urbanMSP

Legislature may give cities the option to establish land-value taxes: pages 12 and 13 of the Property Tax Division report.

The utilities/municipal systems argument was the best one against the Missing Middle bill/s, and even that one was weak. Here's some thoughts that would make the bill much more palatable: Make it (or the strongest measures) apply only to 'metropolitan' cities. In this case, take metropolitan to mean...

The DFL trifecta is not a foregone conclusion -- in fact, the house and senate are always teetering on the verge of flipping, and the apparent solidity of the governorship may only be a mirage created by the GOP nominating terrible candidates. I think the approach of tackling a few meaningful polic...

Yeah these plans are better than our previous LRTs, but there's still lots of room for improvement. I'm still skeptical that the right decision was to route along 21st, but the transit mall they've drawn up is pretty cute. I am concerned that we may be including too much extraneous road reconstructi...

The state created cities. In a political sense they don't even exist if the state doesn't want them to. All their authority is just state authority that the legislature has granted to them . Without state-granted authorities, mayors and city councils are just HOA boards with fancy titles. Cities don...

Washington County is discussing how to spend its transit sales tax dollars this week, and their agenda packet confirms Metro Transit is going to implement a microtransit service to connect Woodbury with its Gold Line stops.

Hooray

Yeah, I just looked at the system map and not much has to be changed. The only thing I really see outside of Woodbury is the Sun Ray Transit Center, which really should be relocated a block south. I would really like Metro Transit to consider something other than microtransit in Woodbury. Land use ...

Two questions: 1. Will nearby local and express routes be restructured similar to the Orange Line? 2. Is the Woodbury express service (and the 323, I guess) going to be relocated to the Woodlane P&R or will it continue to operate out of the theater parking lot? 1. Pre-pandemic, there was a plan...

And let's all be thankful that Lake Minnetonka physically precludes just about any feasible idea for a third ring road. Funny you should mention it. I doubt I could track it down, but some years ago in MNDOT's Corridors of Commerce request, they asked for money to plan "I-894", an outer b...

Didn't read the whole article because I know how much KSTP loves to hate light rail, so the gist is there was a hiccup in which recently installed light rail track in the Kenilworth Corridor was one foot too close to the parallel freight track. https://kstp.com/5-investigates/new-problem-uncovered-...

What are inside the red circles with the lines through them?

I think those are rendering errors

Sounds to me like a certain Boy Mayor's administration heard from a business or two about parking and intervened. If the transit lanes really are A. bus-only for the entire work week and B. actually enforced then this isn't a serious problem. A shameful telegraphing of the mayor's and county's prior...

I think MN was denied funding because our environmental review was out of date, yeah? Will that be updated before the fall funding round?

I sure hope they haven't changed it last minute with no input. The posted layout still shows "BUS ONLY" road markings, so it could be just an oversight and these are still planned to be bus only. But the big text box that reads "ADDITION OF PART-TIME TRANSIT PRIORITY LANE" makes ...

We really shouldn't back down. We shouldn't let capital bully us into backing off our minimum wages . Except the rates set by the city council will, according to the state study, be well in excess of the Minneapolis minimum wage (after accounting for costs borne by the drivers). I think the thing t...

Some alternative rideshare companies have already said they're investigating coming to MN. We really shouldn't back down. We shouldn't let capital bully us into backing off our minimum wages . We shouldn't acquiesce to Wall Street's attempt to punish a progressive city whose only crime was to be so ...

I'm pretty skeptical that the city level is the correct place for regulation of rideshare companies. But I have no sympathy for the companies themselves. From the start, they've abused information asymmetries with their "employees" to subsidize their anti-competitive pricing. The entire m...

I am pretty confident the State Legislature will preempt Minneapolis. They'll set a statewide minimum rideshare wage akin to the current state minimum wage, and change the law to prevent MPLS from setting their own minimum. The likelihood we see the day when Uber actually leaves the state is like 10...

Gold Line is on the verge of being officially delayed. There was substantial trouble getting some utilities moved (I think) and that delayed a large part of the work for a while. The project committee had to sign off on reordering the project's construction schedule and authorize more winter work th...

DC Metro recently changed all their signage to indicate when routes go "via downtown DC."

That seems sensible to me, considering what a destination downtown is in comparison to Brooklyn Park.