urbanMSP

I feel for the Nicollet Ave restaurants, but I'm glad it sounds like things are improving even if they aren't to the level they'd prefer. Still hoping Target holds out long enough to starve some of the skyway retail out of oxygen so they either come down to street level or give up and the retail spa...

Wasn't this something they've been planning to do for years now? They wanted to do a phase two, but couldn't remove this because their funding was contingent on maintaining the underpass as is, so they just waited out the terms of the grant.

I don't think it's going to be anywhere near the level of issue as it is for Brightline. The intersection at 36 is similar to many intersections the Blue Line passes through along Hiawatha. Whereas most of our systems car-versus-train collisions, to my recollection, have happened along the Green Lin...

A lot to like here. I hope we see a lot more buildings that combine height with a smaller footprint on our major transit arteries.

(Granted, this is now fully off topic but...) Hasn't MNDOT done this before? Particularly, work they've done on Bottineau Blvd and reconstructing ramps near Lowry Ave without making any sort of adjustments for the Blue Line Extension project? They don't seem to be very proactive when it comes to tra...

Bruce Vento made sense when the goal was fast service to downtown White Bear Lake. Once that was off the table (even beforehand, when the bus needed to take a major detour from the route to reach a major trip generator like Maplewood Mall), it makes way more sense to serve areas where there is more ...

Business journalism comes in two flavors: 1) Report a list of facts that when viewed together, create a narrative 2) Ask a rich person/CEO their opinion on something, report it as news Neither of which I think are a good reason to draw serious conclusions about anything you aren't already informed o...

There's a big difference between hiring someone who lives in Hennepin County but prefers to do a majority of their white collar leadership work from home, and someone going through the entire job life cycle of recruitment, hiring, working, and departing for another position without ever setting foot...

There's value from a tax perspective, value to the parties I highlighted with a direct financial stake in the status quo returning, political value to people aligned with the Downtown Council, I don't doubt that you can find a lens through which a push for RTO has added value for the city. But I thi...

I truly don't understand the motivation for otherwise non-affected people to try and browbeat organizations (public or private) into returning to downtown commuting. It doesn't make the city any better by forcing city or Target employees to have to drive downtown, pay for parking, and order lunch fi...

I don't know if the crash wall allows them to keep construction moving even when BNSF trains are in the corridor, but when I took one of the tours they said that they basically had to stop fifteen minutes prior to every train arriving, and then could only start up fifteen minutes after it fully left...

There's things to dislike about it (personally I think the Bass Lake Road station being treated like a highway grade separation project first and a transit station second is the most egregious) but I don't think it's so disastrous that it warrants hoping for it to fail. It looks like they're leaning...

I get not running an initial revenue service on the western end, that would be a maintenance nightmare without access to a OMF. But what about the eastern end? Are the structures/track/systems so far behind on the Downtown - Tunnel section that we couldn't get even a year of interim service to the M...

173,254 tons of CO2, 404 tons of nitrous oxide, and 21 tons of PM2.5 in 2019. I don't know. I wouldn't like to live next to it. I guess if the people who put a concerted effort into getting this result also don't want to live nearby a garbage burner, I'm not going to "well actually" about ...

I think the challenge with environmental projects is that there's different lenses through which to view environmental problems. It's easy to fall into a binary of "more emissions bad/less emissions good" (or in a worse example we're all familiar with, grass lawn good, concrete tall buildi...

The people in the room knew who was absent and why. That was enough information to know not to do what they did. You accommodate other people's faith, regardless of whether the outcome would change. Oh I agree. The people who were in the room decided to take this opportunity despite how it would lo...

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. However, some of the people on the council routinely blame mediocrity as a reason to do nothing (see: Palmisano's logic that because we do a bad job plowing streets, we shouldn't even try to plow sidewalks), so it's not a maj...

I don't think Minneapolis is any less unknown to the world than Seattle and San Antonio were in the 1960s, or Spokane and Knoxville continue to be, and they managed to win their bids. However, the unique part of our bid is that it was Minnesota's bid, not Minneapolis. This comes back to an issue tha...

Losing to Spain would be understandable.

Losing to Serbia feels more like a pointed "you can't just snub us for decades and then come back and get an Expo" message that should be carefully considered before investing more time and money into these efforts.

I was really skeptical about the competitiveness of a few empty lots near MOA, but apparently because of the strict limits on the size of site you can build on for a Special Exposition, having MOA directly next door allows them to take direct advantage of that extra retail and entertainment space an...