urbanMSP

Community development block grants, which are flexible funds that are enormously popular with mayors and other local officials, would receive a huge $2.4 billion increase to $5.2 billion despite being marked for elimination in Mr. Trump's budget plan. And an Obama-era transportation grant program k...

I wonder if maybe it's a dumb turf war between MVTA and Metro Transit. If MT's really that concerned about making sure the Red Line riders use the Blue Line to get downtown, it's possible that MVTA wants express buses from the South Metro to be exclusively MVTA service and not Metro.

When you say extending it north to Minneapolis, do you mean along Cedar, or collocated with the Orange Line along I-35W? I've seen proposals for both.

They already failed trying to prevent two light rail lines from being built, why do they have an obsession with still trying to kill it? It's red meat for their base. Bingo. They have to demonstrate to their constituents that they threw everything at the wall to try and kill it. Notice how a few bu...

I thought about that as well as I crawled over potholes in St. Paul. If I'm using a car sharing service then frankly I don't care what happens to their car (unless I get charged for damages), but if I own it then I guess I'm not using it when potholes are prevalent. Also, really stupid question, bu...

I’m thinking they haven’t solved pavement conditions yet or we’d see them testing these things outside of the desert. But in theory there’s nothing preventing a model from detecting potholes and avoiding them when safe. It’s not a fundamentally different problem from the other vision problems they’v...

Well, for better or for worse, Rapid Bus is Metro Transit's branding for the letter lines, though they aren't officially called aBRT anymore. On the other end, I don't think it's totally unreasonable to put the Orange Line and Gold Line in the same category as the LRT lines from a branding perspect...

Well, for better or for worse, Rapid Bus is Metro Transit's branding for the letter lines, though they aren't officially called aBRT anymore. On the other end, I don't think it's totally unreasonable to put the Orange Line and Gold Line in the same category as the LRT lines from a branding perspect...

I mean, the name "Arterial Bus Rapid Transit" is inaccurate at best and pretty baldly misleading IMO. It has few of the characteristics of BRT, and BRT itself is only really passable as rapid transit when it meets a set of very high standards that we've never committed to in Minnesota. IMO...

Any excuse to trot this out: http://stmedia.stimg.co/217STAD120413.JPG?w=600&h=600 I think this tops Ventura's Governor's portrait as the single-greatest image in our state's political history. Anyway, great news that construction's ongoing. I agree that it's a big enough milestone that it warr...

Hahaha, Bloomington's pitch is amazing. We'll extend the light rail...but only for one stop, just north of IKEA. And it'll switch to a monorail! Monorail, monorail, monorail! I really don't buy the "we pitched too many sites" critique though, or understand why it comes up so often. If Amaz...

I was guessing someone tried to cross between parked cars, but it does not appear there was any street parking in that area. Very, very large swath of pavement at the stated intersection of North Mill and East Curry in Tempe. Perhaps this really says more about road design than autonomous vehicles?...

In preparation to add 1,250 employees to their Home Mortgage campus, Wells Fargo is proposing to significantly expand their parking structure. Planning Commission PDF here. As much as I don't love parking garages in the middle of urban areas, at least it's just building up on a highway-adjacent sur...

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/ ... ion/555353

A freeway expansion actually got denied! In Los Angeles! The times, they are a-changin'

I don't think anyone's arguing that Minneapolis didn't once have very weak demand. And it's true that a very quick change from low demand to high demand, like the one we and other major US cities have seen, is generally a bad thing for affordability. At the same time, restrictive land-use policies, ...

Our housing shortage was caused through decades of bad policy. There are some short-term bandaids we can try, but to address the structural problems will involve some degree of patience.

I don't think "is 5+1 good or bad" is a very useful question. Instead the article made me consider, "why is 5+1 the only, or at least the default, application of mixed-use development in so many cities?" I like his buildings because their initial impact on the neighborhood is muc...

Wedge Live says it all much better than I did above.

Just the Minneapolis portion. (Speaking for myself)

The important takeaway from that article IMO is not the prescription (which is borderline obvious) but the reasons why we can't already do it. Both the McCondos this article is talking about and the luxury towers we're seeing as flashpoints elsewhere are all very rational responses to our zoning cod...