urbanMSP

Another thing to note is that, while most development in the city recently has been multiunit residential, these changes do apply to all types of development. The staffer leading the effort mentioned that they're really optimistic about the reduced loading requirements and eliminated parking requir...

Minneapolis' changes to parking, loading, and TDM rules for new developments are now on the runway preparing for takeoff. They appear before the CoW next week. The packet is here . The changes include: Elimination of parking minimums citywide. Expansion of parking maximums in a tiered system (the hi...

Think more important is the issue brought up by our friend Chet Wedgley where the bus lanes disappear south of the Uptown Transit Center in favor of a lot of turning and more general purpose travel lanes. That seems like a really crummy trade off in a number of respects. Obviously it means that a nu...

Perhaps I'm wrong about people's schedules. My employer was similarly flexible pre-pandemic, and to my knowledge there were not many people on a true hybrid schedule, they were either fulltime one or fulltime the other, just with the flexibility to work from home or the field on the occasions when t...

This is on the upcoming Planning Commission agenda. Here's the packet . The address has leveled up to 21 N Washington, a thread name change may be required. There's not a lot to report that wasn't already known. 427 housing units, 373 parking spaces (of which 35 are reserved for tenants of the adjac...

I'm a bit skeptical that many people will choose a schedule like the one you described (three days in the office, two at home). I think it's more likely that people are fulltime office or fulltime WFH, and there are just more people in the latter category than before and more flexibility overall. I ...

Yesterday, two alternatives were presented for the Hennepin South reconstruction . (The project timeline was also pushed back into 2024, which is disappointing!) The alternatives are not so different. They all have two general purpose travel lanes, two dedicated bus lanes the full length of the stre...

I guess it's not surprising that coverage of the Great Office Absence focused on downtowns, since that's where the effects (and the reporters) were most concentrated. But it's definitely silly that predictions about the future of offices have focused on downtowns. Downtown offices are the most prod...

Some are saying Met Council tried the locally-made (but less known) New Flyer buses and didn't have good luck with early production models. Might be shell shock from this? There are great, reliable brands other than New Flyer, such as Protera. Other cities have had issues with Proterra models. I th...

I'm confused by the idea that offices of the future will require a lot more space per worker. We know that the "six foot rule" is completely unscientific, COVID-19 can easily spread further than that indoors. So it's either safe to work inside (at whatever distance) because people are vaccinated, or...

Double endorse both of these ideas.

I'm still really unclear why they are not building floating bus stops on Marshall. If it's a cost issue, perhaps eliminating one set of stations could provide the needed slack in the budget so that the Marshall stations are safe for bicyclists.

I'm just hopelessly old-fashioned for believing that the transit system should go where most people want to go, rather than creating the magical Cartesian transit grid of the future. But a grid actually does best reflect where people want to go. Pre-COVID, just a fifth of all trips were commute tri...

I'm not sure the chosen corridor for SWLRT is a great mystery? Open up Google Maps to the Twin Cities and select the satellite view (or just click here ). The route of SWLRT draws itself, you can see it on the map as a pretty continuous corridor of office/industrial/commercial development extending ...

But still. People hate transfers, even if it's to another aBRT. And the eastsiders are much more likely to want to go to downtown St. Paul anyway. People hate transfers because they've been conditioned by bad transfers. If transfers are quick and relatively painless, as can be the case with hi-freq...

I think this is sort of the wrong way of thinking about it. Corridors that demonstrate high ridership help make the case for improvements, just as the aBRT corridors are upgrading the local bus corridors that have the highest ridership, and not suburban corridors with no service. Let's say, for ins...

But with Lake recently funded and Central designated as a corridor now, it sure feels like we're waving the white flag on ever getting more trams/LRT/streetcars built along urban corridors (with the possible notable exceptions of Bottineau and Riverview, if those projects make it out of the plannin...

Is it pretty safe to assume the Nicollet-Central streetcar is dead now that Central has been chosen for the next aBRT route? Or would Minneapolis be crazy enough to spend the money on a streetcar that only goes down Nicollet? It never went very far up Central, so no, the streetcar isn't officially ...

I'm not surprised to see Central chosen! The importance of that corridor is why it's driving me nuts that it's not paired with Nicollet. While I think this is a missed opportunity, I hope there will be further opportunities to fight about it when the F Line project is more fully planned, just as the...

The Cub building is set back about 140' from Broadway - it doesn't look like it would be too challenging to make that turn without touching the building. Trains would have to slow down, of course, but that's not the end of the world, especially with (presumably) a station at Emerson only a quarter ...

(with one taking, the Cub site, which could be redeveloped) Let's not turn North Minneapolis into a food desert. Unless Cub agreed to reopen in a development like what they did at Lowa Forty Six at Minnehaha. But they just reopened this store after the riots so I don't think the owners would be too...