The Asian experience with Coronavirus suggests it can be controlled with appropriate public health measures. But honestly, the US record on road safety doesn’t make me hopeful we’ll do a great job of this.
10 months after we put these planters in the road they have not been hit by a car. 4 of them are on a corner on a steep hill. Snowplows, trucks and school buses are around here regularly. Good evidence all traffic calming should be upgraded beyond reflective plastic sticks
Every winter I see people in wheelchairs in the street on Franklin Ave because we don't have a coordinated approach to clearing sidewalk snow in Minneapolis
Done. Now I can speak with firsthand knowledge about
#everysinglestreet
in Minneapolis. Not a huge physical challenge for me, the tricky part is organizational, and that wasn't a problem with
@CityStrides
.
1. I was dreading racing 10 miles in 64° dewpoints
2. Nevertheless, kinda bummed since I haven't done a road race since Memorial Day
3. Precautionary decisions for population health are easy to criticize from an individual perspective.
When the postman wanders in front of your 25 second exposure with a headlamp on. Notice how there's no trace of the person who crossed the exposure, but the headlamp got its light in there for a while.
Doing my annual report for the neighborhood association, so let me share with the world also the successes and lessons of this traffic calming planter box project after 3 years on the ground
10 months after we put these planters in the road they have not been hit by a car. 4 of them are on a corner on a steep hill. Snowplows, trucks and school buses are around here regularly. Good evidence all traffic calming should be upgraded beyond reflective plastic sticks
Minneapolis’ North Loop has developed nicely the last two decades, but for the life of me I’ll never understand why the city has maintained these absurdly wide streets.
Don't know if the
@MplsParkBoard
are aware of this, but in the summer people are out "recreating" on the Stone Arch Bridge much earlier in the morning than 6am. This is an absurd restriction on normal use of the bridge in summer
What I find so underwhelming about the Twin Cities boulevard proposal is that the 94 corridor would be a great spot to begin building out a regional rail corridor in the Twin Cities. It’s publicly owned right of way between our two key downtowns.
This poorly placed beg button pole in Saint Paul is a strong contender for some kind of "you had one job" award. Nearly dead center in the straight line to cross the street. How does this happen? (needless? to say this kind of bullshit is a US specialty)
As a local, Allianz is really a solid B-. Big picture, it's well served by transit which is well used for games. Where it falls down is the immediate surrounds, which aren't terrible but have room for improvement.
One thing that could make Saint Paul’s road money go a lot further is narrowing the roads significantly. Having run 3/4 of the city’s streets I can say without a doubt that most of the local streets could be narrowed to 20 feet and still serve the traffic they see.
Watching things in Minnesota (Brooklyn Center) right now, I am struck by the absence (AFAICT) of any public attempt to investigate the totality of what happened in May/June last year in the Twin Cities, and try to create some kind of shared understanding of what happened
This year I've run 80% of the street miles in Minneapolis. I run on the street as much as possible, because it's asphalt, and it helps me avoid dogs, and these days the "6 feet!" people. But you know, cars, it's not risk free. So far, so good ...
Maybe I have limited imagination, but I think that a reliable system of keeping drivers out of two-way street level bike lanes is a harder problem than it appears.
MDHHS issued a new emergency order that enacts a three-week pause targeting indoor social gatherings & other group activities in an effort to curb rapidly rising
#COVID19
infection rates. For more information about the order, visit .
Minneapolis speed camera proposal is weak by international standards in 4 important ways.
* fines are low at comparable speeds
* threshold for penalty (10mph over) about twice as high as intl
* no proviso for increased penalties for repeat offence
* no path to license suspension
I went and checked out the Auckland infill housing boom, and it's really kind of impressive and obvious at street level. Lots of lot splits with backyards getting replaced by townhouses, and replacement of older, small dwellings with townhouses
Many people complain that developers are only building small 1 and 2 bed units
Few understand that it's because we made family sized infill homes illegal on the majority of our land.
When Auckland legalized them, they got an explosion of townhouses
Chart from
@GeorgistSteve
It's mind boggling to think that a single bicycle-on-pedestrian collision in the early 1970s led directly to the separated one way bike paths round the lakes we have today. Meanwhile deadly roads take years to do anything about
Can we talk about how we NEED 2 way bikeways encompassing the entirety of Lake Harriet, Isles, & Bde..
There is huge demand for bike mobility in both directions around these giant corridors, & ample space. No- the crumbling, tight car lanes for the other direction do not suffice
@CT_Bergstrom
Looks like this is being sponsored by a libertarian ("ACT" is the name of the party) member of parliament. MPs can host events on parliamentary premises. Not an official government thing.
@Julietilsen
@WedgeLIVE
Mind boggling to me that ... checks atlas ... Minneapolis couldn’t tow a lot of these cars in a timely fashion. Like, that’s our specialty.
It's scenes like this that make me believe in the argument that sidewalks are a failing infrastructure in the upper Midwest (I have learned this from
@happifydesign
)
@broomtorowicz
There's awesome electric options nowadays that would meet climate and emissions goals. I typically do our driveway and about 400 yards of our block on a single charge
Downtown Minneapolis is dying ... of boredom 😉 a coffee shop at a big central library should be a vibrant happening place, and yet this space has been quiet, sterile, and disappointing since it opened. Nothing has changed post-2020
* Calls for a ceasefire between Israel and Arab forces
* Right-left divisions in the DFL
* Traffic violence on Minneapolis streets.
* Metals theft on Twin Cities streets
Must be today's news in 2023 ... nope, 1948
Stopped to take a photo of these houses with unusually short (for Mpls) <10' setbacks, and there was a guy sitting on his porch, so I said neutrally what I was taking a photo of. He raved about how good it was ...
Thrilled to announce that
@snblickhan
(
@AdlerPlanet
and
@the_zooniverse
), Ben Wiggins (
@umnlib
) and I have been awarded an NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grant to run a multi-year institute for groups building crowd-sourced transcription projects.
Modest proposal: until sidewalks are free of ice all Twin Cities streets are shared spaces, and have a 10mph speed limit for vehicles. Police will direct effort to enforcement and ticket speeders.
Clearly this guy had thought about this issue a lot, because he went onto comment [correctly] that a bigger backyard might be more useful for most people than the swathe of lawn on the front. All in all, a pleasantly surprising chat & a nice moment of connecting with strangers
Just a bizarre, backwards idea (now law) to restrict the height of buildings in a city to "protect" views from the water. Backwards because many more people can enjoy the natural view if you build high near the water.
One way for the state of Minnesota to increase the value of the SWLRT line would be to require cities to upzone all land within a half-mile radius (or further?) of stations.
The penalty for this should be?
a) license revocation or impoundment for a week
b) a fine sufficient to fund a block of fully protected bike lanes
c) a and b
Excited and a little terrified* to share that along with twitter-less colleagues Henry Thomson (ASU) and Robert Schub (Nebraska) I was just awarded an
@NIHAging
R21 to study the mortality and life expectancy effects of randomized land redistribution in New Zealand (1/12)
In long term perspective it's sort of mind boggling that we have the economic capacity to afford vastly more living space per person than generations past, and municipal governments are like "nope, sorry, your ratio of floorboards to grass is too high".
Max is right. If you want cities to provide abundant floor space, then you need tall buildings.
And as people's incomes grow, then they demand more floor space (elasticity ~1).
So, successful cities will increasingly be those that find ways to efficiently deliver floor space.
Not an infectious disease epidemiologist to be sure, but how can you argue with evidence like this? Even if the methods are a little off the public health advice to drink more Antipodean wine to survive the pandemic is sound.
One of the best public outdoor spaces in the Twin Cities. Trees and enough seating in close proximity that there is good energy and yet rarely too crowded.
Pulling this out of the thread about buildings near the water. In its otherwise decent plans for the Upper Harbor Terminal the
@CityMinneapolis
and
@MplsParkBoard
are making a big mistake by placing a road between the buildings and the river
@_minnesota_mike
Yeah, it's almost certainly the case that we're closer to getting the level of concern right for construction workers, and not concerned enough about other traffic related fatalities.
This nice infill housing in Longfellow (36th and 42nd) is 2500 sq ft of house on 3700 sq ft of lot. It's really nice. But you couldn't build this by right everywhere in Minneapolis.
I think when all is said and done the challenges that downtown Minneapolis is facing come down to these simple things, 1) there's not really a lot of people living in downtown (cf. Akl, Mel, Syd, Chi), but 2) nor are there lots of people living quite close to downtown (Milw.)
The Census Bureau is apparently hoping to force all schools and services for the elderly to be located at a central point in a … county. Because who cares what the geographic distribution within a county of the population is? Madness.
I'm just a biker/pedestrian/driver, and it's becoming clear to me that traffic engineering standards for how close vehicles can park to intersections and allow visibility of the cross street are based on shorter, more transparent vehicles than the current average American vehicle
Death spiral of Twin Cities transit. It's really sad. Given the budget and political constraints (look at the struggle to get a bare mile of non-downtown bus lane) Metro Transit run a justly recognized system for an American metro area.
Interesting how Minnesota drivers will voluntarily stop mid-block for turkeys in the middle of the road, but not obey the human law to stop for humans at crosswalks. Makes you wonder who's really in charge around here, and it might be the turkeys.
Many things are notable about this 1922 zoning map of St Paul. One is that you could build 4+ stories everywhere (maybe 5 with a 10 foot setback). The other is the long stretches of commercial zoning. Not nodes, miles of streets.
Hi
@CityMinneapolis
, how do I report dangerous driving by a Public Works employee? I have a vehicle number. Doesn't seem like a 311 category. Accelerating to run a "very" red light in a truck is not really consistent with the Vision Zero for traffic safety we have.
An undocumented 5 seconds of additional walk time to cross a road that's 7 lanes wide perfectly encapsulates Minneapolis' all talk, little action plan to double non-care mode share to 60% in the next 6 years
Is it true that some walk signals in Minneapolis are programmed to give extra times to those who know the secret knock? This from my neighborhood e-list:
This will be a great connection on the Minneapolis riverfront trail system (and in the scheme of things negotiating with a railroad and a concrete company, this idea has moved along pretty quickly from vision to construction)
You don’t often get a chance to say this in the United States, but big kudos to the Minnesota legislature for setting up an efficient and democratic process for changing the state emblems. Notable contrast with the somewhat shambolic process NZ used to not change its lame flag.
#FridayThought
🤔 Do you think it is time to change our mindset from ‘people crossing roads’ to ‘cars crossing pavements’
Many countries already use speed bumps at entrance-ways so cars have to slow down and pedestrians can continue on a straight even surface.
#ActiveDesign
📐
"We can't change our city. We are not Amsterdam!"
#Vienna
: 'hold my
#Weisswein
🥂*'
—Königsegggasse (by
@BirgitHebein
)
(*or 16er-Blech🥫 if you prefer)
1960s urban renewal and freeway building gets a lot of criticism, but when you read the plans from the time and empathize with the problems people of the era thought they were addressing, it's more explicable. A thread, with examples (outtakes from a paragraph for a paper)
We recently purchased some Not-Reaching Pouches to help reduce deadly force encounters between law enforcement and citizens during traffic stops. The pouches store a driver’s license, and insurance card in plain sight in the vehicle on an air vent or other visible location.
One of the best signs of spring in Minneapolis is when the trees prepare to migrate from their winter breeding location. Lots of people have tried to catch them in the act of walking out of here and putting their roots down in far flung boulevards, but they are hard to spot.
I'm curious how Golden Valley, seemingly alone among Twin Cities suburbs, has street widths appropriate to traffic volume. Lots of streets I'm estimating in the 20-24' width range. Better than most Minneapolis or St Paul streets, and way narrower than other suburbs
Beyond the shoveling issue, we really need to make incremental improvements to sidewalk design when we do street and sidewalk reconstruction. They are literally in little valleys. We need more boulevard rain gardens and education of homeowners to landscape in better ways
IPUMS is why I moved to Minnesota, part of why I stayed, & the data is great. More than that tho I’ve been privileged to have great dissertation advising & grant writing mentorship, and ongoing inspiration to dream boldly about research and make good public data. Thanks
@HistDem
Exciting news today! IPUMS founder Steven Ruggles (
@HistDem
) was named a
#MacFellow
by
@macfound
. Known as the “genius grant” he is being recognized for the incredible contributions he’s made through IPUMS in providing easy access to harmonized data.
To put the "not hit by a car" in perspective: 10 months on the road is 300 days. A conservative estimate would be 100,000 vehicle movements. How many plastic-stick only installations are unscathed after 100,000 vehicle movements? Firmer traffic calming changes driver behavior