urbanMSP

I still think we could use a world class indoor waterpark. The armory has a lot of room, but you'd probably want something taller and with a glass roof.

I took a look at the Bloomington alternative transportation plan. I like it and I'd wish they'd get the Minnesota River Trail and the Old Cedar Bridge done already. I like to bicycle and rollerblade around the Chain of Lakes, Hyland Park, West River Road, etc and will continue to do so, but it would...

Early in the days of creating HOV lanes they tried taking a general purpose lane. Normally what happened is that single car drivers were so angry that they had to back down and give them the lane back, so it's rare to convert a lane rather than building a new one now. IMHO Congestion pricing is to g...

It's not like the area the jail was built in didn't have a lot of underutilized land at the time, so hypothetical situations where you could have a private development generating huge amounts of taxes instead of the jail probably didn't occur to them. Also, different people in government have differ...

It would be nice if the jail would just disappear so there'd be a four block park with city hall at the other end instead of a fortress, but since they just built it that's unfortunately not going to happen. There was discussion about putting the jail at Fort Snelling which would avoid the NIMBY pro...

It dates back to a 2001 study of the Oronoco / Pine Island region. The original document seems to be purged of Mn/DOT, but I saved a copy on my computer. All the options seemed to included moving the north Pine Island junction farther north and the south junction to roughly where Elk Run is. It look...

The existing Pine Island interchange is planned to be removed, (Although Pine Island isn't exactly pleased at this prospect), and the intersection north of Oronoco will be removed with the Elk Run project. I think the original idea with building an interchange in the middle of nowhere was to not bui...

I agree that Cannon Falls should have gone first. But looking at the corridor study I'm not sure how far the money could have gone for alternative uses. http://www.co.dakota.mn.us/Transportation/RoadStudies/Documents/TH52CorridorStudy.pdf Somewhat dated, the Pine Island south interchange is $30 mill...

It's important to note that some kind of interchange in the same general area has always been in the plans since the studies started after 2000 for converting the entire corridor into a freeway. I'd be curious as to how much a standard diamond would have cost, Without making provisions to vaporware ...

Should be good enough to last 20-30 years anyway, about the amount of time teams go before whining for a new stadium. I haven't been to a sports event in Minneapolis since the 1990s, but I'll probably go once to see it. I hated the design at first, but now it seems OK. I'm not sure spending money on...

I've done some checking on a roadgeek forum, and getting an I-pass actually might make sense for people driving to Chicago or using the EZ-Pass network. It's $10.00 +$30.00 in tolls with no monthly fee, you can take it with you and slap it on your rental car if you fly to New York and rent a car or ...

There's been noises about a vehicle bridge at Nord Ave for as long as I can remember, but I haven't heard anything recently.

I take it other people do/ want to travel to Duluth differently than I do? I always drive from my home up there. I might spend a few hours wandering around the lakefront, but most of my time is spent in the state parks in the area, then I always drive home because to me it's stupid to pay for a hote...

My own idea would be to eliminate all sales taxes and user fees, and that includes tolls, fares, state park admissions, gasoline taxes, and the like and just fund what we need to with income taxes.

I meant extended into Union Depot, not ending in the street out in front of it.

Are plans in the works to get LRT extended to the Union Depot?

Seems everyone is excited and spending a lot of money on this project for, as far as I can tell, two Amtrak trains a day and a couple of busses.

It doesn't have to be that complicated. There's enough people that want a light or two for their man cave that there's single board controllers on eBay that wire directly to the mains. You just wire the hot and neutral from the power line and the three hot wires and the neutrals for the bulbs to the...

Cars have now have three lanes in each direction. Under the proposal they'd have two and would operate only "almost as well". To me that's anti-car. Do I disagree with it, no. Nor do I think Harriet Pkwy should be 2 lanes with a 45mph speed limit and right turn lanes. But with transportati...

I'm not necessarily against an anti-car makeover for Washington, since I think it has a lot of potential as the leafy boulevard and I don't disagree with the plan to focus most of the in/out traffic on the one-way pairs, but if we're going to downscale it we should go all the way and remove access f...

Thought people here might be interested in my traffic signal collection. Most of them are from New York or California as they have more interesting stuff than we do here, and I'm acquaintances with a collector in each place, but I do have a couple of examples that saw service in the city of St. Paul...