urbanMSP

Article says Hy-Vee wants stores around 90,000 square feet, and the Rainbows are only 60,000.
http://www.startribune.com/business/258396101.html

Why the helmet hate if I may ask? They're hot and dorky and uncomfortable. I don't feel their necessary as safe as bicycling is, at least on dedicated trails (I never ride on a street for any reason, even a bicycle lane). I found myself riding more aggressively with one, probably negating any benef...

For me I'd flatly refuse to ever ride a bike again if I had to wear a helmet. Of course since I ride on recreational trails only and always drive to go bike riding I'm not sure society would be worse off in my case...

Still wish they'd build a decent waterpark like at Edmonton, looks like the new one will be pretty small. They claim the new one will be the largest in Minnesota without giving square footage, but Waterpark of America is only 15th biggest in North America now so that's not saying much (WOA is 70,000...

Bloomington plows the sidewalks- what few they have. On one hand I find forcing citizens to maintain government property as unpalatable, but I guess it's not a whole lot different than being forced into jury duty.

Black Dog Road in Burnsville to be replaced by a bicycle trail.
http://www.startribune.com/local/south/257431151.html

It looks like traffic forecasts indicate a need for 4 lanes towards the very end of the planning horizon, so the plan is to build a twin span at a later date. I'm not sure if this is just to cheap out now, or not but several decades of wear on a piece of infrastructure when it could be built fresh i...

It depends on which dollars. Most of the St. Croix Crossing and Red Wing Bridge dollars are from the general highway fund and could go to just about anything. Contrasted when politicians play highway engineer and implement pop-up projects, the dollars for these like the MN 60 expressway completion o...

I have a 2002 Jeep Grand Cherokee- despite not commuting to work I put over 10,000 miles on it a year running errands, visiting the parents, road trips, etc. Sister lives with me and has a newish Toyota Corolla that she mainly drive to work, and is a relative pain to get out of the driveway in the w...

I've not been to downtown St. Paul for a couple of years so I haven't seen the signals in person, but I will comment. In theory it should be possible to give "Walks" three directions at once (I take it vehicle traffic is either all stopped when a train goes through), and people that instal...

I'm sure to the bean counters the benefit/cost of a bunch of local overpasses isn't 1 or greater (the basic go/no go threshold for highway projects) so even if they're nice for local connectivity they're not going to get built by themselves (even in Cannon Falls Mn/DOT is raising eyebrows at the sec...

https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3729/13941289233_fc8b94caf2.jpg IMG_5342 by North Star Highways , on Flickr Pier/Tower #8 a month later. They got an early start on this one since they could build a causeway from the Minnesota shore. They're going to start work on Pier/Tower #12 as soon as they can g...

The only one that comes to mind is MN 62 and I-494. There's a triple left turn lane (although you can also go straight from one of them) for the southbound off-ramp to accommodate the major movement of southbound to eastbound. This was originally going to be rebuilt as a SPUI during the reconstructi...

They're to give experienced bicyclists a place to ride. They're not wide enough to be a legal bicycle lanes so they can't sign them as such, but that is the intent (in the suburbs casual riders tend to use the sidewalks on busy streets).

I recall reading documents in the very early stages of planning for this project proposing to reroute of MN 19 to tie it into the southern interchange- it would have followed the southeast boulevard, and then went directly west from the interchange to meet up with the current alignment.

Sometimes I think when there's only one realistic option transportation planners throw in a couple of ridiculous ones to reject so it looks like they're actually studying something. I agree with "what are they smoking" in option A. Grants Pass, OR has a similar setup in a similar situation...

For preemption it doesn't matter if there's a countdown timer or not- the only circumstances where you may terminate a pedestrian clearance phase early is for a freight railroad where the train cannot stop, and even there they're trying to eliminate this by putting advanced sensors on the railroad t...

Maybe they could put in one of the new microwave pedestrian sensors so bicyclists and pedestrians wouldn't suffer the supreme indignity of having to push a button.

I like the idea of leaving it open for now. It'll still be available when we build the next Vikings and Twins stadiums in 30 years or so.

They will have priority but not preemption. Meaning that they're timing the lights to expedite LRT vehicles getting through, but a train will not have the ability to preempt a light- turn it green when it would not otherwise. It was tricky enough to get the lights on Hiawatha working decently for ca...