urbanMSP

How many of those outstate voters who hate Walz voted for Biden? You would need a whole lot of Biden voters to vote GOP in 2022 to unseat Walz, and that just doesn't feel like a very likely formula.

Without arguing one way or another re: this building, I really want to push back on the idea that the Gateway District doesn't deserve preservation because the buildings don't suit contemporary tastes. That is exactly the justification people used 60 years ago to demolish the original Gateway Distri...

Ramsey County's Rice Street Visioning Study (redesigning Rice from Pennsylvania Ave to Wheelock Pkwy) continues to move forward. The study team has posted design concepts that could be applied to Rice, all of which assume that the current four lane configuration is no longer viable. Provide feedback...

Especially since Ward 10 is definitely one of the city's most overpopulated wards, and whoever gets elected in 2021 will be running in a very different district in 2023.

It would be like I-335, which was planned to connect 35 and 94 through Northeast. I doubt many people even know about that project, or ever think "I wish there was a freeway through Northeast so I could drive to Rosedale from Golden Valley a few minutes faster. I certainly don't actually wish 335 h...

I was on northeast 35W for the first time in a while yesterday after sunset, and I was totally blown away by how big and prominent this thing is in the skyline. Truly wild.

You forgot to mention that Hennepin is also studying changes to their section of Franklin that would mirror this: https://www.hennepin.us/franklincorridor

A Line BRTOD continuing to hum along.

"Small but loud and well-connected group of opponents" is the definition of handwaving away the opposition. You know who has a good read on the size of the opposition? The elected officials making these compromises.

I love how easily people here handwave away the deep public opposition to some of this stuff. It's charming in a way.

If the school were made of quartzite like that courthouse is, there would be no issues at all.

With the dedicated sales tax funding, and with Ramsey County able to take the lead without political interference from others, I'd hope that they'd be optimistically thinking they could start construction in four years or so, putting an opening date more in the 2029-2030 range. Bear in mind that th...

The shades of orange and red they chose also look terrible right next to each other, for what it's worth.

Do people actually abide by left turn bans? Even if it's 90%, the 10% that ignores it could really grind that street to a halt. I think you would really need a more drastic change (either making the E/W street one-way, or closing the entrance, or building a median to block the turn) to make that via...

Question is does the Twin Cities make the cut for Amtrak's other goal of expanding short haul routes since the 400(ish) miles to Chicago is kinda pushing it and the nlx might have been quietly taken out behind the shed at this point. Amtrak is very committed to the second train, and they have been ...

I don't think it's hard to imagine an open-seat race becoming very contentious about Broadway, in ways that get tied into larger area narratives about investment and gentrification. That's not a surefire win for an anti-Broadway-LRT candidate by any stretch, but I don't think it's a slam dunk agains...

McKnight should definitely not be a wide, fast moving four lane road with few signals indefinitely into the future. That's another issue that local government policy has to fix.

McKnight is being repaved to a three-lane road as we speak.

Main Street, at least southwest of Ensemble/HCC Station, seems to be 80' ROW and a very pleasant pedestrian environment, even with a large landscaped median of station-width between the tracks for the entire stretch and in some places some really excessive sidewalk planting. I apologize for the con...

The point was that suitable sidewalks, car lanes, and LRT lanes and stations can co-exist in a 80' right-of-way, which they do in downtown Houston and many other places around the world. I specifically said that I was not literally applying the city's modal framework, I think car lanes on Broadway ...

I'd been largely dismissive of early discussions about a full subway through North Minneapolis, but I could envision a routing that would follow N 7th St at grade across I-94, and then enter a tunnel near Plymouth and re-emerge at the Broadway crescent, where the Broadway ROW relaxes I don't think ...