urbanMSP

There is absolutely old-style white flight continuing to happen throughout the Twin Cities metro. It's not as explicit as it used to be, but it happens all the time.

That's a very silly website.

Any parliamentary procedure experts know who has the authority to bring a motion to reconsider? The prevailing side, or the losing side? The person who made the motion? To my understanding this shouldn't be a problem from a parliamentary procedure standpoint. Only the prevailing side can make a mot...

Ramsey County's Riversedge proposal has four towers on a cap over railroad and Shepard Rd. It's not impossible, but it is very expensive.

https://www.ramseycounty.us/your-govern ... riversedge

Enter here: https://www.google.com/maps/@44.9308283 ... a=!3m1!1e3

Be prepared for more ticks than you've ever seen in your entire life.

Note this from slide 17: "To fit the LRT guideway, sidewalks, and two travel lanes about 75 feet of right of way is needed. When additional right of way is available other elements can be included: boulevards, bikeways or street parking." I assume that is pretty bare-minimum sidewalks. Not...

Literally no one enjoys or defends that endorsement process, yet it endures...and it's really hard to understand why.

Plenty of people enjoy it. It's an interesting game for a day.

On the contrary, I think that's asking for collisions between vehicles and buses.

I think to successfully do a U-turn, you would have to allow cars to temporarily enter the bus lane.

You save a few feet by consolidating them as a two-way.

I'll be interested to see how well this works on Marshall, it's a tight corridor for everything they're trying to do on it. I do think that's probably part of the issue with floating bus stops there, it would make things even tighter. Another consideration might be snow clearing in the winter, as S...

Ethan Fawley on Twitter seemed to suggest that just converting the outside lanes to bus-only lanes is unlikely for safety reasons:

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. Eastsiders won't lose direct-to-downtown options from Como-Maryland; the buses on Payne, Arcade, E 7th, etc. will continue to go downtown, and you'll ha...

I was under the impression that the water on the golf course was primarily a groundwater inflow issue (because lakes here are just areas where the ground level dips below the water table), and not an issue of insufficient outlet. The Barr report concluded that "the potential lowering of Lake Hi...

That was the big argument for why Rice-Robert had to come first, to make the transfer less onerous.

I remember seeing a population map of the metro area and it seemed downtown Minneapolis was at the center but when I look at this map it looks like it favors the east side of the metro. Is this because they want to cover multiple counties? Or is the population and job centers farther east than I th...

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...

Meadowbrook is an asset, which could be sold and the money from that can be used to reinvest in parks within the city boundaries. It's not about profit-making, but best utilization of assets to serve those who pay MPRB taxes. (Which are almost as much as for the MPD) The park blocks from my house d...

The Park Board is not a money-making venture--if it were, it should be ripping out playgrounds and wildlife areas, which are pure money pits. If they don't need significant capital investment (a big if), golf courses are almost always more profitable than whatever else they could do with that land w...

Not to mention that the Park Board has a "no net loss of parkland" policy, which means that selling park land for redevelopment is virtually impossible.