it looks like a nativity scene when displayed vertically. Just slap a manger inside the light blue and you're done

I can see heads of trolls mad that the “arrow” is pointing… left.

Not to mention BLUE.

Minnesota panel selects final state flag design I'm going to let this sit with me for awhile before I come to a conclusion, but it does strike me as odd that the commission voted down the Starflake design, presumably because "star on blue field" was too simplistic, and we ended up with &q...

Did they mention at all what cost savings that might entail? That's quite a lot of bridge structure that would no longer be needed, even if there is some roadway reconfiguration costs that get added back in.