urbanMSP

Just leave it as 28th Street Station so that the Strib continues to have Curious Minnesota material in ten years.

Hot take: Boom Island Park is one park that would gain from being edged by mid-rise towers like Gold Medal Park. 100%. Unfortunately the built form zoning is a mix of Corridor 4 and Interior 3 over there. Should be Transit 10. Bit of a whiff from Steve Fletcher there. On Graco Park, I love the conc...

While Phillips or North Minneapolis go unserved.

I'm not entirely sure how this process has worked, but USI must need city permission to install this infrastructure, and that permission should come with the requirement that they stop digitally redlining the city.

I think this is a good example of how the way that Minneapolis (and basically every other US city) does historic preservation is really not working too well. The system is reactive, it only engages when there is an active threat to change or demolish a potentially historic resource. But it isn't pro...

The elevated "Interchange Option" is intriguing, but the presence of Lumion people in a rendering doesn't guarantee them in real life. If that's the chosen option (and I think it would be far superior for pedestrians than the "4-6-4 Option") then designing and programming that un...

There's this thing where everyone argues about the first scraps of data to come out and tries to fit them to some future outcome. Not to be the fun police here, but I just don't think it's productive. The Orange Line is opening up amidst a pandemic where downtown office attendance is 30-40% of the p...

I don't want to be Pollyannaish, ridership on the Orange Line may well end up disappointing. But mid-day on December 21st during a pandemic surge is probably not the best time to gauge its success or failure.

I was reminded of three more projects at opposite corners of downtown.

Almost Open
Eleven — 124 units (how did I forget that one?)
724 1st — 49 units

Under Construction
H. Alden Smith House and Apartments — 125 units

That brings my count up to 3,138 units.

Borrowing Joey's post from the Block One thread: By my math, that puts us at more than 1350 market-rate units in the four downtown apartment towers that are in the early stages of construction or about to break ground: this, 240 Portland/O2, 21 N Washington, and North Loop Green, in addition to the ...

I understand the standard cost increase for building underground is something around 5X building at-grade. If it's 10X and $1B per mile for this project, I'd like to see it documented as something that was looked into seriously and not dismissed out of hand or sandbagged. A tunnel underneath Broadwa...

Tunnels between stations would also be extremely costly and not really provide significant benefits over what is proposed. The best case for a tunnel is that it would resolve the surface right-of-way issues at a stroke. As currently imagined, the light rail would entrench Broadway's characteristics ...

The Orange Line's bang for the buck is greater, but if "nine figures" is your only criteria and you're agnostic between 100 million and 999 million, then yeah, the Gold Line is probably better.

What a sad and unfortunate letter to write. Of all the things to be "sickened" by, routing a train down the middle of a road with over 100' of right-of-way seems like a strange one. The tenor of this letter is beneath the dignity of a longtime county official. The BNSF issue is becoming a ...

Just Minneapolis.

Per the CPC packet, the project will have 532 car parking spaces (for 339k office square feet, 20.9k commercial square feet, 356 housing units, and 96 hotel units). The recently departed lot had 351 car parking spaces. So this project will add 181 parking spaces to downtown, but obviously add a grea...

The Minneapolis City Planning Commissions held its last meeting of 2021 on Monday evening. I've refreshed my shared tracking spreadsheet with this year's entries, which you can see here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rW4dsNhgJMhSZP8H0Q50tylKqsZWkJdV/ Final 2021 stats: https://i.imgur.com/R...

Recommended design for Hennepin from Franklin from Lake has both bus lanes and a cycletrack. Super promising development, after the project slipped from its timeline and seemed to be under political pressure to be watered down. Cross sections: https://www.minneapolismn.gov/media/-www-content-assets/...

Last week I had the opportunity to visit the Abbey Church of Saint John the Baptist, which is on the campus of St. John's University (founded by the Abbey in 1883). The Church was designed by Marcel Breuer and completed in 1961. There might be debate about where it ranks, but I think that it's not c...

Would be nice to have the red carpet rolled out a bit more though. I'm not worried that people who work there know how to get in, I just wish that there could be changes that would respect the transit service a little more. It sends a message when the front door faces the parking lot versus the stat...

I think that the Orange Line is arriving at a particularly unfortunate time, given that the downtown is still below capacity (although much more active last week than it seemed when I was last in town over the summer) and Metro Transit's operator shortage is so accute. But I also think that in part ...