urbanMSP

If I had to guess, I'd say that the facilities located on the superblock bounded by 7th and 8th Streets and Chicago and 10th Avenue are the oldest and least efficient portions of their campus.

Is the train able to reverse directions at the Duluth end? I can't picture where that would happen.

Yes, NW quadrant! And that General Mills building was exactly the site that I was looking at. I'm unclear what the rules are for running push-pull service, but if they can get away with it on NLX, then I'd agree coming into Target Field station is better, and for the few riders continuing on to St. ...

This may be what Matt was suggesting, but I'd look at the NE quadrant of Central and Broadway. Looks like there's some room there, including what appears to be a lightly used siding track. It's past the wye, so it could be served by Northstar.

The SPUD article in the Strib this weekend seemed to allude to the possibility that NLX still might terminate there.

Is it time to start thinking about an in-line station for Minneapolis in northeast?

My (limited) understanding of the tax code is that if a non-profit entity owns land but leases it for profit, they do have to pay taxes on it. The University, however, is not your typical non-profit, and as a quasi-independent government body, I have no idea what would apply to this situation. Typic...

I'd have to imagine that the Minnesota delegation is lobbying like crazy to get federal infrastructure bill money to fill in the rest of the gap.

If your suggestion is that the enlightened few who show up for caucuses save us from the tyranny of unsophisticated DFL primary voters, I'd say that's a telling but not particularly compelling argument.

[Quick reminder that caucuses are terrible and should be eliminated.]

I think boosting internet connectivity through rural towns would be good. This is something that everybody loves to get behind, but where's the cut-off where a part of the state is too remote or too sparsely populated to justify extending this service to? Especially if there are satellite based opt...

Very crude math, but if you said that the biennial budget were $54b, and applied a 5% inflation factor to it, you'd get $1.35b of additional inflation cost in the first year, and $1.42b in the second year. I think that makes sense?

Quite a bit less than that if they were legally allowed to include inflation on the expense side of the ledger , which they absolutely should. It probably goes without saying, but the DFL will need to be pretty careful in terms of how much is one-time spending (capital projects, tax refunds, etc.) v...

To put things a little bit differently, if Minneapolis had its current number of households but its 1950 household average size, the city's population would be 572,435.

Per the article, the system (including scooters) was used 533,000 times in 2021, which was a record. Meaning that the sponsorship alone represents an almost $4 per ride subsidy. If they find another private sponsor, that's fantastic. But I'm not really sure this is something the city ought to step u...

Am I correct in understanding that it's still not possible to link your Go To card to the Metro Transit app? In 2022?

If it's possible, apologies for being too dumb to figure it out. If not, how in the world is this still not enabled?

Per quick googling, in 1950, the Minneapolis population was 521,718 and there were 3.2 people/household. Doing the math, that means there were 163,037 households in 1950.

Per current census numbers, there are 178,886 households in Minneapolis now.

[winky face emoji] My point, which I guess I implied but never actually got to, is that I think Minneapolis probably already has more households right now than it ever did before, and given the slim chance that a bunch of families living in SFH's decide to start having lots and lots of kids, number ...

Whenever we compare Minneapolis population back to that 1950 census, I need to remind people that that was an anomaly. Because of the Great Depression, World War II, and the transition of the country out of its war time economy, there was essentially no housing produced for 20 years. Population kept...

Thanks for the great update!