[Edit 1:20 PM- one commenter referred to the Municipal Consent laws that require cities to give approval to anything MnDOT wants to do to a roadway as well. This is important, and establishes a balance of power of sorts. The purpose of this statement is only to point out that if a small town wanted to implement changes to their Trunk Highway Main Street that they believed would improve the Main Street, they are not empowered to do so on their own, and can only do so with MnDOT's approval, which may or may not be obtained, depending on the circumstances and the proposed changes.]

This works out well for some Cities, not so well for others. A lot depends on whether the roadway treats a particular City’s Main Street as a valuable destination, or more of an obstacle that drivers will face on their way between other destinations. Roadway designs often send some pretty clear messages about whether drivers are expected to pass through town quickly without stopping or slow down to interact with the surrounding community. Other times, these messages are subtle. Of course, in all cases, some drivers want one thing, some drivers want the other.

Trunk Highways and Main Streets are an awkward combination, no matter how you look at it. Trunk Highways exist to link destinations, to provide routes for heavy trucks and freight movement, and to provide high-speed mobility between destinations. Main Streets, by definition, are a collection of destinations within close proximity. Main Streets exist to provide convenient access to these destinations. A roadway will rarely do both of these things well. When demands for mobility and accessibility are placed on the same roadway, both sides usually end up compromising, and sometimes, nobody wins.

The City of Ely’s Sheridan Street (TH-1, US-169) is a good example of a “destination” Trunk Highway Main Street, and it has fared pretty well from the situation, in my opinion.

Sheridan Street in Ely, also TH-1 and US-169

I’m not holding up Sheridan Street as a best-case scenario, but I think it is one of the better Main Streets in the State. It’s a two-lane, 30 mph roadway, with permitted parking and frequent intersections (~350′ o.c.), and a relatively active Main Street (even if a bit touristy, and only during the Summer). Traffic here is generally pretty calm. I attribute the good fortune of Sheridan Street primarily to two factors:

1) Ely is an end-of-the line destination simply based on it’s location. If you’re driving on this street, your destination is probably somewhere in or around Ely. It’s not a through-route to anywhere.

2) Traffic Volumes have probably never been high enough to warrant anything else.

But, for every end-of-the-line town on a Trunk Highway that isn’t facing congestion issues, there are probably a dozen other towns in the opposite situation. They are located between two larger destinations, and their Main Street is actively feeling stretched to provide both mobility and accessibility at the same time.

St. Peter’s Minnesota Avenue is an interesting case study of a Trunk Highway Main Street facing a bit of an identity crisis. For some, it’s a lively historical business corridor and traditional Main Street. For others, it’s a frustratingly slow 35 mph zone that forces them to slow down as they travel between Minneapolis and Mankato. For most, it’s probably both, depending on the circumstances. Minnesota Avenue was reconstructed in 2009, and it is often held up as a good example of how Trunk Highways and Main Streets can coexist.

What do you think about Trunk Highway Main Streets? Can Trunk Highways and Main Streets coexist? What do you think are the biggest challenges to these dual-purpose roadways? How can Minnesota or MnDOT improve the policies that govern how these streets look, feel, or operate? Are there any examples of best-case Trunk Highway Main Streets that should be held up as an example to emulate? Any worst-case scenarios? What do you think of the 2009 recent reconstruction of TH-169 in St. Peter?

CNU attendees being photographed from a cherry picker.

All conferences are the same, separated only by sartorial subtlety. This one had its own rules too, secret codes spoken by initiates. For example, where I expected to find seas of thick architect glasses, each more outlandish than the next, instead I encountered non-outrageous eyewear, subtle and plain. It was as if the attendant architects had consciously rejected the trademark of their trade. Instead, as befits a group that explicitly rejects futurism and modernity in favor of tradition and history, it seemed like most of the more well-known CNU figureheads sported the traditional WASP uniform of khakis and dark blazers.  Meanwhile, most of the rest of the conferees donned bland grey and navy blue outfits, the intentionally un-noticable uniforms of the bureaucratic urban professions, innocuous yet informally formal.

The WPB convention center.

The Congress occupied about half of the West Palm Beach convention center, filling a hallway overlooking Okeechokee Drive, the main arterial South Florida’s strange social landscape, and the center’s halls filled with displays touting various new urban developments (a new neighborhood in Mobile, another in Arizona) and exciting displays like that of the National Vinyl Siding Institute or another one devoted to form-based codes. Sprinkled in their midst were a few local planning stands, like the display for the West Palm Beach bike share, or for South Florida’s potential commuter rail expansion.

CNU attendees walking on sub-par sidewalks along a West Palm Beach stroad.

My talk was on my ongoing dissertation research, which involves examining different approaches to bicycle planning and advocacy, particularly how different groups try to attract new riders. It was a shorter version of a talk I’ve given before, edited down to its essence: despite lots of good intentions, rates of cycling in the North America are very low. Why is this? To attract new riders we need to build cycling facilities that feel comfortable, and tan accommodate all the different ways and reasons that people ride bicycles. That’s it, though with many more details, photos, clips of videos from my interviews, jokes, etc.

One of the slides from my talk, this one about bike boulevards.

The crux of the talk is about this theory of how people don’t make decisions based on rational calculations about the environment or exercise, or ratios of cost and efficiency. Rather, and I did this in my talk for a hot second, I introduce the concept of “affect”, which is the idea that people act at least as much through bodily habit and non-concious feeling as through intentional decision making. Needless to say, this is kind of a difficulty notion to unpack,which is one of the reasons why my eight minute speech had about as much impact as a dandelion seed.

In a way, though, the idea of affect is perfect for an audience of new urbanists. For all its critics, the new urbanism movement is dedicated to the premise of place, the notion that how a street ‘feels’ is important. The architects and planners in the room last Friday had all gone to great lengths in their professional lives to defend things like decorative brickwork, flower planters, and window shopping, fighting losing battles with the cold calculations that have reduced our urban environment to a series of parking structures and concrete block bunkers. In a way, the difference between a narrow sharrow in a half-guttered bike lane and a Green Wave’d cyclepath is a lot like the difference between a Stroad’ed strip mall and a mixed-use walkable neighborhood: each depends on the importance of cultivating comfort and on building environments that accommodate a wide variety of lifestyles.

That said, there’s definitely a gap within the ‘urban fields’ surrounding what you might call urban theory. On one hand you have the kinds of literatures that interest ‘academics’ – things like affect theory or assemblages or real estate capitalism. Here you’ll find lots of French philosophy, self-contained radicalism, and mystifying jargon. Meanwhile, the busy practical professional education of planners and architects requires its students to spend the vast majority of their lives at work, engaged in large projects or making portfolios all night in their studios. Most architects and planners that I talk with are all-too-rarely able to take a break to read a book or discuss abstract and potentially useless questions like “what is a city?”

Looking back, I might have chosen to emphasize slightly different things. New Urbanism has a lot to offer, particularly because it’s focused on thinking beyond simple functional models of space. Someday, I’d like to have more time to talk and think about what we can learn from the attempts over the last twenty years to build urban environments that make us feel more alive, more human. The quality of the environment isn’t simply the ‘icing’ on the cake of modernist functionality. On the contrary, how a space makes you feel is the cake. That’s all there is! Starting to understand and shape the affective quality of a space is an important step along the way to building good cities.

The West Palm Beach bike share system.

My voice is gone and after successive nights of little sleep and 14 hours of travel Sunday, not much stamina either, but I’m left with one thought that I want to share today. It is this: the great strength of the Congress for the New Urbanism is the constant, self-reflecting insistence on improvement that all members seem to hold.

I have spent many years as a member of the American Planning Association and the National Society of Professional Engineers. Both professions have their accreditation process and their gatherings are hostage to the continuing education merry-go-round. APA in particular has a cattle car feel, where you run from session to session to get your credits in law or ethics or whatever you need to check off for that year.

At my very first CNU in Denver, I was confused about why the breaks between sessions were so long. Lunch was often two hours and, even then, the sessions afterward didn’t start on time because people weren’t back. Do New Urbanists just like to eat? No, they have a lot to talk about.

The highlight of my week was a late evening conversation Friday night with mostly NextGen members. We arranged chairs out on the courtyard following a CNU reception and we talked about our vision for the future. What are the big changes that need to happen in America? How do we bring them about? Are we thinking big enough or are we still hostage to some flawed assumptions? It was invigorating.

As I get home then, I receive a link to two videos, one recalling the accomplishments of the first 20 years of New Urbanism. The second reflects on what we did wrong or should be doing better. I can see other professional organizations publicly releasing the first, but can you imagine an organization like the American Society of Civil Engineers releasing the second.

If forced to, their video would go something like this. “What have we done wrong…..well, I suppose we should have made a stronger case for more highway funding.”

This is the stuff that makes me proud to be a New Urbanist. If you’re not there and you think you know these people, I’m going to humbly suggest that you don’t. Plan to be there next year in Salt Lake City and add your voice to the mix.

First + Main Video, Dreams

[Click here to watch]

First + Main Video, Confessions

[Click here to watch]

Strong Towns coverage of CNU 20:

• Day 1, NextGen9

• Day 2, Thursday

• Day 3, Friday

• Day 4, Saturday

• Podcast: Mike Lydon

• Podcast: Jennifer Krouse

• Podcast: Andrew Burlseon

• Podcast: Russell Preston

We’ll be releasing more audio at Strong Towns in the coming days, so tune into our podcast. Thank you to everyone who followed us remotely. Hope to see you all in Salt Lake City in 2013.

The corners in question

Two intersections that I pass on my daily commute offer vastly different pedestrian experiences.  Walking vaguely north-ish on 3rd St N in the North Loop you first encounter 6th Ave N, where despite the stop signs giving priority to cars on 6th over their automotive brethren on 3rd, I experience the most consistent yielding to pedestrians of any unsigned, unpainted crosswalk in the city.  Yet the next block up, at 7th Ave N, cars consistently fail to yield despite the crossing being “with” the stop signs.  Here are a few reasons I speculate may be behind the unusual level of respect at one corner, and the egregious level of disrespect at the next:

A day in the life

• Built form.  The intersection at 6th has 5-8 story buildings planted at all four corners, leading to a sense of enclosure rarely felt in our parking lot-pocked metropolis.  It may be that this atmosphere leads motorists to conclude that they’re in a real city, where rules of pedestrian priority apply.  In contrast, at 7th the buildings are mostly lower, though one corner holds a tall 8-story warehouse that extends the full block to 6th, two corners are populated by 2-story buildings, and one corner has been cleared of all structures so cars can be stored there.  Could it be that this low- or no-rise environment results in an assumption of automotive priority?  Do drivers get distracted by the bright blue sky?
  

  North Loop living at Scylla Lofts and Charybdis Flats

• Tension and release.  At 7th, motorists coming from the north have just passed from between two 7-story buildings to get to this lower-slung corner.  As sailors have known for centuries and Frank Lloyd Wright introduced to architecture, traffic moving through a constrained area will tend to speed up, and it’s possible that the same principle applies here, speeding cars through to and beyond 3rd St N on the momentum encouraged by passing through the narrow space between two tall buildings.  Of course, as I mentioned above, there are tall buildings at 6th as well, but as 6th is a wider street than 7th, perhaps proportion leads motorists to perceive the buildings on 7th as taller than their neighbors on 6th.
• Street design.  As I just mentioned, 6th (the courteous street) is wider than 7th (the discourteous one), which is an outcome we wouldn’t expect if we follow the maxim Wider=Faster.  These corners also defy the logic of woonerven or shared spaces, as in this case the users are less courteous on 7th, which is not delineated by striping or even very many signs (except for the stop sign).  Strictly speaking, the same is true of 6th, but this street is effectively striped by its patches of asphalt and bare brick.
• Street texture.  Speaking of, I always assume pavement texture affects the way people drive – it seems like adding roughness is a sure-fire way to get people to slow down, and sure enough on these corners 7th is paved with (somewhat) smooth asphalt while 6th has brick pavers – but only on half the street.  On the side of 6th that is paved with asphalt I experience as much yielding as on the other side.
• Street connectivity.  These being Avenues in the North Loop, neither 6th nor 7th is especially connective.  7th extends to just the two blocks centered on 3rd St, although I sort of suspect that that could be a contributor to rude driving – most motorists are only there because they’re lost, so they’re too busy trying to figure out where they are to watch for pedestrians, or else they realize they missed their turn and they’re cruising back to where ever they’re late getting to.  6th is more connective, since it technically extends to Olson Hwy.  It terminates a block north of 3rd, though, and thanks to a combination of a small rise and the 4th St Viaduct, it appears to terminate within a block or so south of 3rd as well.  It’s possible this appearance of non-connectivity cuts down on attempts to cut through, while the actual connectivity discourages the selfish confusion seen on 7th.
  

  The real dock street

• Street use.  All this analysis may come down to one thing: how the street is used.  In the North Loop, streets have traditionally been used for loading docks.  Both 6th and 7th still have loading docks on them, but while on 7th the truck loads parallel to the street along the curb, on 6th the loading is done perpendicularly, so it’s not uncommon for a semi to stretch across the roadway and leave enough room for only one car at a time to go past.  This would of course be a clue that you’re not on a typical barrel-through-and-ignore-your-surroundings roadway, so maybe a typical reaction is to be more courteous to fellow users.

It seems like for the decades we’ve been pouring money into roads, very few have stopped to think about how design affects the behavior of users.  It wasn’t until the 70s that Hans Monderman in Holland may have been the first to buck this trend and actually put his theories of transport psychology into practice.  The concept of the woonerf is dependent on touchy-feely theories of design or psychology, so while it’s been popular on the continent and even spread to parts of Britain, the American road engineering establishment, the early successes of which depended on a veneer of scientificity, has not been receptive.  Chucking the old familiar signs and stripes may be a radical change, but it’s just as radical to assume that after millenia of engineering and design co-existing and cooperating in built environments, the roadway is the first human structure that has no need of design.  So you may not agree with my observations and conclusions about these particular corners – and if you don’t, or have something to add, please do so in the comments – but I hope you agree that the field of transport psychology needs more attention.

The Minneapolis Bike Coalition has put forward their preferred design for a redesigned Park & Portland (for background on these streets, see here and here).  Full disclosure: I helped with the street rendering. From the Bike Coalition blog:

Key features:

• Remove a traffic lane that isn’t needed. The core of this proposal is transforming one of the car lanes into space that adds to the neighborhood, pedestrian, and bicycling environments. Park and Portland are both currently three lanes in each direction; yet, they carry no more than 13,000 cars a day at any point (and much less at most points). Basically, that means that there is one wasted car lane. It’s not needed to move cars. Have you noticed that there is never any congestion on these roads except periodically where cars are turning? It’s not your imagination! These roads were built before there was an Interstate 35W, and there simply isn’t the traffic demand to warrant 3 lanes each. With a 11 feet of extra space to play with (the width of one of the traffic lanes), there is plenty of space for transformation!
• Move the bike lane to the right side and use the parked cars as a protective buffer. The existing 5-foot left-side bike lanes are not a very comfortable place for most cyclists, and there are common safety problems where drivers turn left. We propose moving the bike lane to the right–where drivers have come to expect cyclists to be. And we propose moving the bike lane between the curb and the parked cars. This is similar to the bike lanes on 1st Avenue North, although this would be much better. There is more space (when we take the lane), so there can be a wide bike lane and an adjacent buffer zone to prevent worries about dooring from the parked cars. Well-designed parking protected bike lanes in other cities have drastically increased biking and improved safety. To greatly reduce the likelihood of drivers parking in the bike lane, we’d strongly recommend using flexible posts to clearly separate the bicycling area. Note that we recognize that intersection treatments will be important to successfully implementing such a design safely–intersections have been done well elsewhere and they certainly can be on Park and Portland.
• Provide planters on the right side of the street to extend pedestrian realm. One of the challenges with providing parking protected bike lanes on Park and Portland is that there is an existing 6.5-foot wide concrete edge on either side of the road that isn’t in great condition and would mean a rough bike ride if there were bike lanes there. While the road is being repaved this year, repavings do not include concrete area, so it will stay rough. We propose getting around that while greatly enhancing the attractiveness of these roads by using the right-side concrete area as a place for planters. A lot could be done with them–they could become community garden space, or just have flowers. They could also be removable if the County prefers to take them out in the winter to ease snow maintenance.

Benefits:

• Greatly improved bicycle environment that would attract more cyclists
• Traffic calming
• More green space and potential community garden space
• Reduced pedestrian crossing distances because of the planters

]]> http://www.streets.mn/2012/05/10/an-alternative-design-for-park-and-portland/feed/ 9 http://www.streets.mn/2012/05/10/an-alternative-design-for-park-and-portland/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=an-alternative-design-for-park-and-portland http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Streetsmn/~3/xsNPIeQDFvo/ http://www.streets.mn/2012/05/10/30dayscitystreet/#comments Thu, 10 May 2012 16:33:15 +0000 Amber Collett http://www.streets.mn/?p=1501

Another year of 30 Days of Biking has come and gone. In addition to miserably failing to tweet regularly, I missed a few days of riding while I was traveling on the east coast. All the same, for me, this was the best year of 30 Days of Biking to date.

For folks who haven’t heard of 30 Days of Biking, it’s a joyful community of bicyclists that commit to riding their bike every day for the month of April and then sharing stories on twitter with @30daysofbiking or using the hashtag #30daysofbiking. Since its inception in 2010, 30 Days of Biking has grown to a worldwide community of cyclists numbering in the thousands. This group of cycling supporters embodies many of the things I love about the Minneapolis urban scene. They play off of the social nature of our Midwestern city by mixing the spirit of adventure with a challenge.

And here’s what I really love about this idea: These are real people. Just like me. Just like you.

Just a few of the photos uploaded by 30 Days of Biking participants

By participating, we’re asked to remember the joy in and of bicycling –a simple ride around the block counts for just as much as a 50 mile ride! I was reminded daily why I started bicycling in the first place. I relish feeling the wind against my skin, getting to know my neighbors, exploring the urban environment, and staying healthy. Bicycling is a sure fire way to experience your city streets and feeling connected to this community of cycling supporters reinvigorated my work as a cycling advocate.

This year I can say I sincerely experienced 30 Days of Biking. Though I missed a few days, I did try. A few times I had to be creative to fit in a ride. I went on short rides during my lunch hour, rode on a stationary bike, and while traveling I tested out Washington DC’s bike share system. When I returned to Minneapolis, I marveled at our city’s on-street cycling infrastructure like I was seeing it again for the first time. One morning, entirely too early, I was overjoyed to see dozens of cyclists on the Midtown Greenway. I tested new ways to commute to the Northeast Ride office on Central Ave. and biked out of the city to put some good miles on my legs.

In an uncharacteristic move, I only took a few photos during 30 Days of Biking. But, they were during a sunset ride along the Stone Arch Bridge, which is pretty much as Minneapolis as it gets.

Next year’s goal: Actually tweet about it…  :-)

Connectivity is important, more connected cities are more efficient (at least to a point) from a transportation and economic productivity perspective.

When I was young and imagined becoming a planner, I believed planning was about drawing lines on maps (i.e. creating plans). Of course you could not just put them anywhere, you had to finesse constraints (budgets, the built environment, the natural environment, and so on). But I liked drawing lines on maps, connecting A to B, finishing the unbuilt. I later learned planning was not nearly so fun.

The reason we have now reached the unfun stage of line-drawing is probably that all the “good lines” (and some bad ones) have already been built. If the political and economic benefit:cost ratio were high, someone already did it. If the ratio were low, no one did, and no one would.

Yet there may be some remainders, perhaps projects with good ratios that somehow went missing. Over my time in the Twin Cities, I have seen reference to the following. I am not suggesting any of the links below have B:C ratios above 1, just that some people believe they do. The number of possible links is enormous (and in some senses infinite, but in practical terms, simply very large).

Freeways

There are two significant new freeway sections proposed for the Twin Cities:

• Stillwater Bridge – Many cuttlefish have died discussing this facility, and I will say no more here.
• Mn 610 – This route north of Maple Grove does not yet connect to I-94, as has been planned since at least the 1960s.

Missing Freeway-Freeway Ramps

• It is well known by locals you cannot travel directly on I-94 Westbound and go to I-35W Northbound, or from I-35 SB to I-94 EB. (Mn 280 will get you there.)
• It is similarly well known you cannot go from I-94 EB to I-35E SB, or from I-35E NB to I-94 WB. (Ayd Mill Road does not quite serve the purpose).
• The new I-494 US-169 interchange will also miss some ramps.
  

  For example, if you’re headed south on 169, there will not be an exit to go west towards Eden Prairie on 494.

  Additionally, if you’re headed east on 494, there will not be a ramp that takes you north on 169.

  “Highway 212 to the west is what motorists tend to use to make those movements,” explained Grand.

Water Crossings

• North of the Twin Cities a new Mississippi River crossing has been proposed by MnDOT to connect US 10 with I-94.

Railroad Crossings

• The Grand Rounds is the name for the Parkway system in Minneapolis, Southeast and Northeast are not yet connected, but proposals to do so have been put forward, and would upgrade 27th Avenue and extend across the railroad tracks to Industrial Blvd.
• Just to the west of that, Oak Street Extended would also cross the same railroad tracks. This is discussed in the plans for SEMI, which also discuss Granary Road and the east RR crossing that would become part of the Grand Rounds.
• Van White Boulevard a road extension that will in which “two bridges that will carry the boulevard over two sets of railroad tracks, a city public works yard and the Cedar Lake Trail.”
• E River Pkwy extension from the University of Minnesota to St. Anthony Main.

Freeway Crossings: Griddus Interruptus

The freeway system in the Cities did a number on the existing grid network. For instance on I-94 between Lexington and Snelling Avenues, the city grid (N-S) includes the following streets (Lexington, Dunlap, Griggs, Syndicate, Hamline, Albert, Pascal, Simpson, Asbury, and Snelling (~ 10 streets per mile)). Only Snelling, Pascal, Hamline, and Lexington actually cross I-94. (There is also a pedestrian bridge at Griggs.) Similar patterns on the other freeways can be found.

This pattern is typical on the trenched freeway system crossing the old urban grid, and would be different had the freeways been either tunneled or elevated.

Building Crossings

• Nicollet Avenue is interrupted by an undistinguished K-mart at Lake Street. The city hopes to restore Nicollet to its original glory.

New Semi-separated Roads

• Granary Road (sometimes Granary Parkway or Dinkytown Road) would run in the famous Dinkytown Trench and connect the St. Anthony Main area with the SEMI redevelopment area. It could provide major relief to University Avenue (and potentially allow University and Fourth to be restored to two-way traffic. It is still under discussion.
• Ayd Mill Road has been proposed for many years to extend to I-94. This aims to solve one of the missing freeway connection problems (I-35E N to I-94W). It is opposed by neighbors.
• Pierce Butler Route is an east-west route in St. Paul just south of the Railroad tracks. There are proposals to extend it to the east and discussions (mostly negative) about the idea to extend it to the west to Mn 280, though extending from Transfer Road to Vandalia may be possible.

Land Crossings: Griddus Nobuildus

The suburbs in Greater>>MSP have largely retained the 1 mile spacing from the original rural grid, but the interior grid, which gives block spacings of on the order of 0.1 miles in the Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul (and many first ring suburbs such as Richfield and Bloomington) is nonexistent outer ring suburbs like Woodbury or Eden Prairie. Some suburban blocks are transected, others remain much more naturalistic in their form (though, to be fair, there are apparently rules about interconnectivity, so that most suburban homeowners have multiple paths to the arterial network and I have not seen a full square mile block as a pure tree or multiple pure trees). As the built density is lower than in the Cities, one would not expect the same street density, but the connectivity is lower than the density would suggest.

Comments

N.B. I have not seen a complete catalog of Missing Links for the Twin Cities. (Adam Froehlig has a great resource here that you should look at if you are interested in the topic, including details on cancelled projects, as well as other fantasy routes.) This list is not complete either, but will serve as a starter.

Please add other items of seriously proposed and not canceled routes (with references) in the comments. Fantasy lines are welcome too, but please label as such.

Caveat: This post is descriptive, it describes some missing links in the Greater>>MSP street network. It does not suggest any or all should be built, though I encourage debate on that in the comments.

Caveat 2: This post does not cover upgrades, links that exist but might be “improved” (widened, grade separated, etc.) or realignments.

WalkScore's calculated 30-minute bus/rail travel shed for downtown Minneapolis

Almost all of us are guilty of living sprawling lifestyles, either now or in the past. Sprawl is a huge urban planning problem, but it’s a difficult one to handle simply because it’s so prevalent. There’s little will to change when everyone shares part of the blame, but we must find ways to do so in order to help deal with the challenge of climate change and changes in the cost and availability of energy sources.

Finding ways to deal with urban/suburban sprawl isn’t helped by the fact that it’s difficult to define in the first place. Sure, city dwellers deride the suburbs for their common cul-de-sacs and curvilinear streets, but even the scale of our central cities is pretty vast—Minneapolis itself stretches 11 miles north to south, a distance which would take 3 to 4 hours to traverse on foot. Saint Paul is almost as wide east to west. By bicycle or public transportation, that would typically take an hour to 90 minutes, about three times the average one-way travel time for a car commuter in our area.

I’m sure it happens all the time: A car commuter grows weary of his or her commute, but is confronted with a stark reality when they look up the bus journey on metrotransit.org or a mapping site—The trip will take 3 to 4 times as long as it would by car, if it can be done at all. The reaction is often to blame the bus or the train. Clearly something is wrong with the system!

Well, sort of. It’s true that public transportation can and should be sped up and expanded, but there are some inherent limits to the technology. A bus or train running at the same top speed as a car will never be able to reach the same end-to-end speed because of the number of stops made in between. The only ways to get public transportation to be competitive for end-to-end travel time is to increase the top speed, leapfrog over potential intermediate stops, and/or make extensive use of exclusive transitways to bypass congestion. Each of these has trade-offs, such as increasing expense, reducing potential ridership, and sometimes taking property through eminent domain.

Sprawl is the real reason why it’s often impractical to switch a car trip to a train, bus, or bike ride. Most of us make daily demands of our transportation networks that are illogical (and sometimes those demands are made by others upon us). If the car never came along, our cities would be much more compact. People would most likely still travel about the same amount of time each day to work, learn, or shop, but transportation through slower methods would have limited outward growth and encouraged building up rather than out.

Travelers to cities outside the U.S. often remark about how fast and efficient transit networks are in other countries, but in reality, they’re often not any faster than what we have here. In reality, they’re simply seeing the effects of a more compact geography, amplified by the fact that tourist attractions are also centrally-located a lot of the time. There isn’t just a greater population density, there’s also a greater density of places where people want to go.

Twin City Rapid Transit route map from 1914

The same used to be the case here during much of the streetcar era. While the Twin City Rapid Transit system famously extended from Lake Minnetonka in the west to Stillwater in the east, the core of the system barely extended past the borders of Minneapolis and Saint Paul themselves. In an accident of history, the borders of he core cities roughly correspond with 30-minute travel times to the respective downtowns.

Now, the car is never going to go away, and many people will fight long and hard to keep their hands on the steering wheel. However, I’m convinced that they’re at or near a peak in this country and will become much less popular in future decades. Fuel prices will rise and the everlasting push for safer and more efficient cars will keep making the vehicles themselves more expensive. Along with direct costs are moral and ethical issues—externalities ranging from direct and indirect pollution from CO₂ and other pollutants, altered landscapes in places like the Alberta tar sands, and violence and economic impacts on people elsewhere in the world. Changing over to renewable energy sources will help, but it’s unlikely to cover our current needs.

Moving away from car-based transportation requires us to shift our population around and change where we place businesses, schools, and other amenities. In the Twin Cities, these shifts almost certainly have to be toward the core of our region, because Minneapolis and Saint Paul themselves are much more walkable, bikeable, and transitable than anywhere else, and that’s where the existing and future investments are most sustainable.

30-minute bus travel shed for a job site in Eden Prairie's Golden Triangle

Some suburbs will certainly see improved transit mobility in the future, but job and population centers are so dispersed that a transit system that attempted to serve all of them would probably collapse under its own weight. Some communities are going to have to get by with minimal transit access and instead build more exclusively around the idea of getting around on foot and by bike. Pick a spot and turn it into a real town center.

We’re going to go through a Big Crunch as car ownership rates decline and more people seek out transit-rich environments that have jobs and the amenities of daily life in close proximity. The population won’t tolerate trip times tripling or quadrupling in length, so communities out on the edge must plan to become denser and more connected, or they’ll be left behind as populations move elsewhere.

As many of our bridges continue to age and the list of bridges that need repaired or replaced continues to get longer, at some point, we should consider whether or not all of our existing bridges are worth replacing. I think most people would agree that there are probably a few bridges out there where the replacement costs are simply too great to justify the expense, but how do we determine which ones? This is a difficult discussion to have, in part because for every bridge that I might consider removing, I can think of two others that we should consider building (for example, why have we never constructed a France Avenue extension over the railroad tracks to Lake Street?). Removing a bridge will almost always be unpopular with the neighborhood, but inherent in this discussion is the understanding that we’re going to have to make difficult and unpopular decisions.

The Stillwater Bridge immediately comes to mind as a candidate for removal simply because of the unusually large replacement costs, but I’ll leave this case study for others to consider.

Instead, here are some of my ideas about a few local bridges:

Cedar Avenue Bridge (over Lake Nokomis), Minneapolis

Cedar Avenue over Lake Nokomis

The Cedar Avenue bridge over Lake Nokomis (map) was dubbed Planning Blunder #9 by Streets.mn authors Bill and Alex. This bridge is a clear example of a roadway that went over when it should have gone around. In hindsight, I think nearly everyone would agree that if we could start over, we’d make a different decision about this bridge. But now that it’s in place, does it make financial sense to remove it? From an engineering standpoint, traffic could certainly be re-routed west along a reconstructed Nokomis Parkway with a few intersection and signal improvements (which would actually allow the City to tackle a few longstanding traffic, parking, and design issues they’ve had around Fat Lorenzo’s – hello improved outdoor dining area!). This would probably be cheaper than replacing the bridge, but it would be close. This would be an interesting case study to develop some firm numbers for.

Midtown Corridor Bridges

A few years back, the City of Minneapolis conducted a study of the couple dozen bridges spanning the Midtown Greenway. The purpose of the study was to determine the historical significance of the former freight rail trench and the bridges that cross it. Given the purpose of the study, it’s not surprising that bridge removal was not recommended, although it’s significant that the study considered it briefly. The study recommended reclassifying some of the bridges as bike/ped bridges in an effort to buy some time before the bridges would need to be removed or replaced. This is a good idea, but it doesn’t really solve the problem. Eventually, bridges will fall under their own weight even without loading. I don’t think the City has made any final decisions about whether these bridges will be removed, replaced, or reclassified, but a historical designation would surely give them fewer options. The impact of removing (rather than replacing or reclassifying) some of these bridges is not fully known. Since many of these bridges carry only a few hundred vehicles per day, it’s hard to justify the $1.8 million replacement cost. A few of these bridges are probably some of the best candidates out there for full removal.

60th Street Bridge, Sunfish Lake

The 60th Street / Acorn Drive / Pieper Road bridge over I-494 between Inver Grove Heights and Sunfish Lake is hard to justify by nearly any criteria (map). The bridge leads to a cul-de-sac in Sunfish Lake that serves only about 8 (not-as-expensive-as-you-would-think) homes. This is not a short span bridge, and there are at least a half-dozen feasible alternative ways to provide access to these residential properties that doesn’t involve building a bridge. This bridge probably carries less than 100 vehicles per day. RUMOR ALERT: I remember hearing at some point that the owners of these 8 homes had privately funded the bridge, but a quick Google search doesn’t provide any documentation of this. If anyone can confirm or deny this, please let me know by leaving a comment. Privately funded or not, this bridge seems unnecessary (at least, as long as Acorn Drive is a residential cul-de-sac).

Minnehaha Parkway Bridges, Minneapolis

This example hits close to home, literally, since I live a stone’s throw from the three bridges over Minnehaha Creek within a few hundred feet of the intersection of Portland Avenue and Minnehaha Parkway (map).  The three bridges – Portland Avenue, 50th Street to the west, Minnehaha Parkway to the east – seem redundant. When I tally up the number of roads (including frontage roads), and the number of intersections that exist within a two or three block area, it seems like with a little bit of careful planning we could eliminate at least one of these bridges and still allow all these roads to intersect. In this case, however, it may not be economically feasible to do so, even if the neighborhood was supportive. These bridges have very short spans and are also very low (maybe 10′ above creek level?). These will be some of the least expensive bridges to replace (and they have the lowest risk of causing injury or harm if they collapse), so we might find it would be less expensive to simply replace the bridges than to figure out how to effectively remove them.

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These are just a few of my ideas, but I’d like to hear some of yours. Which bridges do you think are the least productive? Which are the least essential? Which are the most expendable?

Nice Ride bikes in the scenic North Loop.

We finally have the report on SAFETEA-LU’s Non-Motorized Transportation Pilot Program! The FHWA released the report today, and it is now available to all for their delight and edification (PDF).

This final report has been being promised since 2009 or so, with delivery dates being pushed later several times. This report has been of great interest in the transportation debate, since transportation enhancements are viewed as expendable. The report suggests otherwise, looking at 4 very different communities (Minneapolis, Marin County CA, Columbia, Missouri and Sheboygan, WI).

Key outcomes of the NTPP include:

• Average increases of 49% in the number of bicyclists and 22% in the number of pedestrian trips between 2007-2010.
• In 2010, an estimated 16 million miles were walked or bicycled that would have otherwise been driven –  32 million total driving miles were averted between 2007 and 2010.
• For the four pilot communities, bicycling mode share increased 36 percent, walking mode share increased 14 percent, and
  driving mode share decreased 3 percent between 2007 and 2010. In Minneapolis, bicycling mode share increased by 33% and walking mode share increased by 17%.
• The pilot communities saved an estimated 22 pounds of CO2 in 2010 per person or a total of 7,701 tons. This is equivalent to saving over 1 gallon of gas per person or nearly 1.7 million gallons from 2007 to 2010.

Per the FHWA, 89% of program funds were spent on infrastructure in all 4 communities; in the Twin Cities, that number was 87%. Other funds were spent on education and bike parking. Of these capital projects, most are in some state of incompletion.

Twin Cities projects evaluated include:

• Network gap closures on Marshall Avenue in Saint Paul, Como Avenue in Saint Paul/Minneapolis, and Minnehaha and 20th Avenue South in Minneapolis.
• Road Diets on Franklin Avenue and Minnehaha Ave and 20th Ave South.
• NiceRide Bicycle Sharing and the Sibley Community Partners Bike Library.

In general, the report is mostly unbiased, but has flaws. As a pilot program, solid ways to measure every statistic is a work in progress, and not every metric has solid data. Data collection was not explicitly funded, and thus was done in part with reserved program funds in each community. The means of measurement varied in each community and project. The statistics can certainly be attacked, and almost certainly will be attacked — although the attack may be less based on the math, and more on ingrained notions against spending money on transportation enhancements.

Given the delays in delivering this report, it’s hard to believe that additional communities will get similar investment moving forward — at least in the current transportation and funding environment, which is definitely focused on pavement and silly bridges, rather than projects that encourage density and environmental progress. However, the data may serve as a lever to preserve transportation enhancements at least as a fractional percentage of budgetary spend. In the meantime, even in places like Minneapolis, everyone may need to expect smaller-scale projects that cost less for a while.

[V150 train, modified TGV, conventional World speed record holder at 357.2 mph from WikiCommons]

The following post is by guest writer Matt Sindt, a recent graduate of the Hamline University School of Law who has worked in both state and local government, serving as a staffer on both the Business, Industry and Jobs Committee, and the Economic Development and Budget Committee of the Minnesota State Senate.

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The benefits of a High Speed Rail (HSR) system have been hotly debated across the political spectrum in the U.S. for decades, especially in the Upper Midwest, but developments abroad have brought the ages old struggle into stark relief. Over the last decade, China has built a modern HSR system that can reach 220 MPH. China has invested over 300 billion dollars on HSR. This investment has allowed the Chinese to drastically abbreviate travel times between their major cities.

China’s rail program should make us consider whether or not such a program should be instituted in the U.S. The main reasons the U.S. should invest in HSR are jobs, conservation, safety and comfort.

The debate over building an HSR line in the Upper Midwest has been going on for over 20 years. The discussions have focused on what would be the best route for a new passenger rail line between Minneapolis and Chicago. The Tri-State II report listed two general options; one passes through Winona, MN, the other through Rochester, MN. Recently, the French national rail company (SNCF) published a report with a route through Hudson, WI. This allows travel to Eau Claire, WI rather than to La Crosse, WI as with the majority of domestic proposals. The advantages of the French proposal are obvious since their route is approximately 25 miles shorter than the La Crosse route. The route is also more attractive because the Eau Claire Metropolitan Area has 73,000 more people than the La Crosse Metropolitan area.

There are reasons why a Rochester line is preferred. The Mayo Clinic is considered an international destination and the metropolitan population is fairly sizable at 186,000. The Tri-State III report proposes a line running through Rochester. On a practical level, their plan is inferior because travel time would be 191 minutes rather than 162 minutes. The ultimate failure of these local planning reports is that they rely almost exclusively on existing infrastructure that is at least 50 years old.

Reliance on old infrastructure is bad enough but they also plan to share the infrastructure with freight trains that by their very nature frustrate the purpose of an HSR system. What is the use of having a train that can go 220 MPH if it spends half of its time stuck behind a freight train going 55 MPH? It is for this reason that dual, dedicated tracks must be built, grades lessened, and super-elevators (cants) installed to make the system function to the extent of its abilities. Whenever its practical to use and modify disused or abandoned rail lines this should be done to lower costs, but new lines should be built when necessary. This option is more expensive but provides superior service.

The national conversation began in earnest when in 2009, the Obama administration solicited bids for five regional high speed rail networks. The five networks included lines in: California, Texas, Florida, the Mid-West, and the East Coast. In response to this invitation, SNCF put forth a highly detailed bid. The French plan called HST 220, called for the use of AVG train-sets which are capable of reaching 220 MPH.

SNCF’s bid is a good place to start the discussion in order to provide somewhat specific notions of what cost, service, jobs and other benefits and liabilities would be incurred in such a massive undertaking. The total estimated cost in 2009 dollars for four out of five lines was $140 billion. Amtrak announced plans in 2010 for 220 MPH HSR service on the east coast corridor connecting Boston and Washington D.C. for a total cost of $117 billion. Adjusting for inflation, the total cost of all five projects would be approximately $270 billion. While a highly significant sum it is not astronomical since the annual federal budget in 2012 was $3.796 trillion. The annualized cost of all five projects combined would be less than 0.5% of the federal budget. All public investment will be paid back based on profit estimates. The SNCF plan estimates a 15 year payback cycle while Amtrak estimates 20 years. The two estimates combined calculate that 2.1 million full-time temporary and permanent jobs will be created over the 30 years.

The continuing volatility in the world’s fossil fuel based energy sector is a threat not only to the environment through oil spills and global warming but also because of the instability it causes our national security. As demand increases and supply declines over the next few years and decades, crude oil prices will continue to rise. These increases will exacerbate the already precarious financial position of the American airline industry. Providing a viable alternative in high speed rail would allow for a dramatic decrease in the number of short to mid-range commuter flights. A significant decrease in the number of commuter flights would lower demand for jet fuel and therefore lower the price of fuel making long-haul flights more profitable. The SNCF estimate alone yields a decline in annual fuel consumption equivalent to .2% of America’s fuel consumption in 2010.

Because HST’s are powered purely by electricity renewable resources may be used exclusively. Even using the USA’s current fossil fuels, SNCF claims that their HSR lines would reduce the amount of pollution by 4.4 million tons over the first twenty years.

HST’s are far safer than both automobiles and airplanes. Over 50 years of service throughout the world, high speed trains have a fatality rate, measured in passenger miles traveled per fatality, that is one-sixth of the rate of commercial air-travel throughout the same period.

Additionally, high speed trains routinely provide 7 more inches of seat pitch than American commercial airlines do. This is the international industry and government standard for defining seating area. Seat pitch more or less correlates to legroom. More legroom allows for more comfort and a better travel experience for passengers.

A parallel in US history to this project was President Eisenhower’s decision to build the Interstate Highway System. In much the same way as HSR could be used, a European model was adapted to American use. During WWII, Eisenhower observed the speed with which German troops could be deployed using the autobahn. When he became President he created a federal highway system to allow for the efficient transfer of troops in short order. This lead to decades of American prosperity. Eisenhower was a man of extraordinary vision who grasped the inherent possibilities of a truly interconnected stream of commerce that would not only ease traffic but foster it as well.

For over a decade, America has been mired in a prolonged economic decline. That is why a leader with a bold vision would propose a nation-wide system of federal HSR lines. The Presidency’s executive authority should be utilized to provide for centralized planning of projects, purchasing of equipment in bulk, and uniform quality control throughout the system. This would prevent interference by parochial interests in state and local governments from frustrating the purpose of the project. The overarching purpose is to improve connectivity between markets, decrease our national dependence on foreign oil, decrease pollution, lower travel costs, and ease travel congestion, and save lives by substituting a safer form of transit.

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Guest Writer Profile: Matt Sindt is a recent graduate of the Hamline University School of Law who has worked in both state and local government, serving as a staffer on both the Business, Industry and Jobs Committee, and the Economic Development and Budget Committee of the Minnesota State Senate.

Join Streets.MN on Twitter and Facebook (you can also add us to your RSS Feed). It’s a great way to join the conversation about land use and transportation in the Twin Cities and Greater Minnesota.

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I’m struck by how strongly our culture associates growth and prosperity with highway construction and expansion. Tom Friedman, a respected left-of-center columnist with the New York Times, had an entire chapter in his most recent book, That Used to Be Us: How America fell behind in the world it invented and how we can come back, devoted to the concept that “our winning equation” is, in part, to invest in infrastructure and then watch prosperity flourish, just like it did in the 1950′s and 1960′s.

Of course, this ignores that fact that our investments during the first generation of America’s Suburban Experiment (1950-1975) were higher return investments that generated a lot of positive cash flow. I like to point out that, when we built the 35W bridge here in Minnesota for the first time, it connected far flung areas of the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan region in a way that had not been done before. Following that investment, new commercial real estate was developed, new residential housing went in and the resulting influx of tax receipts made us feel wealthy. When the bridge fell down and had to be rebuilt, we didn’t experience all that new growth, just the costs of construction and delay. Maintenance has an entirely different set of financial metrics than new construction.

Which is why our transportation spending is set up to favor new construction. It is just so much more fun. Maintenance is simply a pain, a local concern. That highway fix it project means nothing but congestion and delays and, when it’s all done, all you have is a little smoother ride. By contrast, new construction is so much better. Not only do the politicians get a ribbon cutting scene, but we can all (once again) “solve” congestion while getting a new WalMart, Taco Bell and Quiki Mart in the process. New growth just feels so much better.

How else can you explain what I experienced last week in Memphis? Here is a city with enormous infrastructure maintenance problems having spent untold sums running highways all over the region. Their local transportation board is proposing the region spend $10 billion more, almost all of it adding new capacity on the far flung (new growth) extremes of the network. Maintenance? That’s someone else’s problem.

How else can you explain a state (Minnesota) that would prefer to spend more on one bridge to aid exurban commuters from the neighboring state than on maintaining all of the state’s 1,149 bridges that are currently rated as structurally deficient? We culturally believe in the power of new growth to solve our problems, that investments in highway capacity and combating congestion pay dividends to us as a society.

Unfortunately, we base this belief on the illusion of wealth that was created in the early years of the Suburban Experiment, where the first life cycle of horizontal expansion had produced growth for our economy and that pesky overhang of maintenance was still a decade or more away. We should know better by now, but there are few in a position to change the system that don’t benefit, at least in the short term, from it being perpetuated.

The emperor has no clothes, indeed, but we’re still in the phase where we jeer and deride the one pointing it out. That will change soon.

What will speed up that change is an understanding of the fact that our transportation investments are not creating wealth, they are destroying it. Now I’m not talking about just the investments where the old Target store at the old interchange is induced to move into the new Target store at the new interchange four miles up the road. I mean almost all of our highway spending. It costs more to build and maintain than it generates in returns and, therefore, will only continue so long as we have the capacity and the desire to delude ourselves.

Let me provide an example. Pretend you were a local elected official and I came to you and said that I had a project that would reduce congestion, allow us to improve traffic safety, create local economic development opportunities and return 2,194% of the cost of the project to the local economy? Sounds good.

What if I then said that the federal government would pick up 90% of the cost, making the local share just $716,000? This is now a no-brainer, right?

Today let’s just look at the federal contribution. I did a Google search for a Diverging Diamond enhancement project with a cost benefit analysis and came up with this one from Kentucky. Yes, I have an obsession with the delusion that is the diverging diamond interchange, but the selection of Kentucky was just random. The report for the project contains an appendix that has a cost benefit analysis as follows:

You can see that by the time you get to 2030, for the diverging diamond without the added enhancements, the cost is $7.2 million but the benefit is nearly 22 times that at $157 million. That is an AWESOME rate of return. Graphically, it would be presented to public officials like this, which makes it easy to understand why it could be supported.

At this point, we’re not going to delve too deeply into what this benefit is. That will come later. Let’s give it the most optimistic spin. Nobody is suggesting that this is money that will pour back into the government. What is being suggested here is that transportation investments like these will reduce congestion, increase mobility, create jobs and that will all grow the economy. So the $157.1 figure could be thought of as the increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Still sound good? Consider that the federal government — through all means of taxation, including income tax, tariffs, business taxes, estate taxes and even including the gas tax — currently captures 15.8% of the economy. Put another way, for each dollar of GDP, about sixteen cents finds its way to the federal government. That means that our whopping $157.1 million in GDP growth only returns $24.2 million to the federal coffers. Graphically, it would look like this.

Okay, this still feels like a good project, doesn’t it? The Federal government spends 90% of $7.2 million and, over the subsequent 15 years, brings in $24.2 million. We should just do this over and over again because we’re just getting richer, right?

Not so fast. It is not like the $24.2 million is going to be spent on transportation, or even that $7.2 million of that is going to be spent on transportation. The Federal government does many things, has tremendous obligations and spends the vast majority of its funds on things that our society deems more worthy of our investment than transportation. In fact, in 2011, the Federal Highway Administration’s budget was 41.1 billion, just 1.07% of the Federal budget. If we are only going to spend 1.07% of what we bring in on transportation, that means this project yields just $259,000 in funds that actually pays for transportation investments.

If the problem here is not obvious to you at this point, let me elaborate. We spend money on transportation. We feel wealthy and experience this enormous “return” (more on that in a second). Only a fraction of that wealth is actually cycled back into the system, however, and an even smaller fraction of that will actually be captured to pay for the project. The amount recouped is ultimately nowhere near the amount invested.

The most obvious “solution” to this problem is to devote more of our Federal budget to transportation projects. That would be the solution of the American Society of Civil Engineers and their adherents in the Infrastructure Cult. Okay, let’s not bother calculating the time value of money (the fact that the costs are today but the benefits are spread out over many future years), but just evaluate what it would take in terms of an increase in our budget to go from $0.26 million returned to break even at $7.2 million. That increase — 27 times the current budget — would make the Federal Highway Administration’s budget $1.1 trillion, bigger than the national security budget ($895 billion), Social Security ($730 billion), Medicare ($491 billion) or Medicaid ($297 billion). That’s not going to happen.

So what if we just raised taxes and the federal government captured more of the wealth generated by this improvement? The calculations reveal that the Federal government would need to increase its take of GDP from 15.4% to 19.8% of the economy, a tax increase of $640 billion with all that extra money devoted just to roads. Only the true socialists and/or the true believers in the power of the Suburban Experiment will think that is a good idea.

Now let me drop the bomb I’ve been alluding too: Those “benefits” that we kind of think of as prosperity, wealth or GDP; they really aren’t. There are derived from a set of narrow correlations between time saved and prosperity that we witnessed in the early 1950′s when we built those initial highways. We connected these far flung places — places only served by railroads or poorly constructed roadways prior — and we saw all kinds of economic gains. We then used that knowledge to build equations to justify expansion of the system. Nobody ever questions those equations today (why would they) and nobody stops to consider the diminishing returns of the system.

So there is not actually any money here, just a few seconds of saved time here and there that economists and engineers equate with money when they are trying to justify a project. Do you take home more money, generate more wealth for the economy or spend more of your income when you can arrive at work 45 seconds more quickly? Not me either. These equations are a joke. (If you want to learn more, read our 2010 series on Costs and Benefits.)

So when I say we are going broke, that this system provides the illusion of wealth in the near term but ultimately destroys wealth, that the decay you see around you in our transportation system is not due to a lack of investment but to the lack of financial viability of the system, you can get a sense of how far gone we are. We are literally operating in a totally different paradigm from reality.

When someone like James Howard Kunstler says we need to rebuild our passenger rail system, that the highway era is a transitional phase that is going to come crashing down on us, we all smile and nod to his face and then giggle behind his back because “that guy is a little crazy“. Like I said earlier, the emperor has no clothes, but we’re still in the phase where we ridicule the guy pointing it out. We need to get past that. Quickly.

Yes, this is just one project, but I picked this project because it is a low cost, high return endeavor. That is the argument that the engineering profession is making and one of the reasons people got so mad at me when I did my earlier posts on the diverging diamond; the diverging diamond makes better use of existing infrastructure and pays a high return, especially when compared to things like adding another lane or building another interchange. Even so, the math on it is ridiculous. Imagine what the math on a project like the infamous St. Croix bridge would be.

In a follow up post I’m going to look at the original construction of our passenger rail system and show how important capturing value to pay for capital costs is to making transportation systems work as well as how such a system naturally resists excessively ridiculous spending, or at least creates systems that break early enough to avoid catastrophe. In the process, I’ll explain why funding the highway system with gas tax dollars was flawed but also why continuing to fund it with deficit spending is perilous. I’ll also, if needed, address any engineers (or those sympathetic to them) that want to argue that we shouldn’t look at the revenue for a single project because it’s the system, dude, that generates the prosperity. Yeah, how’s that working out?

The time to shift our focus to building Strong Towns is now.

Join our conversation by leaving a comment or join us for more Strong Towns content on Facebook and Twitter. If you are interested in having the Strong Towns message brought to your community, sign up for a Curbside Chat and we’ll make plans to get together in a town near you.

In an undated photo from the HC Library, Herman Olson makes a convincing case for tearing it all down and building a freeway

Once upon a long, long time ago, Minneapolis didn’t have any neighborhoods.  Well, of course the city had neighborhoods, but they were the sort of organic shorthand referring to important intersections, like Cedar-Riverside or Chicago-Lake, you know, the kind of place that in the old world would have been called a square and given its own name.

In this amorphous pre-neighborhood era, all planning was handled by a grumpy old man named Herman Olson.  He spent his time thinking about where to put public markets and how to cram more cars into the downtown, but no one really put much stock into his recommendations, because no one could remember why he was qualified to say where stuff should go except that he had worked for the city for decades.  Since the City had plenty of other employees who’d also worked there for ages, Olson was frequently ignored.

And, in the late 50s, he was finally replaced.  The colleges of the day were churning out urban planners and giving them a scientific veneer and an interest in something called comprehensive planning, and Minneapolis received a typical product by the name of Lawrence Irvin.  No one really knew what comprehensive planning was, but the new planners were very insistent on doing it, and they got cracking by working on the Official Plan that was to be published in the fall of 1960 and to be heavily dependent on the concept of neighborhoods.

The earliest introduction to Irvin’s conception of neighborhoods that I can find is in a document with the amazingly dated title Minneapolis in the Motor Age, basically a book-length argument for why we need to subvert our lifestyles to accommodate cars.  He* starts with the reasonable observation that streets can “unify or divide related activities.”

Blobs are the answer

The idea that streets can unify or divide seems a platitude when you consider that depending on placement, any physical object can unify or divide any number of other objects.  So it’s a pretty big leap when on the next page Irvin declares that one of the “functions of importance” of streets to land use is to “provide a means to define Neighborhoods” (emphasis in the original).  What he’s after is the consolidation of vehicular traffic onto arterial streets, and he uses a cool chart to attempt to portray the severity of the problem of car-choked side streets:

Not too different from today

Irvin goes on to explain that arterial streets should not go through communities and neighborhoods because neighborhoods and communities “must not be divided by major physical features in such a way as to prohibit effective internal circulation” (emphasis again in the original).  Besides its circularity, this argument is notable because, in the midst of a document that proposes building wider and faster roads to accommodate the needs of the motor age, Irvin is acknowledging the ways that roads actually inhibit mobility.  But hey, he comes up with a far out map of a “hypothetical” community to illustrate his point:

North Anywhereville

Finally, Irvin drills down to the level of the neighborhood, sketching a almost kibbutz-like concept that can “support”  (he probably means justify) an elementary school and a park within a half-mile walk, includes a few stores but “separate[s] residential and non-residential districts.”  There’s a conceptual neighborhood drawing, too, but greyscale this time.  It shows street concepts like cul-de-sacs, diverters, and “safety walks”, but the only text about streets in neighborhoods is the now-repetitive admonition to route “Major streets around, not through the neighborhood” (emphasis yet again in original).

No room in the budget for industrial brown?

After using all those pages and three full colors to illustrate his concept of communities and neighborhoods, Lawrence Irvin did not yet see fit to actually unveil how it would apply to the actual city.  After reading Minneapolis in the Motor Age you know you’re not supposed to route arterial streets through neighborhoods, but where are the neighborhoods you need to avoid?  Luckily Irvin didn’t wait long, as a couple months later The Official Plan – the city’s first comprehensive plan – was published, and included a map of communities and neighborhoods.

As you can see (if you squint enough to make sense of my terrible scan), Irvin came up with something pretty similar to today’s neighborhoods.  Note that the commercial intersections that heretofore had been the only differentiated points on the map are excluded altogether from the shading that denotes neighborhoods.  Despite the somewhat elaborate setup in Minneapolis in the Motor Age, the neighborhood boundaries weren’t Irvin’s creation but rather mostly reflected contemporaneous attitudes in the planning field.  They certainly had little to do with Minneapolis’ history as a streetcar suburb, and in many cases reflected an aspirational conception of which streets would become arterial (consider the extension of 36th St across South Minneapolis, despite the fact that it is only intermittently a collector east of Bryant and creates awkward boundaries near Powderhorn Park, later rectified).  In fact these aspirations created conflict with other city departments, specifically the transportation department.**

The plan came up with two stated purposes for inventing these neighborhoods – to serve as a conveniently small unit for planning and to be a platform for “citizen action” – that they were to fulfill in the major zoning overhaul that Irvin was shortly to launch, and they still fulfill them more or less to this very day.  And that is how the neighborhoods got their shapes.

City of parkways and freeways

*Irvin had a staff that was actually writing these documents, but it’s more convenient to my narrative to attribute it to him – and anyway, he as Director approved the plans.

**As told by Alan Altshuler in his classic The City Planning Process, which I’ve leaned on heavily for the outline of this history

Cross-posted to my blog, Getting Around Mpls.

In the future, robots will create retro-futuristic drawings for us

Much has already been written on the robot car, but streets.mn’s own Bill Lindeke posits that they “will not save us“, citing three problems.  While I agree that we probably can’t be saved (from what exactly I can’t say, there are many options), but in my opinion Bill and other urbanists should welcome the robot car with open arms, or at least, tentative waves.

As I do with each post I write about robot cars, I must begin with two items of preface: 1) I believe the benefits of robot cars will outweigh their drawbacks, but I have reservations about their implementation (not necessarily the concept), and 2) no post about robot cars should neglect to include a link to Brad Templeton’s Robot Car website, who is, as far as I can tell, the grandfather of writing about robot cars on the internet.  Now that that’s out of the way, on to the meat.

In this post I want to respond to the three problems Bill sees with robot cars.  Next time I’ll posit some benefits of robot cars I think he may be overlooking.

Problem #1 – The Automobile System Complexity/Equity

The massive number of cars involved – over 254 million registered – means that any new technology is going to take a long time to get implemented across the country. Think of all the old clunkers on the road. Think of all the cars that don’t receive proper maintenance. They aren’t going away. This doesn’t include the uninsured unregistered cars, which according to some estimates, are16% of the cars on the road and rising dramatically every year. There are cars in my working class neighborhood that are literally held together with duct tape, or where the windows are plastic sheets.

All these facts mean that any change to the US auto system that’s as fundamental as the robocar revolution will not happen quickly or neatly or evenly….Not only will this pose problems for the promise of robocars, dramatically reducing many of their efficiency and safety gains, it will create a deep divide within the social geography of our transportation system. It’ll be a lot like at airports, where you have different lanes for business travelers and the masses. It’ll be like the difference between limos and bus stops.

I don’t necessarily disagree with Bill here, but I don’t agree that this is a problem.  Robot cars will be incorporated into the market slowly.  They will initially operate in mixed traffic and you probably won’t even notice them.  Yes, this will reduce their potential safety and performance benefits (no road trains will happen for a while), but each additional robot car will reduce the likelihood of accidents and increase the opportunity for fuel efficiency and road system performance.  I also think Bill overstates the equity case.  Yes, at first only the rich will have robot cars.  But the rich were the first to have anti-lock brakes, air bags, navigation systems and other safety features on cars.  As technology gets cheaper, more people will have robot cars and the roadways will become safer.  Robot cars also benefit people besides their passengers, because they can more effectively avoid crashes.  Like a pedestrian airbag, the adoption of robot cars by the rich will benefit people besides the rich.

Robot cars may or may not be given separate facilities.  For many years, I think they probably won’t, they’ll just operate in mixed traffic.  Once subscription robot car-sharing services become available, I imagine they will be given special treatment (access to carpool lanes, etc), but why not?  We give these advantages to other transit and carpools.

So robot cars may not “save us” because they’ll take a long time to implement and require special infrastructure.  To the latter I say “they won’t”.  To the former I say, “maybe”.  70 percent of cars are probably replaced after ten years, which isn’t that long in infrastructure terms.  If Bill wants a more cost-effective mode of transport for “the masses”, he should hail the coming of a subscription car service that frees people from the debt, insurance and maintenance costs associated with parking your own individual jalopy outside your house.

Problem #2 – Liability

As Bill correctly points out, in our litigious society, we need someone to blame when robot cars go bad.

But what happens when you take that driver away, and let them start to doze off or read the newspaper or surf the web? Who’s responsible then when something goes wrong? Sure, in a robocar society, accidents will be greatly reduced.

But they’ll still happen! (And, this is what none of the dozen or so robocar articles I’ve read don’t bother to mention.) Something will go wrong. With 200 million cars and millions of other changing variables, something will always go wrong. Nobody who’s ever seen the “blue screen of death” or the “spinning beach ball of stasis” can possibly disagree. (What happens when a robocar system gets too old, and doesn’t get maintained? What happens when a small part breaks, and nobody notices?)

Bill posits that a solution would be something akin to a air traffic control network for automobiles, and he imagines the enormous cost and complexity of this system.  But Google and others have already demonstrated that no centralized air traffic control network is necessary.  Driverless cars can operate in erratic human traffic without any central controller, and have already done it for hundreds of thousands of  miles with no accidents.  To use another airplane metaphor, robots have been landing our planes since the 1960′s.  Yes, there will be accidents.  Brakes can only stop a vehicle so fast, even if a computer is pushing the pedal.  Sometimes computers will have software problems.  But as with automated airplane landing systems, there will be redundant computer systems, and they will be tested and retested to make them safer.

If I had to answer the question today about who will be ultimately liable in the case of a catastrophic robot car crash, I’d say the manufacturer.  As with any other consumer products, they will maintain some liability for the safety of their product.  I’m confident we can figure out a solution that works logically and equitably.

Problem #3 – The Solution That Has No Problem

Finally, Bill says that the future is now (!) and we don’t even need any stinkin’ robot cars.

Maybe the robocar is a solution in search of a problem. If the problem is that our current road system is unsafe, unhealthy, bad for the planet, and incompatible with new technological norms, there are two roads before us. The first is to develop highly complicated new technologies that will “solve” the problem. While I’ve wary of the complexity of the situation, I’m not saying we can’t do this. Computers are amazing, the US is the wealthiest country in the world, with the best engineers and software designers you’ll find on planet Earth.

But for the cost of a single backup camera, you could buy someone a really nice new bicycle. For the cost of a single robo-interchange, you could implement a system of safe and comfortable bike lanes all through an entire city.

This is just one example of the road less traveled. If we go down this road, we start reducing our dependence on technology. Instead of robocars, let’s build cities that privilege people. Instead of thinking about ever more complex ways to depend on the automobile, let’s start thinking beyond it. To me, that’s a visionary future. It might not be as shiny, and it might not be up there with the Jetsons or Norman Bel Geddes’ Futurama, but it’s far more equitable, practical, and affordable than the robocar alternative.

I don’t think Bill’s roads (shouldn’t that be sidewalks?) are mutually exclusive.  We could certainly do a lot more to make our cities more livable, leverage all the benefits of simple, cheap solutions like the bicycle and decrease our dependence on the car.  But we should still encourage and welcome the age of the autonomous vehicle.  We aren’t going to be rid of cars or something like them for a very long time, and I don’t think that’s even the right goal.  Robot cars are not a panacea for what ailes our cities and planet, but implemented properly, I think they can bring many benefits that Bill might like.  And that’s what I will explore in the next post.

The Grand Avenue "student dwelling" where I lived for a few years after college. I paid $200 / month for a tiny bedroom. Because I was dead broke, it was practically heaven.

On the whole, universities are a great thing for cities. They’re like modern day factories. They generate many economic benefits, providing jobs, attracting young people, fostering “innovation”, and other  cultural linkages and synergies. Without its schools and universities (The U, Macalester, St. Thomas, Augsburg, St. Catherine’s, Metro State, and more) the Twin Cities would well on its way to becoming an irrelevant elderly backwater.

But universities also generate tensions, particularly for the areas surrounding campuses. These “town/gown” issues are familiar to anyone who’s ever lived in a near a college. Complaints over hegemonic institutional expansion, student noise, or density are as old as Harvard. The latest such battle happens to be in St Paul surrounding the University of St Thomas, a medium-size, private, historically Catholic University located in one of city’s nicer neighborhoods (right near the fancy homes along Summit Avenue and the Mississippi River). St Thomas has become the flash point for a really interesting battle over student housing.

The issue dates back a few years. Some time ago, particularly during the real estate bubble, homeowners near the school noticed increasing numbers of homes being converted from “single family” homes into homes occupied by university students. The way I understand it, sometimes a student’s parents would buy the home and let the student rent it out to some of their friends. Other times, a landlord would buy the home and rent it out to students looking for affordable housing near campus. Either way, homeowners started complaining to their City Council Member, who eventually passed a temporary “moratorium” on new student housing pending a city study to be presented to the Planning Commission. (Note: I am a member of the St Paul Planning Commission as of January.)

Presently, the issue revolves around St Thomas student behavior, and the idea that students inherently cause problems. As the city staffer explained it the public presentation, there are many lifestyle differences between the “typical family” and a home of students. While a typical family house has 2 adults (with 2 cars), a student house has 3-4 adults (with 3-4 cars).* Likewise, in a typical family house the “comings and goings are at regular hours,” while for a student house the coming and goings “are more likely to have a schedule of later nights.” Finally, there is the issue of alcohol and merriment, which should be familiar to anyone who has ever seen a college film. Everyone who lives anywhere near St Thomas (or near any university) will have a story to tell about something stupid happening.

After the moratorium was passed, the city has finally completed their study:

The city's process.

The final proposal by the planning department involves a “student housing neighborhood impact overlay district,” which would do two things never done before in St Paul or Minneapolis. First, it would define student dwellings: a “student” is an “individual who is enrolled in or has been accepted to an undergraduate degree program at a univeristy, college, community college, technical college, trade school or similar.”

The city has never tried to “keep track” of students before, but will to begin doing so, in order to identify  ”student dwellings”, or  homes “in which at least one unit is occupied by three or more students.” (From my understanding, this would involve actually going door-to-door and asking people if they are students or not.)

Second, the overlay district requires that any new student dwelling be at least 150 feet from the next student dwelling, creating a buffer between student-occupied homes. In theory, this would spreading them out through the neighborhood, making the experience more tolerable for neighbors.

The map of student dwellings, according to two preliminary studies.

The planning commission is hearing public testimony on the overlay district at the next meeting on May 4^th. But in even just releasing the  study for public comment, there was debate over the potential impacts of the ordinance. As described in the Highland Villager, some commissioners (myself included) raised questions about whether the study was rushed,  the “grandfathering in” of existing student homes, about pushing students farther away from campuses, bad north-south transit, and the lack of student participation in community processes. It became clear that the city is acting more quickly on this process than they normally would for something with such broad impact.

As I’ve thought more about this issue, the proposed ordinance appears troublesome within the larger context of the Twin Cities. As reported in a few different places this month, we have some of the lowest rental vacancy rates anywhere in the country. Rental housing is difficult to find, and very expensive. Meanwhile, proposed apartment developments (particularly in areas with single family homes and/or political connections) are fought by neighbors. Any developer attempting to increase density must prepare themselves for a contracted battle over parking, noise, property values, blotting out the sun, or general agoraphobia.

On top of that, restricting rental housing in favor of “single family”  lifestyles doesn’t fit with long-term demographic trends. Check out the MetCouncil’s latest report. For decades, demand has declined for traditional nuclear family homes. More people are single, and people have fewer children. Empty nesters want smaller simpler housing options. Traditional single family homes are not the future of the Twin Cities, and we should think twice about placing blanket restrictions on density.

For me, though, the main issue is whether or not it’s ethically acceptable to legally limit where a certain types of people can live. Just because students are an “unprotected class” who are “generally transient” (as the city planner informed the commission), doesn’t mean they’re not equal citizens, and aren’t entitled to the same rights as anyone else. The whole thing reminds me of some of the more shameful moments of US urban history, things like restrictive covenants and redlining. There’s no way that we would single out a group of people according to race, class, religion, or sexual orientation, limiting where they could live. Why is it OK to do this with students?

I’m all for the enforcement of noise ordinances, and the city should be working on issues of housing maintenance (e.g. trash in the yard, height of the grass, etc.). I just don’t think the city should be involved with policing people’s lifestyles. Should St Paul be a city where going to sleep at 10:00 is written into the city code?

These issues aren’t just a problem for St Paul either. Neighborhoods around the University of Minnesota are  notorious for opposing students. The Marcy-Holmes neighborhood association has some very strict restrictions on who can participate in their community meetings, and the Prospect Park neighborhood has gone to great lengths to attempt to control where “density” will be built along University Avenue.

As a former and current student, and as someone who has spent years teaching undergraduates, I know that most undergraduates are worried about their future. They’re taking out big loans, and the last thing they need is higher rent located farther from school. Meanwhile, students are an easy target. They don’t go to community meetings, and if the Voter ID amendment passes, they’ll find it difficult to vote.

At Streets.mn, we’re trying to figure out ways to create better urban environments, to foster a city with a diverse commercial corridors,  good transit, street life, and density. It’s not helpful when apartments are expensive, restricted, and difficult to obtain. If rents here are the same price as rents in Chicago, how many potential Twin Cities young people are going to opt to stay? How many young, creative people will leave the Twin Cities behind, in search of a city that doesn’t zone their lifestyles out of existence?

The City of Minneapolis is promoting Streetcars in a number of corridors, including one in North along Broadway to compensate for the rerouting of Bottineau LRT to avoid North. Promoters of Minneapolis Streetcars, including Mayor R.T. Rybak, are engaged in magical thinking in their assertion that streetcars will have transformative effects.

Famously, Minneapolis and St. Paul saw their streetcars bustituted by 1954, and many mourned their loss. But Minneapolis and St. Paul were not alone. Streetcars were obsoleted worldwide. We don’t go to London to visit their famous double-decker streetcars (at least not since the 1920s). We don’t see them in New York or lots of other world cities. There are reasons for this.

Streetcars are overall a less effective means of transportation than buses.

That is, centrally-powered steel wheels on steel tracks in the middle of traffic are less efficient across most dimensions than self-powered rubber tires on streets in the middle of traffic.

Oh, I can see the streetcar advocates foaming to say why streetcars are better:

• They have lower operating costs for both energy and labor per passenger and lower emissions
• They have a smoother ride
• People know where they are going
• Developers believe in their permanence, and will make commitments. As the Oakland promoter says ” Unlike buses, streetcars have had a measurable impact on property values due to their permanence, connectivity, and marketability.”

Let’s go at these in reverse order.

The simple fact that after 1954 there were no more streetcars in the Twin Cities belies their permanence. Yet on almost every former streetcar route, today we see continued bus transit service indicates that it is the service that is permanent if the demand is there, not the physical instance or particular technology. We can further look at the built form of cities which have made significant commitment to bus rapid transit (Ottawa, Curitiba) to see evidence of development following the service, not the technology. BRT of course is more comparable to LRT if it runs in its own right-of-way. Arterial BRT is more like streetcars. According to a report published by the Transportation Research Board, the link between land development and streetcars has not been substantiated by empirical evidence. Most of the evidence that does exist comes from project promoters or advocates, who obviously have a stake in the outcome.

In the 1880s and 1890s when the first generation of streetcars were built, they provided a huge increment of accessibility over competing modes (walking, horse). Today, they provide no increment of accessibility over cars and buses. They allow no one to get anywhere faster than before. The entire argument rests on qualitative improvements.

The navigability problem with streetcars is solved by the oh-so-attractive wires in the air and tracks on the ground, which tell you where the service is going. Buses on undifferentiated blacktop have no such obvious signals. In one sense this is correct, Twin Cities buses are not obviously navigable, and I have railed at this before. But again, this is easily solved with better signage, and more importantly, tall lights with “T” on them as in the adjoining images from Vancouver and Stockholm, lights which can be seen from several stops away.

The ride quality issue I think is more one of new infrastructure than of streetcar infrastructure. In the waning days of streetcars, people praised the new buses (presumably on relatively new streets, for from what I can tell, almost nothing in Minneapolis has been resurfaced since the middle of the last century) for their ride quality.

“Clang, clang, clang” went the trolley
“Ding, ding, ding” went the bell
“Zing, zing, zing” went my heartstrings
For the moment I saw him I fell

“Chug, chug, chug” went the motor
“Bump, bump, bump” went the brake
“Thump, thump, thump” went my heartstrings
When he smiled, I could feel the car shake

He tipped his hat, and took a seat
He said he hoped he hadn’t stepped upon my feet
He asked my name I held my breath
I couldn’t speak because he scared me half to death

“Buzz, buzz, buzz” went the buzzer
“Plop, plop, plop” went the wheels
“Stop, stop, stop” went my heartstrings
As he started to leave I took hold of his sleeve with my hand

And as if it were planned
He stayed on with me and it was grand
Just to stand with his hand holding mine
All the way to the end of the line

The Trolley Song speaks to the smoothness of the ride. For a young romantic, even a bus can be idealized. For the regular commuter or the harried shopper, bump, bump, bump is far from romance.

The operating cost question is partially correct. Clean electricity powering a streetcar will save energy and reduce environmental impacts compared to a diesel, or even an electric, bus in traffic. We do not have clean electricity (yet) in the Twin Cities in general, so while the energy claim may remain, the environmental one is weak at best. The labor argument may also hold if you have a long streetcar that carries more passengers per driver than a bus. Germany has double-decker buses that hold 128 passengers (wikipedia), while streetcars by Skoda hold 157 (wikipedia), as with all things, it depends on configuration, but it is not the knock-out punch. And it is only critical on routes with that level of demand, at times with that level of demand. And if to achieve that demand, you lower frequency, you are worsening service.

Offsetting the operating cost advantage is the major capital cost disadvantage. Buses can effectively free-ride on streets paid for out of property and gas taxes, while streetcars are responsible for their own tracks (and BRT on exclusive right-of-way similarly are responsible for their own pavement). Does the $100 or $200 million dollars spent per line garner any new passengers? Are the existing passengers qualitatively better off in a way that they would actually pay for? Is the trip any faster? If the service is indeed better, it should be able to charge a premium and retain its customers.

Further offsetting this is scale economies. We have, and will long have, lots of buses. At best we will have a few streetcars. The buses will have lots of people working on them, a collection of spare parts, expertise, and so on to keep them maintained efficiently. Streetcars will, especially at first, be rare, without the library of spare parts, without the staff maintenance expertise, and without any of the other advantages of buses. Either costly redundant vehicles will need to be provided, or the system will be “out” more frequently than buses. The Twin Cities in the last decade has invested in two new rail technologies (commuter trains and LRT), neither of which are cheap. A third seems to add to the system complexity with few advantages.

Like magicians, streetcar promoters are engaging in diversion and distraction, attributing all success to streetcars and covering up the mistakes. The benefits of streetcars are illusory, the costs are real.

The Twin Cities does like its toys: new stadiums, trains, convention centers, and the like are the most egregious examples. If money were free, this would not be a problem. Where I live, money is not free.

Many people in the Twin Cities are familiar with the University of Minnesota bus transitway connecting its Minneapolis and St. Paul campuses (the latter actually being in the suburb of Falcon Heights). Since the 1990s, its exclusive access has allowed buses to shuttle quickly between campuses—parts of it also get used by buses to the Minnesota State Fair each year.

There was also a piece of dedicated track for getting to the St. Paul campus by streetcar between 1914 and 1954. A special “Inter-Campus” route shared track with the “Como-Harriet” streetcar line between Minneapolis and Saint Paul, though there were private extensions to reach each campus.

Students boarded at the traffic circle at Pleasant Street and Pillsbury Avenue on the Minneapolis campus, and the streetcar headed north on 15th Street to reach Como Avenue, which it followed until reaching Eustis Street in Saint Paul.  The line then turned north along Eustis before heading east at what is now Idaho Avenue in the small suburb of Lauderdale. From there, track was laid in an exclusive right-of-way which ran just north of Folwell Avenue to reach the campus. Streetcars ran along the south edge of the agricultural test fields before curving around the east side of campus and ending up near today’s St. Paul Student Center.

The line was unique among streetcar routes in the area because had a connection with the freight rail network and was used for small deliveries to the St. Paul campus, including coal for a campus power plant. The connection was a short piece of track which ran west of Eustis (across what is now Minnesota State Highway 280) to connect with the Minnesota Transfer Railway (now the Minnesota Commercial)

The Inter-Campus line was one of the last two streetcar routes in operation in the Twin Cities, and was replaced by buses on June 18, 1954.

Some remnants of the old private right-of-way still exist, though it is deteriorating. The main pieces still visible include a retaining wall, a staircase coming down from Folwell Avenue, and a few old concrete platforms for former stops. (Unlike today’s transitway where there aren’t any intermediate stops, the streetcar line did make stops along the way.) Here’s a slideshow of photos I took there a couple of weeks ago:

Hiawatha Avenue - Image via www.lightrail.com

Hiawatha Avenue has been a thorn in the sides of south Minneapolis residents for years, and it has been the source of much discussion, including here on Streets.mn. In a recent post called The Urban Future of Hiawatha Avenue, Sam described the corridor as follows:

Hiawatha is a “Stroad,” in the words of Chuck Marohn. Marohn writes about our 45MPH worldwhere stroads are neither streets nor roads and do nothing well – they are not fast and access-restricted enough to move traffic efficiently nor slow and humane enough to concentrate density in a pleasant urban environment. The physical layout and speed limit of Hiawatha means it does nothing well, and it has a lousy pedestrian environment.

A bit hyperbolic, perhaps, but I tend to agree. In that post, Sam argued in favor of Hiawatha Avenue becoming an urban boulevard, including elements like better pedestrian crossings, on-street parking, reduced speed limits, more trees, and other humanizing elements.

I was reminded of a post from August of 2009 by David called Time for overpasses on Hiawatha?, where he asked whether it was time to fully grade-separate Hiawatha Avenue from the cross streets, a proposal I think is worth additional consideration.

Hiawatha Avenue as it exists today is literally a result of the tension between these polar opposite visions for the corridor. The short version of the history of the corridor (as I understand it) is as follows: MnDOT proposed a fully grade-separated 6-lane freeway. The neighborhood balked, and the compromise was the existing 4-lane at-grade configuration plus LRT, along with a few additonal roadway capacity items (like interchanges at Lake Street, grade-separating Minnehaha Parkway, and re-aligning the southern end of the corridor closer through Minnehaha Park.

As it turns out, even the compromise solution that was supposed to be more palatable to the neighborhood still turned into major headaches for MnDOT (and everyone else, from my reading). Readers who have been around the Twin Cities longer than I have will no doubt remember the Minnehaha Free State, a group of protesters who camped out in Minnehaha Park for months protesting construction. I read about it in Mary Losure’s Our Way or the Highway: Inside the Minnehaha Free State, an excellent book easily worth the $17 new price, and certainly worth the $0.35 one seller is asking for a used copy on Amazon (I wrote more about the book here, although I think my feelings about it have changed a bit since writing the review in early 2008).

After a bit of googling, I was amazed to discover that the official MnDOT project web page for construction activities that took place along Hiawatha Avenue in the 90′s and early 00′s is still active. It appears to be virtually unchanged since 2000 – one page still refers to future construction activities that will occur in 2000. I wonder, is there a reason MnDOT keeps this page active, or is it simply a relic that has long since been forgotten by the MnDOT IT department?

The reality is that we are receiving some very mixed messages from agencies about the future of Hiawatha Avenue. On one hand, Hennepin County was one of the biggest proponents of the Hiawatha LRT in the corridor, and they are the primary agency agreeing to make several intersections more pedestrian friendly (as Sam wrote about), both indications that they envision a more pedestrian friendly corridor. On the other hand, Hennepin County was also lead agency behind the iconic Sabo Bridge constructed so that bikes and peds wouldn’t have to cross Hiawatha at-grade. Moreover, simply moving ahead with the construction of the Lake Street and TH-62 interchanges (after agreeing not to grade-separate the rest of the corridor) suggests that MnDOT hasn’t entirely given up on the possibility of grade separation.

One thing we can say for sure is that there are no easy solutions for this corridor. This is a very clear example of how our collective lack of a clear vision for this corridor has resulted in a corridor that in all likelihood will remain exactly in its current state for many years  to come because the costs (social and financial) of doing anything different are too great. The decisions we’ve made in the past will make it very difficult to realize either vision for the corridor. We’ve done some things out of order (if we were going to grade-separate, it should have happened concurrently with LRT construction, for example). No matter what we do, including doing nothing, it’s going to hurt.

Via SLO Bike Coalition/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Want to see more adults on bikes? Encourage communities to hold more kids’ bike rodeos.

And it’s not just about “raising little cyclists,” although indoctrinating educating them young as to handling skills and traffic navigation is a lovely contributor to the goal of putting more adults on bikes in 10-20 years. I’m talking about right now, this week.

Consider the merits of a bike rodeo:

• How do kids get to a bike rodeo? Adults bring them. Very often, the family/caregiving unit all arrive on 2 wheel transport.
• What are the messages of a bike rodeo? Safety and fun. Rodeos, properly run, are the least preachy of bicycle education sessions.
• What is the time commitment? One heck of a lot less than a 9 hour Smart Cycling course via the League of American Bicyclists, or even a 2-hour Commuting course. And the adults don’t need childcare to attend a kids’ bike rodeo like they do those other events.

An enthusiastic child can do more to get the casual adult with a bike out on his/her bike than any preaching about bikes as transportation, earnest blog posts about the mom who drops her 2 kids at daycare and bike commutes to an office job every day (rain or shine!), or putting in bike parking at the grocery store. Because to the casual adult with child responsibilities, all of that is grand and noble and sounds completely unworkably like ideas come up with by spandex-clad urban hipsters who have never procreated. (Yes, even the daycare mom story. Yes, I know there are people who do it, but the average suburban parent would read that piece and mock it as fiction.)

As communities, we need to be building our streets to accommodate many uses — transportation to and from core destinations, certainly, but also a sense of neighborhood, and recreational purposes as well. Allowing families to bike to soccer practices, or to grab a cone, may not sound like contributors to grandly advocated transportation visions, but they do reduce congestion, increase community fitness, and encourage people to engage in their communities and environments that making the same trips by minivan just don’t.

And that’s why the bike rodeo is such an awesome piece of outreach. By including some parent activities and info, and creating a realistic context for bicycle use by adults who work full time and have kids, you get more butts on bike seats. And as the children grow, don’t be surprised if that recreational cycling becomes a gateway drug for the adults to tackle more utiliarian cycling. Because that’s how bike rodeos roll.

The big news in this TPW Committee is that Minneapolis is continuing its proud tradition of innovation* by approving an incredible new experiment in bike facilities on Penn Ave S.  Known as a Quantum Teleportosymbolic Cycle Track, this facility is actually invisible on Penn but can occasionally be seen on a slow, labyrinthine side street somewhere nearby, as long as the occasional signs announcing its presence are not blocked by an SUV.  It has a dual purpose of allowing people to park directly in front of their house and also letting cyclists who get lost in SW Minneapolis and happen to stumble upon a sign know that they’re on a Cycling Route.

Phase one of the construction of this Pseudo Track would be the invisibility phase, in which the facility would be constructed on Penn that would create, as CM Hodges put it at the committee meeting, a “balance” between parking and cycling.  Of course, any scale measuring this would be tilted hard towards parking, because there would only be the customary few feet between the parked cars and the honking raging traffic along Penn for a cyclist to squeeze into.  But don’t worry, there will be a parking spot available directly in front of your house, as long as you don’t live on the west side of the street between 51st and Cromwell, where the existing roadway is 2 feet too narrow to accommodate parking according to MSA guidelines, or the west side along Armatage Park, where there is currently no parking.

Phase two will include, at some unspecified time in the future, signs placed along some unspecified side street somewhere near Penn using some unspecified funding to serve as the collector bikeway that City policy says should be on Penn.  streets.mn attempted to reach the Bike Master Plan for comment, but it was in critical condition at HCMC and not expected to survive past Friday’s council meeting.  In the meantime, instead of actually biking, check out this video about bike lanes that actually exist in some parts of the city.

Now that my spleen is vented, here’s the rest of the summary:

1.  Sheridan Ave S Street Resurfacing Project (39th St W to 43rd St W)  Public hearing for a mill and overlay, street was built in ’48 and last resurfaced in ’93, $185,856 for a half-mile of roadway.

2.  Upton Ave S Street Resurfacing Project (43rd St W to 54th St W) Public hearing for a mill and overlay, “various segments” of the street were built in ’51, ’66, and ’84, cost is $419,174 for about a mile and a quarter of street.  This entire stretch is designated for “Shared-use pavement markings/sharrows” in the Bike Master Plan.  Those don’t require removing parking?  So you’re saying there’s a chance…

3.  Nicollet Ave Construction Services Contract  Kimley-Horn & Associates will be paid for engineering work on the project to reconstruct Nicollet between Lake & 40th Sts.  Combined with the design work they’ve already completed, about 14% of the $5m budget will go to them.

4.  Pioneers and Soldiers Cemetery Fence Rehabilitation Project  The MN Historical Society will kick in $150k to restore a cool, scary fence around the oldest cemetery in town.  You can kick in some of your own bucks at a benefit show featuring Low on June 12th.

5.  Talmage Ave SE Street Reconstruction Project – Contribution in Lieu of Assessment  The U is throwing in $192,793.91 (presumably in pennies) towards the construction of this longtime potholed road just on the Minneapolis side of the St Paul border, of which the U owns approximately a quarter of the total street frontage.

6.  Riverside Ave Street Reconstruction Project – Contribution in Lieu of Assessment  Ditto with Riverside, a road that I’m guessing a few more of you are familiar with, only this time they’re generously paying $360,459.72.

7.  Street Easement Deeds  You know that building under construction that looks like a lakefront hotel plopped basically on top of the 46th St LRT station?  There is some complicated real estate wrangling going on under it.

8.  Armatage Area Street Resurfacing Project  A whole bunch of streets in the Southwest corner of the city will get new pavement this year, costing about $1.1m.  With the construction of the new invisible bike lanes on Penn, it should make for a fun year in this neighborhood.

9.  Sabo Bridge Engineering Services  The engineering firm Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates is making sure nothing is wrong with the Sabo Bridge, besides the obvious, and Minneapolis is splitting the cost with Hennepin County.

…

14.  Airport Noise Resolution  Far South Minneapolis has apparently gotten noisier lately, and the City is asking the MAC to do the following about it:

• Move the approximately 32 daily departure operations from a 360 degree heading to a 340 degree heading for those operations going to destinations such as Duluth, International Falls, Winnipeg, etc.
• Implement the use of three divergent headings (360 degrees, 340 degrees, 320 degrees) for north bound departure operations off Runway 30R.
• Continue adherence to the Runway Use System (RUS) at all times when traffic levels and prevailing winds allow.

If that doesn’t work, the next resolution will ask residents to stop flying to “destinations such as Duluth, International Falls, Winnipeg, etc.”

Bonus!  4/12/12 Special TPW Committee meeting!

1.    Yard Waste Processing  The contract with Organic Technologies approved by the council about a month ago turned out to be a bit too much for the company, so it’ll be revised to give them about half the work at a slightly higher per ton rate.  It’s still less than the other contractor is paid, so might as well take it.

2.    West Broadway Alternatives Analysis Grant Application  In February, the City Council agreed to a route for the Bottineau Transitway that mostly skipped North Minneapolis and cut through the city’s largest park.  In return, they asked the County and the Met Council to support other transit investments in North.  The money is going where their mouth was, as the three agencies are now jointly applying for Fed AA funding for a West Broadway streetcar.  Along with Central-Nicollet and the Midtown Greenway, that’ll make for a dizzying amount of streetcar studying in Minneapolis.

4 out of 7 ain't bad

*The definition of an innovation is something that’s never been done before except for in dozens of cities in Europe and Japan and California and Portland and Seattle, right?

My favorite upcoming ride is the Northeast Ride (and, in full disclosure, I’m helping to coordinate it so I’m a little biased! :p ).

Set for June 2, 2012, this is the first annual Northeast Ride. Cyclists will be taken on a creative tour of Northeast Minneapolis –with stops at one of each of the neighborhoods’ parks. The ride will also take participants through the arts district, touring past the great Northeast creative buildings and historical landmarks like the Casket Arts Building and the Grain Belt Brewery, while using some of the new bike trails and bikeways. At just under 12 miles, this is a family friendly ride and open to riders of all abilities. Each stop will have an interactive, creative activity such as creating a Northeast Minneapolis time capsule, a make your own spoke card station, lawn games, and more. Folks are encouraged to register ahead of time here.

The idea for the Northeast Ride came out of the Northeast Community Development Corporation’s ‘Northeast Futures’ conversations, and a desire to create an event to unite the neighborhoods of Northeast Minneapolis. In the conversations, Northeast residents identified the environment, arts & economic development, and cycling as key priorities for Northeast Minneapolis in the coming years. The Northeast Ride is about all of those things –but most importantly, the Ride is about developing a sense of community throughout Northeast.

And this is what I feel makes the Northeast Ride so genuinely awesome –it is from the community, for the community. We’ve already seen businesses as different as Productivity, Inc., Indeed Brewing, and the Army National Guard Northeast Armory come together to support the ride.

I’m excited to see how cycling events like the Northeast Ride can continue to build sense of community, support local businesses, and invigorate urban space.

More exciting is Hennepin County, through its Minnehaha-Hiawatha Community Works program, is actually pursuing some efforts to make improvements to Hiawatha. They are proposing improved pedestrian crossings at notably at 32nd, 38th and 46th Streets. The latter two intersections are near light rail stations where, based on observations of people scurrying across the street at rush hour, pedestrian crossing improvements are sorely needed. The proposed changes by Hennepin County are good; they include curb bumpouts, increased “pork chop” size (sounds tasty, right? but pork chops they are actually the island between through-lanes and the right turn lane), straightened crosswalks (ADA compliant), lengthened walk signals for crossing Hiawatha, widened center medians (in case the signal still isn’t long enough and you get marooned), and the possibility of restoring the southern crosswalk across Hiawatha on the south side of 46th Street (ironically removed right after light rail service opened to accomodate a second turning lane on 46th Street). These proposed improvements are wonderful, and are necessary first steps towards making Hiawatha a better street in the future. But we must do more.

Hiawatha is a “Stroad,” in the words of Chuck Marohn. Marohn writes about our 45MPH world where stroads are neither streets nor roads and do nothing well – they are not fast and access-restricted enough to move traffic efficiently nor slow and humane enough to concentrate density in a pleasant urban environment. The physical layout and speed limit of Hiawatha means it does nothing well, and it has a lousy pedestrian environment.

It isn’t ridiculous to imagine an “urban/urbane” stretch of Hiawatha Avenue. I propose the following:

1.   Reduce the speed limit to 30 MPH (at least between Minnehaha Creek and 35th Street). Enforce it. Slower traffic makes for a more humane urban environment. Slowing the traffic by 5 or 10 MPH will only marginally increase the time it takes to drive the corridor – a small sacrifice to make a huge improvement to the overall environment.

2.   Allow parking on Hiawatha Avenue. Use the existing shoulder.  This will serve three purposes. It will allow people to park near the light rail station, and I guarantee it will be used. It will allow for parking near current and future mixed-use developments near light rail where off-street parking may be at a premium. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it will slow traffic on the street.

3.   Plant trees along the street that will actually one day create a pleasant, leafy canopy. This will increase the property value of development near train stations, create a more inviting pedestrian enironment and will simply look nice.

4.   Build crosswalks a different color than the roadway. Crosswalks of a different color (or different paving material) makes them more prominent and makes crossing the street on foot safer.

5.   Reduce curb radii – make corners sharper to slow turning cars.

6.   Make Walk signals come on automatically, perhaps a second or two before the light turns green. We’ve covered this before at Streets.mn – one need not “apply” to cross the street.

7.   Add crossing gates for sidewalks, not just traffic lanes. It makes a pedestrian feel unimportant. And straighten the sidewalk – there is no reason for the sidewalk to divert around the crossing gate when the traffic lane gets to proceed in a straight line.

8.   Increase walk signal timing so an old lady or family with small child can make it across. (check, Hennepin County plans to do this)

9.   Increase the size of center islands and pork chops, so pedestrians marooned feel a little better sense of safety. Wider pork chops and curb bumpouts also reduce the distance across the street, making it more friendly (check, Hennepin County plans to do this as well)

Like I said, proposed improvements by Hennepin County are fantastic first steps, but we must keep our eye on the ball and demand more. The benefits are many, including more attractive development sites near light rail. Most of all, we’ll have a more livable city.

The truck that killed Dennis Dumm on Park Avenue in 2009. Img fm Star Tribune.

Anyone who walks or bikes around the Twin Cities will have a head full of ideas about ways to improve the experience. These mental lists quickly grow long: a crosswalk here, a spot for improved signal timing there, a better bike lane down that street… It’s a continual mental murmur, an alternate imagination for a city that doesn’t consistently place cars first, second, and third on the priority list.

In the midst of all this imagination, it can sometime be difficult to separate out the really great ideas from the merely beneficial, the brilliant from the banal. But rattling around my head for some time now (for years!), I ‘ve been wondering what to do with streets like Park and Portland, 26th and 28th, SE University and 4th. There’s one simple single thing that may be the best possible idea for improving Minneapolis streets in “one fell swoop.” What’s more, now is the ideal time to start thinking about it. Now more than ever, this is an a propos idea, killing at least three birds with one stone, skinning all sorts of cats. We need buffered cycletracks on Portland and Park!

Allow me to explain…

Minneapolis’ One-Way Street Pairs are Dinosaurs from Another Era

One of my biggest gripes about Minneapolis is its highly problematic network of one-way, high-speed streets running through the seemingly worst possible places: Park and Portland, 26^th and 28^th, and University and 4^th Avenue SE. (There may be more, but they’re not on my beaten path.) A while back, talking about these streets with the late Urban Studies professor and Minneapolis historian Judith Martin, she explained that these streets are remnants of the pre-94 and 35W days. Back then, they were intended to provide freeway-esque access between Downtown and the growing suburbs. As you can imagine having witnessed the current University Avenue chaos, this was particularly important during the freeway construction period of the the 1960s.

Today, these streets run through some awkward spots. The north end of Park Avenue boasts large mansions. Elsewhere, both Park and Portland traverse some of the most economically challenged neighborhoods in South Minneapolis, places that have a great many children and families. What’s more, SE University Avenue near the U of MN campus runs directly in front of Fraternity Row and the school’s athletic complex, which boasts the highest densities of occasionally inebriated pedestrians for hundreds of miles in any direction.

Then, on top of these strange arrangements, some time ago bike lanes were placed on these streets. And when I say “placed”, I mean “placed badly on the incorrect side in ways that start and stop without warning.” After skyways, these streets are my #1 pet peeve about Minneapolis. They should not be taken for granted. At the very least, we need to think very carefully about the way that they operate.

At some point, someone thought it was a good idea to put a high-speed one-way street next to "frat row" on the University of Minnesota campus.

One-Way Street Pairs are Terrible for Homes, Yards, Pedestrians, Kids, Dogs, & Others

Anyone who goes for a walk down any of these roads will immediately note that cars move very fast. From a driver’s perspective, this is their chief benefit. You can “zip” through the city on Portland Avenue at nice 40+mph clip. Speeding with few relatively stoplights from Longfellow to Uptown is so much easier on 26^th Avenue than any other option.

The downside, though, is what happens if you’re not in a car. For anyone living in any of the homes along these urban express routes (what Chuck might call stroads), the steady stream of fast moving cars is terrible. Cars are loud, and pollute the air. But even worse, they move really fast through neighborhoods filled with people. Mothers clutch children to their hips. Yards go un-played upon. Nobody walks down these sidewalks if they have any other choice. Property values along Park and Portland go down…

All these things are subtle and hard to quantify, but the effects are very real. Living along these streets is far less pleasant than in should be. In a sense, the people who live on, walk along, or bike down Park and Portland are paying the cost, while people driving in cars from points South reap the benefit of a few minutes traffic time. That’s something that might be good for commuters from Richfield, but it’s bad for Minneapolis neighborhoods.

[A very shaky look at an accident on 26th Street.]

One-Way Street Pairs are Literally Deadly & Unequally Distributed

Park and Portland, as they’re arranged today, depress the quality of life for thousands of people who live near there. But, on top of that, these one-way streets are also the streets in the city that literally kill. A cyclist was run over by a truck and killed on Park Avenue in 2009. Last year, a young woman was run over by a truck and killed along University Avenue SE. A woman crossing the street at Park and 27th was killed by a car in December. An old man crossing the street was killed on Park Avenue in May 2009. This is not even close to an exhaustive list.

Another thing to point out about these streets is that they just happen to be in neighborhoods with a lot of politically disadvantaged people. The neighborhoods along 26^th and 28^th, Park and Portland are the areas of town where people with limited means and limited access to transportation happen to live. This seems to be how it works everywhere. Places with well-connected residents get traffic calming, good bike lanes, and other amenities. Place without connections or political clout get dangerous roads.

The University of Minnesota has its own situation, where these streets are placed right thorugh student neighborhoods. Students don’t vote, and are sometimes restricted from participating in neighborhood and community processes. Nobody will complain when you ram a high-speed road through a student neighborhood, though they should.

The Benefits of the Buffered Bike Lane Approach

In the best possible world, if I had a magic wand, I’d wave it and change all these streets back in the two-way configurations they had before the 1950s “suburbanization” of the city. Not only are two-way streets safer because they slow down traffic speeds significantly, they are also easier to deal with for people navigating the city. Simply put, they’re simpler.

First Avenue South used to be a one-way street, and now it's not.

But that’s never going to happen. The city did do a conversion of a one-way street on 1^st Avenue, near the Institute of Arts. But that was a short segment on a street with low traffic counts, and while it worked out nicely, most of the discussions about transportation in South Minneapolis seem to be about creating more “access” rather than creating better places.

Barring that political impossibility, if Park and Portland are going to remain the one-way “collector” streets that they are today, improving them needs to be a two-fold process. First, the streets very much need to be calmed, with traffic speeds lowered to something that tops out at 30 mph. That’s the speed that urban streets should be. 40mph is a very different kind of environment, not suitable for a corner like Park and Franklin, or 26^th and Nicollet. Some sort of traffic calming approach, with narrower lanes and bumpouts on the corners, along with improved signal timing that really made it impossible to speed down the street would be a huge improvement over the today’s racetrack-style wide-lane layout. I’d even advocate removing a lane somehow, though this would probably be greeted with exasperating shakes of the head by any self-respecting public works department.

The second thing that has to happen, of course, is better bicycle infrastructure. No 21^st century bike lane should be on the left side of the street, and no bike lane should be on a street where multiple lanes of cars are traveling in excess of 40 miles per hour. And this really should never happen in Minneapolis, a city that claims to be a national leader for bicycle infrastructure. As I’ve argued before, the way things are set up today, it’s inevitable that more people are going to be killed.

A cycletrack in Chicago, where it also snows and has "politics."

Well, the obvious solution, one that would solve many problems at the same time, is to take these Park and Portland and built the city’s first (real) buffered cycletrack bike lane. For those who don’t know, a cycletrack is a bike lane that’s separated from the moving traffic, either by bollards, concrete, parked cars, or ideally all three of those things. (If you want to get a sense of what a cycletrack doesn’t look like, go down 1^st Avenue in the Warehouse District.) If you want to get a sense of what it does look like, check out this picture of one in Chicago, or this one in Denver, or this one in Copenhagen. Cycletracks are really the gold standard of bike lanes, because they create a space that feels and looks safe and is comfortable for all kinds of riders. Add because these streets would still be one-way streets, it would be a great route for cyclists!

On top of that, you could even do a “green wave” for bicycles with some stoplights timing tricks, which would both calm the high-speed auto traffic while making it convenient and efficient for bicycle commuters coming north and south from downtown to South Minneapolis.

Buffered cycletracks on Park and Portland would calm traffic, improve the quality of the life of the neighobhrood, increase property values, make the street far safer than the death trap it is today, and create a bicycle route that would rival the Midwtown Greenway in utility and comfort. It would really place Minneapolis on the map as a city that is doing creative and innovative things for bicycling and placemaking. In one fell swoop, you’d improve Minneapolis in at least five really important ways.

Can Hennepin County Think Oustide the Stroad?

Not only would this idea have benefits for all sorts of people living in the city, it’s very easy to do. Park and Portland Avenues are slated for a re-design and re-construction project very soon, and the plans are currently being worked out. Right now is the perfect time to think about re-designing these urban streets, which are really relics of a far earlier pre-freeway age that greatly devalued urban space at the expense of improving auto circulation. The plans are being worked out right now, and the great thing about cycletracks is that they’re pretty cheap to build if you’re already spending lots of time and concrete re-constructing a street. As Brendon has pointed out, its not that difficult to  re-allocate some paint, install a little bit of concrete or plastic, and move the parked cars out away from the curb. It’ll likely cost less than one part of one part of one mile of freeway.

The problem is that this is relatively unlikely to happen, because Park and Portland are owned and operated by Hennepin County, and not by the city. Compared to the city, which is relatively forward thinking in terms of how they design roads, the county struggles with changing the status quo. When the topic of a Park and Portland cycletrack came up at the last Bicycle Advisory Committee meeting, and apparently engineers had made it clear that a buffered cycletrack was impossible due to “political pushback” and “pushback about winter maintenance.”

Now, I don’t know the details of either of these “pushback” situations. Political pushback typically means 1) people don’t like change, 2) somewhere, someone might have to walk a few more blocks for their parking spot, 3) some politician is annoyed that that they weren’t consulted earlier, or 4) it’s not in the latest highway design manual. None of these reasons are convincing considering the huge need for a change along Park and Portland, and the huge amount of people who would benefit from innovative thinking.

Along with an invocation of “emergency vehicles,” snowplow concerns are another thing that always pops up whenever you talk about re-designing a street. To me, though, snow plowing is a problem that just requires some creativity. The big problem for plowing is when cars drive over the snow, and pack down into ice. With a cycletrack, this issue disappears. You might even be able to plow it with one of those brush machines that the Universities use, or maybe a pickup truck like they use on the Midtown Greenway.

It’s frustrating that people routinely invoke wintertime to perform a ritual of “Minnesotan exceptionalism”, saying that, “sure that might work in [X city], but here in Minneapolis we have such extreme winters, so [Y good idea] is just impossible.” The truth is, lots of cities have both snow and cycletracks. Snow plow concerns shouldn’t be driving this conversation.

An buffered cycletrack makes sense for most anyone living in Minneapolis. The stories that Brendon’s post generated about people waiting to cross these streets forever, or almost getting killed, are an everyday occurrence. It’s no exaggeration to say that people living in these neighborhoods are terrorized, that they literally live in fear. By one relatively minor change, Hennepin County and Minneapolis could take great strides toward actually achieving and implementing some of the nice ideals that politicians and planners are always touting  in speeches and planning documents. A Park and Portland cycletrack would foster liveable neighborhoods and dramatically encourage bicycling. Let’s do this!

A buffered cycletrack in New York City, where they also have snow and politics.

It’s always seemed a little crazy to me that some of Minneapolis’ most heavily-used bike facilities are located on streets that are functionally freeway relievers (see Blaisdell/1^st Avenue on the west side of 35W).  Drivers expect (and marked speed limits encourage) travel at 35, 40 or 45 miles per hour on these routes, feet away from cyclists traveling 5, 10 or 15 miles per hour.

Don’t get me wrong, Park and Portland (likewise Blaisdell and 1^st) are pretty great bike routes.  Given their heavy traffic, they have priority over most cross-streets at intersections, meaning a speedy trip.  They’re also huge, so there is space for adequate bike lanes.

I don’t know what the ideal configuration is for bikes and cars on these two one-way pairs, but as Hennepin County prepares to repair and re-stripe Park and Portland this summer, I think it’s a good time to think about how both of these pairs could be made safer and more inviting for cyclists.  In fact, Hennepin County’s Complete Streets policy actually requires them to assess all road projects for inclusion of Complete Streets features and “integrate innovative and non-traditional design options”.

So, in order to get the discussion started, here are some questions and ideas:

1. 

   A protected bike lane in Chicago

   Do these streets need to be one-ways? Park/Portland and Blaisdell/1^st became the one-ways pairs we know today to address traffic capacity prior to the construction of the freeway system.  Well, we have a freeway now (and a newly widened one at that), so I think it’s time to reassess this configuration. Blaisdell at 40^th sees 2,800 AADT, hardly two-lane one-way street territory. Access Minneapolis, the adopted citywide transportation plan, specifically identifies the Park/Portland and Blaisdell/1^st Ave one-way-pairs for evaluation and eventual reversion to two-way streets. Two-way traffic would mean slower traffic, and better streets for bikes. Two-way streets also might allow more space for a “multi-street” solution (see #5).

2. Do these streets need to be three lanes wide?  At any time other than rush hour, three lanes are way too many.  This encourages speeding (see #1) and wastes space that could be used for other modes.  Hiawatha handles similar and greater traffic volumes, and is only two lanes in each direction for most of its length.
3. Do we need on-street parking on both sides of the street? Park and Portland have parking on both sides.  Losing parking on one side would free up a lot of space to better incorporate bike and ped facilities.
4. Is there space for an “innovative” solution?  Hennepin County is already apparently considering moving the bike lanes on Park/Portland to the right side of the street, which is a good start.  But what about “buffered” bike lanes (paint, bollards, etc)?  What about putting the row of parked cars between moving traffic and the bike lane?  How about a full-on cycletrack?  New York and Chicago have some great examples of protected facilities on very busy streets that use just paint and parked cars.  With one less row of parking, I’m sure Park and Portland could each fit a wide bike lane and a 6-foot buffer between the curb and a rowed of parked cars.
5. 

   A cycletrack in Montreal that needs only bollards and paint

   How about a multi-street solution?  I’ve outlined a multi-street solution to providing a segregated two-way bike facility on the Blaisdell/1^st Avenue pair at Net Density.  If Park and Portland were both two-way (or one two-way and one one-way) perhaps both a segregated two-way bike facility could be used on one half of the pair while the other reverted to all-car.  Maybe we could develop one really excellent two-way facility on 1^st Avenue south (an at-grade Greenway perhaps)?

6. What solution is potentially the most safe AND inviting?  We shouldn’t be planning bike facilities for 30-year-old males.  We should be planning facilities for mothers with kids in tow and retirees riding trikes at 5 miles per hour.  Any new facility should increase safety AND be a marketing tool for hesitant cyclists.  People should drive by on their car and think to themselves, “I’d be willing to ride on that.  And I’d be willing to bring my child along with me”.  (Note: there appears to be some controversy over the safety benefits of “segregated” bike facilities.  I won’t weigh in here, except to say that recent evidence seems to show additional bikes on the road means more safety. If better facilities attract more riders and make drivers more aware of cyclists, that is a good thing.  Traffic engineers, please debate in the comments)

What do you think?  Do you ride or drive on Park and Portland?  Are you one of those traffic engineer people who can tell me more about lane widths and design speed and why we’ll eventually be told we can’t have nice things?  Let me hear it (here’s something from twitter to get you started).

At present, according to the Minneapolis Bike Coalition, Hennepin County doesn’t seem interested in anything beyond moving the bike lanes to the right side of the street.  If you’d like to see something different on Park and Portland, contact your County Commissioner, contact the MBC and contact your City Council member.

Cross-posted at netdensity.net

To the extent we actually plan in this region, we plan for the Twin Cities as if it were essentially static.

Forecasts sometimes call for the Twin Cities to eventually reach 4 million people. Forecasts in the 1960s, referring to a 1964 document titled 4,000,000 by 2000!: Preliminary proposals for guiding change, said that would occur in 2000.

Forecasts now in the early 2000s say imply that might occur in 2040. The Met Council’s Regional Development Forecast projects 3.6 million people in the 7 county area by 2030.

But suppose there were a “black swan”, some large socioeconomic or demographic change in the world that vastly increased the Twin Cities’ population. We can speculate what this might be: war, famine, meteor impact, volcano, or climate change affecting elsewhere and driving immigrants here, or some sort of boom due to climate or technical innovation that attracts people to this region.

Where would they go? What would need to change. Decisions that look good (or bad) for a metro of 3 or 4 million people, look bad (or good) for one of 10 million people. We cannot optimize for both, but perhaps we can make decisions that allow us to adapt.

Clearly there is enough land … there are more populous cities in smaller areas. But the land would need to be reconfigured. We could simply build more densely on green fields and farms, or we could redevelop existing parking lots and developed land at higher densities. The ease of developing for a metropolis of 10 million however is lacking. The City of Minneapolis would probably need 1 million people in such an arrangement. People with a lot more time than me can figure out the amount of redevelopable land, and the potential population or jobs on those areas. I could see another 100,000 people in high-density residential in the downtown and near-downtown areas without much fuss, by building on surface parking and vacant or near vacant lots. We could probably subdivide existing units, put in accessory apartments, fonzies, and finished basements, and reduce the space per person for I guess another 200,000 people without much new construction. The remaining 300,000 would not go so smoothly. The land is not zoned for them, existing arrangements would be disrupted.

How would they move? The existing road network is congested enough with 3.something million people, it would be much more so with 3 times that population. The transit network as currently constituted would be insufficient.

We cannot build a network for 10 million with a population of 3 million. What can we do that will adapt? What rules should we use?

I cannot answer these questions with confidence, but I offer some speculations.

1. Preserve rights-of-way – acquiring long contiguous paths is difficult and expensive. Don’t let any go just because they aren’t being used now. One expects that with 10 million people, the cost-effectiveness of rail becomes much better, as the same fixed costs can be spread over 3 times as many riders. But that new rail system still needs right-of-way. It could go underground, or be elevated, but it would be cheapest if it could travel at-grade for as long as possible. This demands rights-of-way.

2. Maximize the width of those rights-of-way. Acquire as much land on either side of the right-of-way as possible, so you can expand later at minimum distress. Prevent encroachments.

3. Preserve contiguous spaces – Putting lots of small buildings scattered about on equal-sized, legally separate parcels are a lot harder to undo than fewer buildings on smaller parcels, with a few larger parcels remaining undeveloped. (I almost said use heterogenous lot sizes, but I figured that is more difficult to understand). Single-family homes (and condominiums) are very hard to redevelop because of the legal transaction costs. One of the reasons the street map of the City of London after the Great Fire of 1666 looked a lot like the City before the Fire was that while buildings burned, the property lines did not, and it was most convenient to rebuild in place (with better materials) than to reorganize the city in a better way as proposed by Christopher Wren.

4. Ensure connectivity – The 1 mile grid on which the Midwest of the US is laid out as a lattice upon which development occurs. Within the older cities and towns, this grid was replicated fractally. In newer areas, a hierarchical topology was imposed. This may have been okay for the car, but it is actively deleterious to the use of any other mode. Subdivisions connect to that lattice. Those subdivisions need to connect internally in a regular way to provide multiple paths between origins and destinations. That is the primary lattice needs to be regularly divided into finer and finer connected lattices.

5. Avoid irreversible decisions – Always keep in mind how you might undo something you do. Can your building be put to alternative uses, can it be recycled, will it leave toxic waste? Can legal land uses be changed in response to needs, or will neighbors need to be consulted in processes lasting years?

6. Adopt universal rules – Have as few rules as possible regulating decisions, only general rules that apply in the maximum number of circumstances. Fine-grained details that allow flexibility should be decided on a case-basis.

A Northstar train heads south through Elk River

For the past few years, the Minnesota Department of Transportation has been facilitating the Intercity Passenger Rail Forum, a monthly-scheduled meeting between policymakers at the state, city, and county levels plus various other organizations who are working on various projects to maintain existing passenger train service and add/restore other lines. Some meetings get canceled if there isn’t much to discuss, though one was held on Monday this week, and I was able to sit in.

The general picture

The funding picture for passenger rail is not very bright this year. The Minnesota House and Senate have included some freight rail projects in this year’s bonding bills, such as money to replace or upgrade highway/rail grade crossings, but there hasn’t been any funding put forth for the Southwest LRT line from Minneapolis to Eden Prairie. The House had $1 million for the Gateway Corridor along Interstate 94 toward/into Wisconsin (though the Gateway Corridor dropped commuter rail from their study last month). The Senate bill had $5 million in it for the Minneapolis Transportation Exchange, a plan to expand the Northstar and Hiawatha stations at Target Field in order to handle additional commuter, intercity, and light-rail traffic.

For the time being, many projects will have to rely on existing funds or see if they can obtain more money from cities, counties, and the federal government rather than the state.

Northern Lights Express (Duluth)

Bob Manzoline from the Northern Lights Express project said that the Minneapolis to Duluth line is in the final stages of environmental review and plans to release their Environmental Impact Statement for public comment sometime this month. The public will be able to respond to it for about a month, the NLX project will respond to comments, and finally a Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) should happen around June or July, meaning the project will be ready to proceed with final design and construction. Some design work has already happened—Most recently, the project has been doing LIDAR mapping (like radar but with lasers) along the route. The mapping project has resulted in some calls to police because it’s been done with black helicopters hovering 300 feet above the tracks, and people have been wondering what’s been going on.

A 6–8 month study is also planned to determine whether the train should simply run straight to the center of Hinckley or divert out to the edge of town to directly serve Grand Casino.  A direct connection to the casino would likely bump up ridership, and the study will attempt to find whether the diversion is financially justifiable.

Project officials say they’ll be able to get 30% of the design complete with existing funding.

Zip Rail (Rochester)

The presentation for the Zip Rail line to Rochester was focused around a recent study that said that building the line would provide about $1 billion in economic benefit annually—If true, that would generate $784 million in new tax revenue to the state plus another $1.6 bililon in taxes to the federal government over the first 25 years of operation.  The study relied heavily on IMPLAN economic modeling software for those numbers.  More direct user benefits in terms of time savings, avoided crashes, and reduced emissions were calculated to save $725 million over 25 years.

Nobody really knows what alignment the Zip Rail line might take yet (it might follow parts of the abandoned Chicago Great Western route which goes down to Dodge Center, it might run closer to U.S. 52, or any number of other paths), so there wasn’t any attempt to try and calculate changes in property values.

The project is still moving forward on its service development plan and is working toward doing an Alternatives Analysis and EIS, some of which can be accomplished with existing funds.

Saint Paul Union Depot

A fairly brief update was given for the Union Depot project in Saint Paul.  Things are progressing rapidly and the project is more than 60% complete.  Contractors will soon begin paving the parking area underneath the station’s massive train deck between Kellogg Boulevard and Shepard/Warner Road.  Tracks should be installed soon (the website for Trains magazine reports that a “first spike” ceremony will be held at the end of April).

Left out of the discussion was the fact that Greyhound Lines has decided not to run their buses to the depot once it opens, opting instead to consolidate into their Minneapolis depot at the Hawthorne Transportation Center.  Greyhound still has a small depot on University Avenue near Rice Street, though it will close after May 6th when Central Corridor construction blocks access.  Along that block, LRT tracks will shift to the south side of University Avenue (rather than running in the center), which will prevent bus access to the old depot.

Jefferson Lines, which also uses the Greyhound depot in Saint Paul, is planning to operate out of Amtrak’s Midway station for St. Paul customers until the Union Depot opens for service.

Bafflingly (to me, anyway), it turns out that Amtrak is going to continue to use their Midway depot for switching cars and for storage.  On most trips, an extra car gets added/removed to handle higher loads between the Twin Cities and Chicago, plus private cars are sometimes added to the train.  I’m hoping there’s a good reason for the situation, though I don’t know what the reason is yet.

The Union Depot is expected to fully reopen in November or December.

The Interchange

The Minneapolis Transportation Interchange, a project to expand the light- and heavy-rail platforms at Target Field, is almost ready to begin.  Operations of the Hiawatha Line were already changed at the beginning of March so that trains no longer use the tail tracks at the extreme western end of the route.  A permit to demolish the Environmental Services Building across 5th Street from the Ford Center is expected any day now.

Funding has been a bit of an issue for this project.  There either wasn’t much discussion of money at the meeting, or I just didn’t follow it well enough to write it down, but reports in the Star Tribune have said that there’s roughly a $30 million shortfall on the project at the present time.

There was a mention that some portions of the project might be sliced off and handed to private sector interests who may be able to build on their own (some retail has been planned in the station area).

Twin Cities to Milwaukee/Chicago

There are two distinct but clearly interrelated projects in the pipeline for adding train service between the Twin Cities and Chicago: A short-term plan to add a second daily train between Minnesota and Illinois, plus a medium-term plan to implement 110-mph train service with higher daily frequencies.

An Alternatives Analysis happened last year to select a route for trains reaching up to 110 mph between the Twin Cities and Milwaukee (they’d continue to Chicago, but the study specifically looked at the shorter corridor).  Mn/DOT is proceeding on to a Tier 1 Environmental Impact Statement—at least once they get done responding to all of the comments they got on the AA.  They received a lot of messages from people and organizations who wanted the train to go elsewhere, such as through Eau Claire.  Nonetheless, Mn/DOT will continue working on the Minnesota side of the route.

WisDOT is not actively participating in that study at the moment but is collaborating on the second daily train.  Amtrak is going to conduct a small study with funds from Mn/DOT, WisDOT, and La Crosse County, Wisconsin to figure out how much a second train would cost.  There’s also a question about where the train should terminate in the Twin Cities: Saint Paul Union Depot?  The Minneapolis Interchange?  Should it go farther to St. Cloud?  How about one of the Northstar stations in between?

There wasn’t any obvious discussion about the situation at Talgo in Milwaukee.  Talgo is a Spanish train manufacturer who moved in to an old automotive plant in the city a few years ago to build trains for Amtrak’s service between Milwaukee and Chicago, and who could eventually build trains for the service to Minnesota.  The Wisconsin legislature recently blocked funding to build a maintenance facility for the new trains, which means that two nearly-complete trains may be put in storage once they’re done.

At least one of the new trains had been expected to visit the Twin Cities by the end of June on a demonstration/endurance run, so it’s not clear whether that will happen or not.  On Wednesday, Talgo announced that they will start laying off workers on June 3rd.  But then again, the recall election for Scott Walker is on June 5th.  Anyone have a crystal ball handy?

Northstar

There wasn’t any significant discussion of the Northstar Line that I recall, but there are a few things happening that I should mention anyway.

The Star Tribune recently reported that an extension to St. Cloud won’t happen until the existing line reaches 4,500 daily passengers (it’s only around 2,000 today).  A new station is being added in Ramsey which should bump up ridership by around 15%, but that’s still a long way from what’s needed to make the Northstar run the longer distance.  A 230-unit residential project will also start construction next to the station next week, and other cities are also working on transit-oriented development zones around their stations, so ridership should keep climbing modestly for a while.

Of course, the biggest complaint about Northstar is its frequency of service.  Mn/DOT said at an earlier Passenger Rail Forum meeting that they were submitting a TIGER 2012 grant request to the U.S. Department of Transportation seeking to do a grade-separation of tracks at Foley Boulevard in Coon Rapids (just north of MN-610), which should help with that problem.  This project has been submitted before as an attempt to build a third main track in the area and add a station at the Foley Boulevard park-and-ride, which would increase capacity enough to run some more daily round-trips on the line.

However, TIGER grants have been very competitive.  The project failed to make the cut under the first round of TIGER grants a few years back.  I haven’t been able to find a copy of what was submitted, so I don’t know whether it was essentially the same as the old $99 million request or if it was smaller.  (The TIGER program for 2012 is only $500 million for the entire country, so a grant for 1/5th of that money would be unlikely.)

The new Ramsey station should open in November.

So, despite a funding stream that has been choked off quite a bit, there’s a lot going on in terms of future passenger train service in the state.  It’s hard to say whether it will all come to fruition, but there will definitely be a few new destinations popping up soon.

a high ratio of Place to Non-Place (photo credit: Nathan Lewis)

Non-Places are areas where generally no end-purpose activity occurs. Lewis considers roadways, parking lots, and undefined green space to be Non-Places. Roadways and parking lots generally facilitate the movement of people between places, but are not locations where the primary activities of life, work, and recreation occur. Undefined green space such as buffer landscaping around buildings is another form of Non-Place that can be found in any American city or town.

Mostly non-place

In some cases the line between Place and Non-place can be fuzzy. For example, a few feet of grass between an apartment building and a street: someone might one day decide to plop down there with a blanket to get some sun, but mostly it serves no activity and on the spectrum of Place to Non-Place, its closer to Non-Place.

Some locations could be one or the other, depending on use at the time. A parking lot could pull a complete switch from Non-Place to Place on the weekend if it hosts a farmers market. Anyone who has attended an Open Streets event will recognize how a even a busy roadway can transform from Non-Place to Place when recreational activity replaces motor vehicle traffic.

non-place becomes place, for a day (photo credit: Jennifer Simonson)

Non-place isn’t inherently a problem if it occupies only a proportionally small area. But many American cities and towns have what you might call a deficit of place, or a very low ratio of place to non-place. When the place to non-place ratio gets low, you get the characteristics of American suburbia: wide roads, buildings surrounded by acres of parking and landscaping, hostile pedestrian environment, massive infrastructure maintenance burdens, and other negative symptoms.

For more on Place and Non-Place, check out Nathan Lewis’ article.

Each of these photos shows a location where some element of the trail design was compromised to avoid having to remove trees. When I use the word “compromised”, I’m splitting hairs a bit and using it in an engineering sense, meaning that some measurable dimension does not meet the generally accepted design guidelines. The trail, which was fully reconstructed in 2009, meanders around the trees, rather than requiring the removal of trees. For example, in each of these cases, the trees are located too close to the edge of the trail without what the MnDOT Bikeway Facility Design Manual calls “horizontal clearance”. In other places, the trail narrows, or doesn’t provide the recommended 3′ separation between the path and the back of the curb. In some cases, the result is that these locations wind up being bottlenecks or experiencing some operational challenges during peak hours (which I presume is probably Saturday mornings in June or something similar).

I don’t intend that to be a criticism, and this isn’t really a post about trees. This is a beautiful trail – one of my favorites in the Twin Cities. Despite the “compromised” design, I’ve yet to hear a report of someone crashing into a tree because it was too close to the trail. Also, the trees are beautiful old oak trees – it would certainly be sad to see them torn down unnecessarily. For the record, I like trees, but I would have preferred the trees removed (we could plant dozens of new trees for a couple thousand dollars) and the trail standardized, but I’m also aware that this may be a minority opinion.

I don’t know why the MPRB decided not to remove the trees, but I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that it was simply because as a park board (rather than a transportation agency), the MPRB tends to naturally prioritize trees more than a transportation agency might. I wonder, how would this trail design have been different if, say, Hennepin County had designed the trail?

*****

We might design a trail differently for recreational users than we would for commuters. For example, a recreational trail might purposely meander, taking users through interesting terrain, or highlighting scenic areas. The trail would highlight the experience, rather than utility. Trails designed for commuters, on the other hand, might be flatter or straighter. Imagine Minnehaha Parkway for recreational users, Midtown Greenway for commuters.

Throughout the metro area, many of the prime trail routes used by commuters are managed by parks departments rather than transportation agencies. The MPRB and Three Rivers Park District (3RPD)collectively control most of the major commuter routes in the west metro, and St. Paul Parks & the DNR control much of the east metro trails (although, Hennepin & Ramsey Counties both own a few trails as well).

*****

I’m not trying to suggest that parks departments are wearing blinders, nor am I proposing transferring the trails to other agencies. I am certain that the engineers and planners at the MPRB, 3RPD, DNR, and other major parks departments, are aware of just how critical their trail facilities are to non-recreational cyclists in the Twin Cities. I’m also certain that they want to increase the number of people using their trails for any purpose – recreational, utilitarian, or otherwise. And yet, I don’t always hear them speaking the transportation language. For example, the MPRB 2020 Comprehensive Plan doesn’t mention non-recreational cyclists at all. The plan primarily assumes that people are riding bikes to reach “natural areas”, rather than to reach downtown, the University of Minnesota, or any other major destination located along the trails.

*****

What are the implications of major bicycle facilities critical to promoting bicycle commuting and utility cycling being owned and managed by agencies whose primary objective is to provide recreational opportunities?

• Bicycle Advisory Committee: advise the Mayor, Council and Park Board on bike-related issues. (13 vacancies)
• Pedestrian Advisory Committee: advise the Mayor and City Council on policies, programs, and actions for improving pedestrian safety, mobility, accessibility, and comfort. (8 vacancies)
• Capital Long Range Improvement Committee (CLIC): make recommendations to the City Council and Mayor on the five-year capital improvement program. (3 vacancies)
• Neighborhood and Community Engagement Commission: advise on community issues and needs related to community participation. (4 vacancies)
• Planning Commission: develop and implement the city’s Comprehensive Plan. (1 vacancy)

[Above: Four scenarios for Twin Lakes redevelopment laid out by Roseville planners in 2001]

“A Ramsey County district judge this past week declared “invalid and unenforceable” a Roseville city ordinance that would impose an “impact fee”  on various Twin Lakes property owners who seek to develop their property in the future.” [Roseville Patch, April 1, 2012]

A court ruling that flew under the radar last week may change the way cities and towns levy impact fees in Minnesota. The topic is admittedly dry – certainly not as exciting as a new football stadium or light rail projects. It takes a small education to get up to speed, but certainly worthwhile. [Note: To those advanced Streets.MN readers, you can read the entire 20-page judgement in PDF form: Link]

The Location:

There is a large formerly industrial parcel in the first-ring suburb of Roseville slated for redevelopment named “Twin Lakes” [Google Maps]. To get caught up to speed, here’s the Comprehensive Plan [PDF] and official  Twin Lakes Redevelopment Project page. The question however, is not over urban planning or design.

Last fall, the City of Roseville Council adopted Ordinance 1417; an ordinance that imposed a direct impact fee on various Twin Lakes property owners who seek to develop their property. While it is unclear specifically what these impacts fees were to fund, but suffice it to say, it was likely infrastructure improvements.

The ordinance was challenged, and the ruling goes something like this: “… since the roads Roseville plans to fund in the TLRA are available for use by the general public. Thus, in the context of a public road, Roseville’s impact fee is more like the tax than a regulatory or license fee.” [Star Tribune, March 29, 2012]

The ruling is interesting for a number of reasons.

1. Nexus

Impact fess aren’t as commonplace in the United States as they are in other parts of the developed world, but they aren’t without a legal backbone. Notably, legislative restrictions prevent impact fees from operating outside of a stricter “nexus” (e.g.: must be close to, or effect the paying property owner). The US Supreme Court holding in Nollan v. California Coastal Commission (1987) established that the power to impose impact fees (or, exactions) on a development is not without particular limits. Nollan states that a impact fee must advance a legitimate state interest and mitigate the adverse impact of the development. This doesn’t appear to apply in the Roseville case as there are likely to be few negative impacts, at least when compared to the existing land use. Most on-lookers would consider anything short of nuclear power plant an improvement.

2. Rough Proportionality

The most influential facet of the Nollan ruling was the institution of nexus in levying exactions, of which, the Court ruled a nexus must explicitly exist. The more recent case of Dolan v City of Tigard (1994) expands on this, stating that an additional standard of “rough proportionality” between proposed exactions and the project impacts that the exactions are intended to alleviate [see: Rough Proportionality: Who Pays for Infrastructure? - PDF]. No precise mathematical or financial equations are required, but the city must make an individualized determination that the required dedication is related both in nature and extent to the impact of the proposed development. The City of Roseville does this, but they go about doing it in a backwards way.

3. Backwards Thinking

Chapter 1022 of the Roseville city code details the process for the zoning overlay district. The requirements are to first conduct a traffic study and then determine the amount of network trips that will occur from the development (as determined by the Institute of Transportation Engineer’s (ITE) Trip Generation Handbook, 8th Edition).

Most of the Infrastructure Improvements for the Twin Lakes plan (or, TLIIR) outlines that there isn’t adequate infrastructure, so property owners can pay the City if they’d like to redevelop their property. Furthermore, it outlines how it will charge per trip generation:

If development on a Block will generate Network Trips in excess of the number allocated to that Block in Section E below, the property owner(s) of such Block may, as provided in Section C1 above, enter into a voluntary development agreement which includes the payment of the Twin Lakes Roadway Improvement Cost Allocation Amount allocated to such Block in the TLIIR, as adjusted for the development to be constructed on such Block using the methodology set forth in the TLIIR.

It’s city-code-speak, but hard to read it your not familiar with. So, I’ll only quote it one more.

If development on a Block will not generate Network Trips in excess of the number allocated to the Block in this Section E, the property owner(s) of such Block shall not be obligated to pay the Twin Lakes Roadway Improvement Cost Allocation Amount set forth in the TLIIR for such development.

In non-city code speak: “if you create traffic, you pay more. If you create less traffic, you might not have to pay at all.” There are a handful of problems with this, and other developments that are proposed in the small area. I’ll discuss those in part 2.

To be continued … This ruling could have a big impact on how cities levy fees. I’d love to hear your thoughts on opinions. Please leave comments.

Last Friday, I received a couple of boisterous reactions by email to the Baxter assessment story I linked to. These guys were livid, and I suspect many others will be as I discuss it more fully here today. I too often forget that people don’t know this stuff. I’ve been immersed in it for years and have, as a mostly powerless bystander, become numb to it. Thanks for the reminder — this will be eye opening for many.

As we’ve discussed at Strong Towns for years, almost all of America’s cities are financially insolvent. They have far, far more liabilities than they have revenue that they can tap into to pay for those commitments. This is the result of 60 years of the Suburban Experiment, a development pattern that creates (for a while) the illusion of wealth by allowing cities to exchange near term cash benefits associated with new growth for long term liabilities associated with infrastructure maintenance. We’re now in the long term and, financially, everything is breaking down.

City managers and other public officials that argue with me on that last paragraph (and there are getting to be fewer and fewer that do) almost universally depend on one funding mechanism as the key to remaining solvent: the special assessment.

For many cities, the special assessment is a magic money machine. The idea is simple. The city does a project. The costs of that project are assessed (charged) to the property owners that benefit from the project. To make things go smoothly, the city generously finances the project at reasonable terms and collects the money “painlessly” in the same way that property taxes are collected.

If it were only this simple.

Anyone who listened last week to the health care testimony at the U.S. Supreme Court knows that a big deal was made over the government’s ability to tax versus the government’s ability to collect money in other ways. Among other things, the 5th Amendment to the Constitution states that individuals may not:

…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…

The 14th Amendment ensured that states (and by extension, cities) would be bound by these same provisions. At the time it was adopted, the Obama administration argued to us — the masses — that the health care impact fee was not a tax, but to the court last week they insisted that it was. Why? Because the government has the authority to tax citizens but it can’t take your property (money) by other means without due process (nor can they delegate that authority to others, aka: insurance companies). This is not a small nuance; it is the basis of our government.

What if the government decided that you should pay an extra $20,000 in taxes this year. Not anyone else, just you. That would be illegal, a violation of your rights to equal treatment under the law and due process. Now, if the government decided to tax every family an extra $20,000 in taxes this year, they may have a revolt, but the tax would not single out any one person (or specific individuals) and would thus be legal. There is a lot of legal nuance here and attorneys can and will argue over this for as long as we are a country, but in a broad sense, the government can’t take your money unless they tax you or go through a process that affords you the right to appeal (like a fine you can argue in court or, in this case, a special assessment).

So special assessments are not taxes. It is a charge in exchange for a benefit. I’m going to go back and quote the 5th Amendment again.

…nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Here’s how this applies: If the city takes your money to build a street — not through taxing everyone but through a special assessment on you — you have to receive “just” compensation. Is your compensation that you get to drive on the street? No, everyone has that right since it is a public street. So what is your compensation?

It is the value that is added to your property from the improvement. That is it. Period. End of discussion.

Let’s put some real numbers on this. Your property is worth $200,000. The city goes out and improves the street in front of your house. The cost is $14,000 per property. After the project, your property is now worth $205,000. What is the maximum your special assessment can be?

The answer: $5,000. That is the amount that your property increased in value due to the project.

But the cost was $14,000 per property. Who pays the rest? That is where the general taxpayer comes in. If the project is for the public good, then tax everyone to pay for it. If the project benefits just you and a few others, that benefit will be reflected in the increased value of your property and can be captured through the special assessment process.

I actually find that Wikipedia (bless their souls) do an awesome job of explaining this. Fromtheir entry for special assessment (my emphasis added):

The property tax most citizens are aware of is known as an ad valorem tax. This tax is used to fund general or day-to-day government operations. An ad valorem tax is commonly levied on both real and personal property. A property tax is based upon a property’s market value. The ad valorem tax levy is based upon a “millage rate” which never varies from parcel to parcel. The foundation principles for ad valorem taxes are that each property is valued according to its market value (equity) and that each property is taxed based upon a single millage rate that applies to everyone (uniformity).

Special assessment levies are not ad valorem property taxes even though they may be collected on a property tax bill. A special assessment is based strictly upon the concepts of “need” and “benefit.” Special assessments require a finding that the public improvement is “needed” for a reason consistent with the law which permits the special assessment and that each property specially assessed receives a unique, measurable and direct benefitfrom the public improvement that was needed. The basic idea is, if government funds make a property more valuable, the government has the right to get money back from a property owner. This contrasts significantly with the ad valorem tax which is extracted to fund government operations that are designed to benefit all citizens.

If I could underline “measurable” twice, I would.

There are some of you that see the clear problem at this point, but for those that don’t, let me point it out to you. You live on a paved road. You are refinancing your home and get an appraisal that says it is worth $200,000. The road in front of your house is in rough shape and the city needs to fix it, which they do in the weeks after your appraisal. The cost they want to assess you is $14,000. In light of the assessment, the bank requests a new appraisal. You had a paved road with cracks and potholes before and now you have a smooth, paved road. How much is your house worth?

Very likely, it is still going to be worth $200,000. If you had gone from a gravel road to a paved road, maybe you would have seen an increase in value. Maybe, but the form that appraisers use and the comparables they review don’t get into the quality of the pavement. There is an inherent assumption that, since a property fronts a paved road and since the property owner pays taxes, that road is going to be maintained. It is a rare case that a simple maintenance project is going increase the value of a property.

Let me give you another example to drive this point home and show you that roads and streets are the least of our problems. Look at that water pipe buried in the ground. The one you’ve been paying a water bill for decades supposedly to maintain. Let’s say the city knows that pipe is old and needs to be replaced before it becomes a costly maintenance burden and so they dig it up and put in a new pipe. How much more is your property worth now that it gets water from a shiny new pipe instead of an old, worn out pipe? Pretend you were out of the country for the six months that this happened and arrived home without knowing. Would you notice a difference? It is really hard to argue that something adds value when it is imperceptible.

Now the city managers, engineers and finance directors are all hopping mad at me. Let me ask their question for them: If there are four homes on a cul-de-sac and the city has to go in and fix the street, replace the sidewalk, replace the sewer pipe and the water pipe, and the cost is $400,000, who, Mr. Marohn, are you suggesting pays for that? Nobody is using that infrastructure except for those four homes. Shouldn’t they each pay $100,000? Isn’t that fair since they are the only property owners that benefit?

My answer is simple: It is public infrastructure, taken over by the city for maintenance through a public process, and it is now the city’s to maintain at full cost of that maintenance, minus any increase in property value the project might create. If the city did not think this infrastructure served a public purpose, it should not have taken it over and assumed the maintenance liability.

Now that is very inconvenient — in fact it is devastating — to the wishes of city officials. As we’ve demonstrated many times, the amount they are collecting through property taxes and fees pays only a tiny fraction of the cost of maintaining this infrastructure. The rest they assume they can make up through government transfer payments, taking on debt and through special assessments. If they can’t — and they really can’t, if they are challenged — it destroys their budget and the gig is up.

I’ve found that there is an art to assessing improvements that keeps this all from turning too ugly for a city. Let me again go back to the Wikipedia entry for special assessments:

Among the unique characteristics of the special assessment is one that makes a special assessment particularly onerous for ordinary citizens. A special assessment levy enjoys a legal benefit known as a “presumption of validity.” This means that it is much harder and usually, much more difficult to appeal than the ad valorem property tax most citizens are familiar with. This happens because it is difficult for the ordinary citizen to recognize that an error in the special assessment procedure or methodology has occurred and the resources a taxpayer must use to fight a special assessment levy are more expansive and costly than resources to fight an improper ad valorem tax on their real estate.

If your real estate taxes are messed up, you go to a hearing with some proof of that and there is a board that, while not always accommodating, will typically hear reasoned arguments. If your special assessment is messed up, you have to go court. Not only that, before you go to court you have to file proper objections with the city indicating that you are contesting the assessment. This all has to be done within certain time frames or your right to appeal is lost.

To fight your assessment, you will need to hire an attorney and an appraiser willing to testify in court. This is going to cost you between $6,000 and $10,000. Let’s say that your assessment is $14,000 — are you going to pay $10,000 in hopes of getting a verdict, at the district court level, that is 100% in your favor and that the city — with more resources and more to lose — won’t appeal to higher levels? Not likely.

So there is an incentive for the city’s approach to become devious. Keep the assessment low enough to where it is more expensive to fight it than to simply pay it. Make the project complicated — don’t simply fix the infrastructure but improve it in some marginal way, like a wider shoulder or something — so that more expertise is needed to ascertain what is going on. Make the assessment process as prefunctory and opaque as legally permissible to avoid the opportunity for substantive objection. Of course, since this is all being done for the “greater good”, the deviousness is justified as what is needed to “get things done”. At least that is what we tell ourselves.

I’ve seen poor, uneducated people living in trailer houses assessed more than their home was worth. I’ve seen well-heeled property owners negotiate their own “insider” terms of assessment. I’ve seen citizens forced, through the assessment process, to pay for improvements that actually devalue their property and their neighborhood. The end of our video, Conversation with an Engineer, lays out this irony of ironies.

In recent years when property values were rising and the real estate market was liquid, the special assessment process ran into few objections. If the assessment was too high, people could sell their property, typically make a lot of money, and buy something else. Progress was not worth fighting over since all seemed to be benefiting. Today is a much different story. Add to rising property taxes to falling home values and a frozen housing market, and I anticipate there will be some aggressive resistance to the special assessment process.

And when that happens, even the smug city officials that believe they have everything under control, that they need not be concerned with the public return on investment, that special assessments are the perfect tool for routine maintenance — even they will need to acknowledge that we’ve long passed the time when we need to start building strong towns.

Special to streets.mn , April 1, 2012

The City of Minneapolis recently received Federal funding under the Advanced Quality Urban Waterways Initiative (New Starts) Retro-Transit program to investigate alternative scenarios for transforming city streets into canals. By revealing the underlying stream beds that have been paved over in more than 150 years of the city’s existence, the proposed Urban Waterways system aims to restore the natural habitat of the endangered Musk Beaver and the Yukon Green Frog within the city of Minneapolis. It is said this is 17 percent more effective than green roofs in filtering polluted rainwater before it drains into the Mississippi River.

In addition, the canals will create a distinctive urban form and enable the deployment of a new set of environmentally-friendly (green) water taxis. These water buses will be painted Chartreuse to aid in identification. Express water buses will stop only every other block. The aim is to eventually convert every street and avenue to a canal, so that all travelers will have to either walk on the Skyway system or use public water-based transit to reach their destinations. To avoid transfers, local public transit agencies plan to commission designs for amphibious water/land buses.

Federal grants

In addition to the AQUWI grant, Minneapolis is also happy to have received a “Swimmable Communities” grant from the US Department of Parks and Recreation to help pay for the study. This grant will focus on the feasibility of making the canals swimmable year round, through heating in the winter (and cooling in the summer). It is anticipated that heating will be in place during the winter months of August to July. Minneapolis Director of Canals, Dutchess Bridgewater, says “Initiativizing this project will put Minneapolis uniquely on the Map with our sister cities of Venice, Stockholm, and Amsterdam”.

Restoring historic environment

Archeologists have found that the land Minneapolis was built on was historically a swamp, dubbed the Eye of the Pig, that was filled in by native Americans around 1100 AD to form the capital of the civilization of Antonopolis. That civilization collapsed about a century later, for unknown reasons, but mysterious runes found in northern Minnesota suggest that an invasion may have been the cause.

A fine batch of sausage

The session’s not quite over, but probably all the bills that will pass this year at the MN Legislature have been introduced.  I thought streets.mn readers might be interested in those bills that affect the state’s transit landscape, so here is a bowdlerized version of a summary from my personal blog.  Warning: I am not a lawyer, and only a dabbler in the dark art of local politics, so feel free to distrust my interpretations and predictions.  I’ve provided links to the official pages for each bill so you can make up your own mind.  Also please note that this list is House-focused; this is due to the House’s pages being a bit better than the Senate’s in user-friendliness.

HF2685 Metro Transit service fare increases required  As the title indicates, this bill would have raised Metro Transit fares by a quarter in an attempt to punish transit riders for high gas prices (a motivation expressed by Rep. Bruce Vogel of Willmar), but in a twist of the knife has been appropriated as a vehicle for an omnibus transportation finance (?) bill (but not the omnibus transportation policy bill, which you’ll see is below).  The bill contains some other heinous provisions that I’ll describe below, but does not as of writing contain the transit-slashing vindictive fare increase.

HF2852 Distance-based transit fare surcharge pilot program established for replacement service transit providers  It’s not necessarily a bad idea to use a distanced-based or “zone” fare system, but the language in this bill only allows an increase in fare for distance, which could be a problem for short-distance express service.  This bill has been incorporated into the omnibus transportation bill, so it has a pretty good chance of passing.

HF2473 Transportation public-private partnership pilot program and related regulations established  The Legislature is graciously allowing MnDot to propose a public-private partnership with a selected private company, but not to accept a public-private partnership that a private company proposes out of the blue.  The bill actually suggests a project for the pilot program, the Mississippi River crossing that would connect I-94 to US-10 near Clearwater, but I mention it here because the bill ignores a potential application to transit, although it doesn’t expressly forbid it.

HF2387 Greater Minnesota transit funding provided, bonds issued, and money appropriated  There’s usually some fairly general bonding money for Greater Minnesota transit in the bonding bill; this bill would have provided $10m, but that got shrunk to $2.5m in the final House version.  The Senate seems to have upped it to $4m, and I’d guess it will end up around there.

HF2321 Metropolitan transit service opt-outs authorized  DFLer Bev Scalze makes this session’s transit-wacking bipartisan with her bill to reopen opt-outs for suburban municipalities.  She got sympathy from the committee for her dissatisfaction with her community’s transit service, and this bill has been incorporated into the omnibus transportation bill listed above as HF2685.  I would like to take this opportunity to conjecture that Rep. Scalze has never taken the bus, or else she perhaps would have not introduced this bill that is guaranteed to make Twin Cities transit more confusing.

HF2271 Minneapolis to Duluth high speed passenger rail funding provided, bonds issued, and money appropriated  Alas, ’twas not to be funded, but just about every DFLer with a district along the proposed route signed as an author.

HF2155 Central corridor light rail line property valuation increases limited  Here’s a fun one – legislatively limiting the increase in property values caused by Central LRT.  Of course, they’re only limiting the increase in taxable value, not sale value.  No one wants any pain with their pleasure, I guess.  The Senate version actually got referred to the committee on Taxes, but the House version is just sitting there.

HF1284 Omnibus Transportation Policy  Bus use of shoulders is expanded by this bill, both in terms of where and how fast.  On the where side, authority will be given to counties and cities to allow buses to use shoulder on roads that they own.  On the how fast side, MnDot will be able to raise the speed limit for buses on shoulders in specific locations after conducting a study, which would have prevented the greenwashing reasoning for restriping a bus shoulder as a general traffic lane and arguing that it will improve bus speed.

HF1943 Metropolitan Council transit funding provisions modified and HF2696 Metropolitan Council; formula changed for assistance to cities and towns with replacement transit service  Mike Beard worked tenaciously this year to redistribute funds from Metro Transit to suburban opt-outs; one of his efforts took the form of HF1943, which attempts to restore cuts that the Met Council made to opt-out funding as a method of dealing with their own budget cuts.  In the March 7th meeting, Met Council Gov’t Affairs Director Judd Schetnan responded by pointing out that most of the opt-outs had reserves equaling 150% of their annual budgets, implying that they could whether these cuts relatively easily.  HF1943 doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, perhaps because Beard found a better way to redistribute money to the suburbs in HF2696.  This bill nearly doubles the amount of MVST money that goes to opt-outs, and has been included in HF2685, which looks likely to pass.

This being a bonding year, there were also many transit projects that got their own capital funding bills, including NLX, Bottineau, Southwest, a park-and-ride in Maple Grove, a transit center in Duluth (rehab of the gorgeous Depot maybe?), the Lake Street transit station, and many more.  None were included in the bonding bills, which only nodded to transit in the House’s version, which included $1m for upgrades to track between St Paul and Hopkins, potentially for use on Red Rock commuter rail or “HSR” to Chicago.  The final bonding bills may change in the conference committee, though, so now’s the time to contact your legislator and ask they listen to the extraordinary popular support for the Southwest Transitway.

Finally, the bill that would most affect transit hasn’t exactly been introduced yet, though it has received a hearing.  Championed by Mike Beard, this bill would transfer transportation planning functions to an independent board of elected officials appointed by metro area counties, and it would also fund transit through property taxes(again) instead of the general fund.  There’s not enough time left in this session for this bill to make it through the legislative sausage grinder, but Mike Beard seems to think he’ll be in the position to shepherd it through next year.  I guess we’ll find out in November…

The future of transit in Minnesota?

Starting in late 2009, the L & H Development team, of which was am a part, began a series of planning and design meetings with the Corcoran Neighborhood Association (CNO) to create a concept for the property. The team knew the Minneapolis Public Schools, which currently owns the 6-acre site, was issuing an RFP, and felt working with the neighborhood group to create a plan was prudent. CNO already uses a portion of the site for its Midtown Farmers Market. The site also contains an office building used for classrooms, and a surface parking lot.

The design centers around a public plaza, on which the farmers market and other events will be held. A mixed-use building will front Lake Street, with housing contined in other buildings at the site. CNO approved the concept plan in late 2011, and now that a purchase agreement is imminent, L & H is pursuing financing to push the development ahead. These next few months will be critical as the design gets refined from concept to detail. We zoom down from 40,000 feet and now decide where trees go, how wide sidewalks are, what building faces look like and where doors are, and most importantly, what developers are building and where.

It is my hope that when all is said and done, the project features mature trees, pleasant sidewalks, a public square with public art, the farmers market and events, with a restuarant facing it that you can’t tell for sure where the square ends and the restaurant patio begins, a coffee shop and doors – many doors. Retail doors, office doors, residential doors – all opening on to the sidewalk and activating the public realm. It matters less the actual design and height of the buildings – what matters most is the public realm and how those buildings relate and add to it.

What is known is it will all be steps from light rail and this development could become a national model for transit-oriented development. Stay tuned!

Minneapolis Open Streets 2011 Photo: Bethany Heemyer

Rules of the Road

From Sean Hayford Oleary

A bicycle is kind of a difficult creature on the road: not quite a vehicle, not quite a pedestrian. This balance can lead to a lot of confusion for all users of the road when it comes to understanding proper right-of-way.

The basic principle is that a bike is a vehicle, and generally the movement rules applicable to cars are applicable to the bike. However, there are a lot of areas where a bike differs.

The first difference is that Minnesota law distinguishes between sidewalk and street riding. A sidewalk cyclist is considered a pedestrian, and has right-of-way over motor vehicles in a crosswalk. As a pedestrian, a sidewalk cyclist is not required to stop at stop signs and is bound by the pedestrian walk/don’t walk signals at traffic lights, rather than the vehicle signals.

Most bike folks know that sidewalk cycling is problematic. In urban areas, it can be dangerous and disrespectful for pedestrians. In fact, it’s against city ordinance to ride on the sidewalk in most business districts in Minneapolis, including Lake Street, Uptown, Downtown, and near the University. Even in suburban areas, however, sidewalk cycling increases your risk of crashes, because it makes you substantially less visible to drivers.

However, even a bicyclist who never rides on the sidewalk may run into this legal area. For example, the Midtown Greenway has many on-grade crossings (most notably near Hiawatha Ave). At these locations, bicycles are considered pedestrians and have right of way. Bear in mind that while you may not be subject to a stop sign as a pedestrian-cyclist, you should consider the sign’s intent: if you’re being as a pedestrian, you should be cycling in a way that is reasonably consistent with ped speed. Don’t go into a crosswalk at 20 mph if you expect cars to be able to react appropriately.

On the street, stop signs can also pose a tricky situation for cyclists. It is extremely common to run them, with varying levels of caution. From a legal perspective, there is not currently a distinction between vehicles and street-riding cycles when it comes to stop signs: like vehicles, you are expected to make as complete a stop as you reasonably and safely can on your vehicle. From a safety perspective — especially if you sometimes fail to make this complete stop — keep two basic things in mind:

1. At 2-way stops, yield to pedestrians and cross traffic. Make sure the way is clear before riding into the intersection.

2. At all-way stops, yield to pedestrians and then be prepared to take turns with vehicles. Drivers may become unsure in this situation. They may offer you a hand signal to proceed — or, you should be prepared to offer them one.

While stop signs treat street-riding cyclists the same as drivers, red lights do not. Minnesota has an Unchanging Red Light law that allows cyclists to run red lights if they:

1. Make a complete stop
2. Reasonably believe that the light does not detect them, or will not change
3. Yield to cross traffic

Note that you are not required to use the pedestrian push signal (though, if there is too much cross traffic to run the light, this may still be your safest option). This is technically an affirmative defense — which means you might still get a ticket for it, but if you can show that you followed the requirements of the Unchanging Light law, the ticket will be dismissed.

Okay. So while I’ve talked a lot about interactions with motor vehicles, I should say a few words about pedestrians. Pedestrians have right-of-way over vehicles (including bikes) at all crosswalks and all unsignalized intersections. Pedestrian right-of-way at unmarked crosswalks is routinely ignored by vehicles, but like drivers, you could get a ticket for violating it. Be a good example to our car-driving brothers and sisters and stop. Also, remember that on shared-use paths — or on the sidewalk — pedestrians have right-of-way over cyclists using the facility. Be respectful and give them their due space.

(Lastly, note that these are Minnesota-specific laws. They’re substantially similar in other US states, though few have the Unchanging Red Light law.)

What have you experienced while riding in other cities or countries? Are there laws that you appreciated in those locations that you’d like to see implemented here? Were there problematic laws or rules that you think we should avoid?

You may contain the creek, but you can't control the creek

The Transportation & Public Works Committee of the Minneapolis City Council discusses a lot of interesting stuff but seems to either use too many or not enough words to describe what they’re talking about.  Here is an attempt to add some context to the dry but vital meeting topics.  I’ve been summarizing them here at streets.mn since the beginning of the year; here’s a list of past meetings if your interest is piqued.

1.  Public Works High Performing Employee Awards  I take back every defense I ever made of public employees as thrifty and efficient workers – these guys got free breakfast!  And all they had to do was save the life of someone stuck in a flood.  John Galt is rolling in his grave…

2.   Mississippi Watershed Management Organization Joint and Cooperative Agreement  Fridley, Columbia Heights and wee Hilltop have joined the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization (WMO).  They previously belonged to the Six Cities WMO, but that recently dissolved with most of its members joining the Coon Creek WMO.  Presumably the watersheds themselves did not shift, so I sense politics afoot.

3.   Bassett Creek Shoreline Restoration  The City is partnering with the Park Board and the creek’s Watershed Management Organization to repair erosion along Bassett Creek, mostly in Wirth Park but also behind that giant hulking abandoned mill across Glenwood.  Biolog and rip rap will be installed for “toe protection”, but don’t kick off your shoes just yet – the toe of a stream bank refers to the part that is closest to the water.  Now if only the rest of Bassett Creek actually had banks to restore…

4.   Settlement Agreement  The asphalt Knutson Construction used on a short segment of 4th Ave N between Bryant and Dupont was not up to snuff, so they’re paying the City a cool $11k, to be used on the extra maintenance this crappy asphalt will require.

5.   Seward Community Bike Walk Center (SCBWC)  Here is an explanation from the RCA of why this is not just a subsidized bike shop in a fairly wealthy neighborhood:

The SCBWC will operate community-based transportation programming and educational services designed to increase bicycling and walking among populations in Seward and the surrounding neighborhoods that are under-represented in non-motorized transportation activities; especially low-income, minority and immigrant youth and women populations. The proposal builds upon experience by Seward Neighborhood Group that includes community organizing at Seward Towers and with the East African Community in Seward, as well as several demonstration biking and walking programs tested in the community.

That’s great, but every time I see something like this I wonder why we can’t have crosswalks.

New Parking Landscape for Ventura Village

6.   Critical Parking Area  Ventura Village is getting resident-permit parking along the odd side of about four, strangely non-contiguous blocks.

7.   Combining Near North, Grant Area, and Olson Memorial Hwy Frontage Rd Street Resurfacing Projects  I will take the credit for the City combining these projects – they clearly are copying my idea from my write-up of the 1/31/12 meeting.

8.   Cedar Lake Rd N Street Resurfacing Project  Maybe two blocks of Cedar Lake Rd N are going to be resurfaced to the tune of $385k.  This craggy stretch has somehow escaped paving since before the US entered World War II, and lies just north of the delightful Bassett Creek Trail.  Time to add bike lanes here as recommended in the Bike Master Plan, although this street is very narrow so it seems unlikely.

9.   8th Ave NE Street Resurfacing Project  Three blocks of 8th Ave NE and one block of 6th St NE will be resurfaced for just under $100k.  These blocks last felt the heated breath of asphalt in 1951 and 1965.  My wish list for this segment would include advisory bike lanes along 8th (the Bike Master Plan identifies it as an arterial bikeway west of 5th St NE) and a sidewalk or bike path connector to Washington St NE through the little triangle of Park Board-owned land.  If the latter happens I’ll be flabbergasted, but the former is possible, although it sounds like advisory bike lanes would need FHWA approval so sharrows are more likely.

10.  2nd St NE Street Resurfacing Project  About a mile and a quarter of 2nd St NE will be resurfaced in three separate segments, one between 17th and Lowry, one between 3rd and Broadway, and the one block between East Hennepin and 1st Ave NE.  The project will shrink the City treasury by $1.6m.  The Bike Master Plan has nothing to say about any of these segments, but I would suggest looking at putting something on the block between East Hennepin and 1st since people likely use it to connect to these one-way facilities (did East Hennepin ever get striped?).

Tubes! Crosswalks! Trees! Where'd Minneapolis go?

11.  Downtown Minneapolis Public Realm Conservancy Study  Public Works is throwing $5k into the pot for a study of the feasibility of creating a nonprofit entity to coordinate the “greening [of] the public realm.”  This grew out of a goal in the Downtown Council’s 2025 plan, which involved many pictures of currently non-existent trees on downtown streets, as well as pictures of men in futuristic tubes.  Downtown’s streets sure could use some more green, but it seems like Public Works could accomplish it all by itself by simply replacing underused traffic lanes with trees (boulevard trees require 5.5′, and one traffic lane is at least 11′; works out neat when you consider pretty much every street east of 2nd Ave S is overbuilt, and many west of it, too).

12.  Capital Project Close-Outs  For the past two years Public Works has been digging through its couch cushions for change, analyzing the final costs of finished projects to see if any were finished for less than budgeted.  If I’m reading this spreadsheet right, they found a good $3.75m of funds available to be reallocated to stuff like free breakfast for honored employees.  Actually, the funds have been reallocated following a process they’ve been using “for years,” according to CM Colvin Roy, which involves “matching up project funds that are remaining from a project that didn’t consume all the funds, with a project that needs more funds, all of these projects approved of course.”  It turns out that investors don’t like the bonds they bought for infrastructure to instead go to bagels for heroes.  In fact, the outrageously expensive and incredibly useful Cedar Lake Trail extension gets most of the spare change, a bit more than $3m if I’m counting correctly.  But don’t worry; while most of the projects in this close-out are paving-oriented, Steve Kotke promises more impending close-outs from surface water and sewer projects.  If accounting wizardry is your thing, check out the further discussion on this issue at the Ways & Means committee today.

13. Bids  A bunch of bids were accepted at this meeting; interesting bids include Tiller Corp’s $5.5m contract to supply asphalt (apparently nearly a 48% increase over 2011, probably due more to increased paving activities than peak oil) and Graymont’s $2m contract to supply quicklime to the Water Works, for which they charge 8% less if delivered by train rather than by truck.

14.  Sabo Bridge Update  While the crack team of forensic bridge scientists from LeHigh University continues its investigation as to the cause of the cable connector doohickey, Public Works continues to monitor the bridge daily.  Driving through the area continues to be a real pain.

Bonus:  solid waste system changes  Last fall, the City Council decided to switch from a multi-sort recycling system, but staff is still evaluating whether it’ll be single- or dual-sort.  They’re still thinking about how it’ll work with organics collection.

Garbage can land, Dunwoody under 394

The goal of the region’s planners, and of the city itself, is to Maximize Accessibility. Cities (metros) have one purpose: To reach more things in less time. These things include jobs, friends, mates, security, supplies, and so on. If you do not wish to reach these things, you should not live in a city.

This has two aspects:

Where can we put More things (land use) and

How do we ensure we spend Less time (transportation).

Transportation and land use cannot be treated in isolation, the need to be arranged relative to each other.

There are a variety of strategies to try to achieve this goal.

1. Adaptability.

(Un?)fortunately the future is uncertain. When the street grid was laid out in the 1800s, no one seriously planned for the automobile. It was nevertheless adaptable. In contrast, when the Metrodome went up in the 1980s, it was intended to be flexible (to support multiple sports in one facility) yet it will barely last 30 years in useful service, it has not adapted to changing circumstances.

The flip-side of flexible is design to fit and customization. The Metrodome was not custom, and hence could not out-compete potential custom-designed stadiums.

Identifying what technologies are adaptable (can be modified to be used for things that were not intended or at least not the first intended use) and what are flexible (can be used as intended for multiple things), is a challenge, but not impossible. This is an exercise seldom undertaken. Similarly deciding where to be standard, and where to be custom and fit-to-suit in advance is hard, but necessary. Bespoke designs generally require much greater benefits than flexible designs, as they have no other use.

2. Resilience, Reliability & Robustness

As we learned in 2007, the I-35W bridge was structurally deficient and fracture critical, and so once one element failed, the whole bridge did as well. Fortunately, the street network is not critical in the same way. When one link failed, people adapted well, finding alternative routes or destinations.

Networks do have vulnerabilities (selected choke points) which both need to be made more resilient and less likely to fail, and need redundancy in case they do fail.

Transit services are also vulnerable to strikes (e.g. 2004). We have basically one provider (and its unions). There are more reliable ways to organize. Multiple providers, contracting, franchises, etc. are strategies that the Metropolitan Council should seriously consider. It is unusual in the US, but typical elsewhere in the world where transit actually works.

3. Skate to where the puck will be, not where it is.

We know some things about changing technologies. While we cannot fully anticipate what those changes will be, we expect the future is not like today. Yet essentially none are acknowledged in planning and forecasts, which assume technology and behavior are quite fixed. This leads to next strategy:

4. Scenarios not Forecasts

The future is uncertain. Despite best efforts, forecasts have been terribly inaccurate. There are “black swans” everywhere. We need to consider a large set of possible outcomes and plan for those rather than one “expected value”. This reduces risk, enhances reliability, robustness, and resilience.

5. Reinforce Success, Cull Failure.

We need to be active Darwinists. If a strategy is successful, do more of it. If it is unsuccessful, stop throwing money at it.

Resources are scarce. Money, time, energy, effort spent on losing strategies cannot be spent on better ones.

Admit failure (at least of your predecessors). Not everything the Metropolitan Council has ever done is a success. You are not the Pope.

6. Recognize Lifecycle

All technologies go through birth, growth, maturity, and decline stages. Plan accordingly. Do not invest in expensive capital projects for mature technologies. Learn to manage instead. For decades we have climbed down Mt Transit and up Mt Auto. This means we have changed our urban form to one centered on people relying on transit to one relying on the auto. The more we climb up Mt Auto, the farther we are from the peak of Mt Transit. We cannot easily go back (nor should we necessarily do so). What is our next technology, what has peaked, what is truly growing?

7. Flatten Hierarchies (“The City is not a Tree”)

Connections allow multiple paths, reduce vulnerability, and increase interactions. At a spatial level we see this with Cul-de-sacs, which put all their eggs in one basket. If the entrance to a cul-de-sac is blocked, the residents are cut-off. In contrast a more robust network has multiple pathways, no one can be cut-off with a single disruption. This is not just a prescription for transportation networks, but for a whole range of policies. This reduces risk, enhances reliability, robustness, and resilience.

8. Information everywhere

Information wants to be free. Stop making it expensive. Parking regulation signs have more information density than the typical Bus Stop sign. In order to feel comfortable traveling everywhere, I need to have ready information at my fingertips or eyeballs about where and how I go next. I have to have confidence this information will also be available at my destination. Information increases usage. Providing a service that no one knows about as useful as not providing the service at all. About 1 percent of Twin Cities trips are by transit. There are many reasons for this. One of them is information.

9. Incentives Matter

People, firms, governments, respond to incentives. Structure the game so the incentives align with ends. Examples follow:

A. Loans not Grants
What about a Metropolitan Investment Bank rather than Grant programs? Lend money to communities who want to do things (infrastructure, buildings), on the condition they pay it back over time (from user fees, value capture, etc.).
Local governments will only do things that are worthwhile. Chicago is doing something like this.

B. Full Cost Pricing on Development
Suppose new development had to pay their share of the full capital costs of public facilities required to serve it?
This is equitable and efficient.

C. Full Cost Pricing for Travelers
Suppose travelers had to pay for the pollution they produce and the congestion they impose on others?
They would travel more efficiently, better use infrastructure, be less peaked.

D. Capturing the Benefits
Suppose infrastructure providers could capture the land appreciation that results from their investments.
There would be more investment.

Are these things difficult?

Yes, and that is why you are paid the big money, to make difficult decisions. These are worthwhile things, that will improve the efficiency of the region, lower costs, enhance services, upgrade the experience of users, and reduce both failures and the consequences of failures.

Taxis are generally off my radar when thinking of different modes of transportation. I tend to walk, bike, and take buses or trains—taxis have never been much of a consideration for me because the price difference compared to local transit. Bus and rail fares rarely exceed $3 (the main exception being the Northstar commuter train), but taxi rates can easily reach 10 times that level. Taxis also simply haven’t been that common in the Twin Cities—in Minneapolis, the city limited licenses to a mere 400 up until 2006 (though the total number of Minneapolis taxis has apparently only risen to 500). My own timidity largely just stems from the fact that I’ve barely used them and just don’t know what’s typical.

Lately, I’ve spent some time researching local fare regulations in order to further my education a bit. Minimum taxi fares in the area are often pegged at $5 (the maximum allowed for a minimum fare in Minneapolis and Saint Paul proper). Add in per-mile rates of up to $2.20 in Saint Paul and $2.75 in Minneapolis plus extra fees for waiting (up to $24/hour) or traveling from the airport (where $6.75 is on the meter before the taxi even starts moving). Oh, and don’t forget the customary 10–15% tip (though you have the right to refuse to tip).

At this point in time, I suspect most cab drivers have credit card readers onboard, though I haven’t seen it required anywhere yet. Street hails are legal, though I still haven’t figured out if there’s a special local code for roof lights being on or off (in some cities, this gets rather complicated).

It is possible to pre-negotiate a fare payment with at least some drivers. Saint Paul has set a minimum rate of $6.00/hour, though I suspect you’d be hard-pressed to find any driver willing to go that low.

Perhaps more confusing than fares and tips is figuring out which cab company to call when you need a ride. Cabs licensed in Minneapolis can drop off in Saint Paul, but not pick up there unless also licensed for the capital city. There also seem to be cabs licensed for airport service which aren’t allowed to pick up in either of the two core cities (the MSP airport terminals are located in the unorganized territory of Fort Snelling, so taxis operating there may not be subject to the ordinances of surrounding municipalities).

At least a dozen different companies serve the two core cities, all of whom do things a bit differently from one another. Oh, and don’t forget that there are 180 other cities and townships in the 7-county metro area alone which may have their own regulations. While I’ve been able to get some information about the core cities, reliable information for Bloomington—the region’s third largest city—has proven to be elusive, so I haven’t been optimistic about getting data from other parts of the metro. Understanding the patchwork of regulations around the region could easily become a full-time job.

This could be simplified, of course. At a recent BURP event where several area bloggers and followers got together for some drinks and conversation about all things urban, one wise guest suggested that taxis should really fall under the umbrella of the Metropolitan Council rather than being regulated by individual cities. Hopefully this would make things easier for everyone: taxi drivers, owners, and passengers. Drivers and vehicles would only need to be licensed once, and wouldn’t need to worry about out-of-sync license renewals (Woodbury licenses always expire on Dec. 31, for instance, while Saint Paul licenses expire a year after being issued). Cab owners could get vehicle inspections done once rather than multiple times in multiple locations, and things like driver background checks could be made more uniform as well.

The Minneapolis City Council will be looking at taxi regulations soon, though their interest is in protecting drivers following a recent murder on the city’s North Side. Council Member Gary Schiff wants to mandate either bullet-proofing or cameras in city taxis—both of which have been security options in Minneapolis taxis for a while now, though the major local companies tend toward using a GPS-based alert system instead.

Is it time to start thinking more broadly about taxis and their role in the Twin Cities transportation network? In my mind, taking a more regional approach is long overdue.

Nice Ride released their 2011 ridership data in January, and I’ve been itching to map it ever since. Flows (don’t call them fluxes) are a particularly interesting way to visualize the ridership over different route segments.

I used ArcGIS with Network Analyst on a heavily modified Open Streets Map metro shapefile to generate routes between the start and ending station of each Nice Ride rental. The Open Streets map file allowed me to include off-street trails (very important in Minneapolis), which weren’t included in my previous attempts. I set Network Analyst to prefer off-street trails, bike lanes and regular roads (in that order).

Other than being pretty, you can draw a few interesting conclusions from the flows:

• The most traversed segment, with over 16,000 trips, was the off-street trail through the Hennepin-Lyndale bottleneck (although likely some of this traffic went to the Cedar Lake Trail in real life). In my opinion, this is a horrible segment for bikes and peds and if we’re trying to attract visitors back to Minneapolis, we should do something about it.
• Other heavily-traveled areas are the Mississippi River bridges, downtown streets, and Uptown.
• Men and women take similar routes. I mapped both, but the flows looked very similar.
• People are using Nice Ride even in the middle of the night. They are sticking even more closely to the southwest-to-northeast spine common during the day.
• 30-day and Annual subscribers are getting into the neighborhoods more than casual subscribers (single day), pointing to the obvious conclusion that they are full-time residents who are using Nice Ride to go to and from homes more often.
• Since Saint Paul only had a partial year of service, it’s hard to draw many conclusions yet.

What else do you see?

Cross-posted at netdensity.net

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the fate of Federal funding sources for biking and walking, specifically the potential elimination of the Transportation Enhancements and Safe Routes to Schools programs. National advocacy organizations like the League of American Bicyclists or People for Bikes are continually asking us to contact our elected officials to encourage them to vote to preserve bike/ped funding.

At the state level, the Statewide Health Improvement Program (which funded a modest amount of local bike/ped planning efforts) was recently cut to a fraction of its former size.

We’ve also been the beneficiaries for the past few years of the national experiment called the  Non-Motorized Transportation Pilot Program (NTPP) – a $25 million grant given to a local non-profit organization (TLC) to invest in bike/walk infrastructure. This program is now primarily complete. We have dozens of projects on the ground to show for it, but the prospects of receiving additional lump sum funding of this sort are slim.

Kevin Krizek touched on this idea recently – asking the question of when there will be enough local support for cycling that outside funding sources won’t matter anymore. Indeed, an unintended consequence of dedicated bike/ped funding is that many communities interpret this to mean that other funding sources shouldn’t be used for bike/ped projects. Julie Kosbab offered some thoughts about what the future might hold for cycling without some of our favorite funding sources.

Still, funding is not our biggest problem. We have a public acceptance problem. People just aren’t that into bike infrastructure – at least not when it has a direct impact on them.

We fully reconstruct miles of roadway every year. Why isn’t bike infrastructure routinely implemented at this time? When the implementation of bike infrastructure gets rolled into a larger corridor reconstruction or maintenance project, the additional costs are pretty negligible. In full-corridor reconstruction scenarios, this is not an issue of cost. So why don’t we do it?

The answer, I suppose, is that we want other things more than we want bike infrastructure. Our streets are full of competing objectives – bikes, peds, trees, cars, parking, utilities, streetlights, signs, lighting, etc. The biggest challenge to implementing bike infrastructure is that many (most?) people consider it to be the lowest priority.

Most people I know are supportive of the idea of bike infrastructure. However, most of us aren’t willing to give up the other things we like to make room for bike infrastructure. Like a headline you might see in The Onion: “98% of Americans support Bike Infrastructure Somewhere Else.” Perhaps this doesn’t describe most of us, but it’s accurate for at least enough of us that bike accommodations are often stripped out of projects.

There are countless case studies of communities who decide not to implement bike accommodations because it would require removing traffic lanes, removing parking, removing street trees, or have some other undesirable impact (the most recent Twin Cities examples being Penn Avenue or Central Avenue).

The bottom line: we all like bike lanes, but not as much as we like everything else.

I’m not trying to suggest that funding isn’t an important issue, but increasing bike/ped funding levels on its own won’t change this dynamic.

The National Bike Summit visits Congress. But how could they do a better job?

March (thus far!) has been a month of summits — the Minnesota Bicycle Summit happened March 5, the National Bicycle Summit is happening right now, and several Transportation and Tourism Summits occurred in Minnesota. All have focused on various forms of advocacy in various venues.

I’ve been to a few of these events this year and in years past. They tend to be interesting, especially those emphasizing citizen advocacy. And like many advocacy programs, they have a number of messaging challenges and conflicts. As a result, I’ve come up with some observations on how to improve them all.

1. Can the histronics. Okay, so we all get it: The situation is urgent. All the exclamation points on earth won’t make that more apparent than a simple listing of facts. Especially for organizations like the League of American Bicyclists, every year is the most urgent year ever lately. Now, knowing the facts about federal transportation bills, they may have a point. But as marketing messages goes, it leads to panic fatigue. Public relations pros will tell you: Organizations can get stuck in panic mode, and that’s a really inefficient use of resources in the long term.
2. Balance the pep rally. Every advocacy event is more pep rally than educational session. The people at the top select speakers and sessions based on organizational belief and goals. This is fine. The events are intended to fire up attendees for direct action advocacy. That is also fine. But sometimes the pep rally elements leave attendees unready to speak to representatives. Attendees need info to deal with potential pushback and cross-examination from those they are advocating to. Who is opposed to this legislative item, and why? Knowing this matters, and can help a citizen speak up against cash-rich special interests.
3. Guide the novices. At an event like the Minnesota Bicycle Summit, one of the biggest changes from 2011 to 2012 was BikeMN having the resources to make legislative meeting appointments on behalf of attendees. In 2011, they provided info to people on how to make the appointments; most didn’t and were baffled by the process. In 2012, BikeMN assembled the resources to make the appointments, resulting in less bafflement and more hob-nobbing with legislators. Groups putting together legislative visits and meetings should also consider making maps of legislative offices (and directions from gathering points!) available to attendees, either pre-event or at the event. Make the process confusion-proof so that people can focus on their message.
4. Help attendees tailor their pitches. The dream is that everyone can walk in with a similar ask and make it work. The reality is that different legislators react to different things, and a lot of that is a product of their territory. An urban representative and a rural one look at many issues of transportation and funding differently. Suburban reps are also a product of their representation area. I’ve found that for where I live (darkest Anoka County), my best bet is really to lean on my status as a working mother of two, belong to a church, support cycling and alternative transport. I’m not an urban male in spandex. I have a graduate degree, I shop at CostCo, and I have been known to bike to church with my kid in a trailer. This narrative helps as a wedge with the people who represent my district.

Drinking the Kool-Aid is going to be a big part of any advocacy event. But to be truly successful, these events have to make it easier to administer the Kool-Aid to the skeptical. And that’s where the biggest leaps are yet to be made. Event management and planning is huge and complex, and I absolutely appreciate the challenges everyone who puts on these summits and events face. The best reward for facing these challenges is positive impact on the societal issues they are tackling.

Now I’m a Disney junkie. I wrote last year about how my early experiences at the theme parks was a gateway drug that got me into Strong Towns and, ultimately, into the New Urbanism. In fact, last week I kept thinking about an article that my friend Dan Bartman had sent me just before I left. It was a blog post titled, “in defense of “green day” urbanism,” and it used punk rock as a metaphor for what I had also experienced. Here’s the opening paragraph:

People sometimes complain that “New Urbanist” or “town center” developments like Downtown Silver Spring are fake and sterile. But the way I see it, these projects are to urbanism as Green Day is to punk rock. They may not be “authentic,” but if done well, they can get people to seek out the “real stuff” later on.

I visited New Orleans in 2001, which was during the first stage of my conversion from engineer to whatever it is I professionally am now. Hated it. Through my eyes it was dirty, smelly and run down (and this was before Katrina), a huge departure from the sterilized car-centric environments I had grown up in (and grown accustomed to). I could not figure out why people liked the place.

I visited New Orleans in 2010 and again in 2011. Loved it. Same place, but my eyes saw it and I experienced it much differently. What an amazingly rich environment, full of life and activity. One of the truly great cities of North America. I could not understand why every place did not yearn to capture their own local variant of what was going on there.

The story of that conversion is a complex one (you’ll have to read the book) and has left me with this challenge: How do I help others understand their places differently without their having to go through the long, painful and confusing path that I took to get here?

Disney World — and to a lesser extent Disneyland in California — presents to me an opportunity for a short cut, one that goes right to the core of what middle class, suburban America is seeking.

From a layout and design standpoint, the Disney World resort complex is the ultimate strong town. There you have places (theme parks, resorts, commercial areas and other destinations) that are connected by roads. Those roads accommodate fast moving cars, buses, monorails and even travel by boat. Internal to each of those places are networks of streets — largely devoid of cars but, where cars are present they are slow moving and pedestrian-compatible — that provide access to these places and support a complex environment.

People shell out thousands of dollars a week to come to this strong towns environment. They live in accommodations that are spartan in size but generous in quality. They spend little time in their own private space but instead voluntarily press the flesh with the subset of humanity affluent enough to afford to be there. They travel by public transportation — even buses — and stand in line for nearly everything. While I’m sure there are nightmare stories, my experience has been that people traveling here generally adopt the Disney approach and treat others with a degree of deference and — dare I say — respect not commonly found in most American environments.

In short, ordinary middle-class Americans pay exorbitant amounts of money to spend time in an environment that they pay exorbitant amounts of money to avoid spending time in back home. Sure, back home in the sterile suburbs they don’t have the Pirates of the Caribbean, the Disney princesses and the fireworks spectacular, but in terms of time spent, those things are such a small fraction of a typical trip. The majority is spent in Disney’s ongoing social experiment, an environment that most people find very rewarding when they experience it.

Because of where my parents’ condo was located, I got to experience the STROAD hell that surrounded the park as contrast each day. In California, this can be seen right outside the gates of the park where hotels, fast food, strip malls, wide roads and fast cars dominate. Walt Disney was appalled at what happened in the land surrounding his California park so, in order to avoid the same fate in Florida, he purchased what is essentially an entire county. (If you want a good book about this, I recommend Chad Emerson’s Project Future.)

Unfortunately, instead of eliminating the mindless, over-engineered blight, it only displaced it. It was six miles from my parents’ place to Downtown Disney. My GPS would always tell me this is a trip that should take 22 minutes. Four minutes for the three miles on the streets/roads within the park and then 18 minutes for the three miles of STROAD outside the park. Here’s what the latter looks like in Google Earth.

The typical American STROAD, this one just outside of the Walt Disney World Resort near Orlando, Florida.

I have to relate a couple of stories though just to demonstrate how ingrained the American development pattern is for our society. On the way home one day, after spending time in a place my entire family found delightful, we were in our car stopped in the six lanes of congestion on the above-pictured STROAD when a complaint on the traffic was heard from within the car (I’ll not name the complainer except to say it was not a female). Not a family to complain without suggesting a solution, the next breath contained the “obvious” approach necessary to end this traffic crisis: more lanes and a few more traffic signals. When I objected and explained how it was the signals and the lanes that were causing the problem, how this same traffic flowed freely a few miles back where there wasn’t all this junk along the highway, I was dismissed.

Back at the gated condo, a warning was issued about the speed of travel through the access road one must cross to get to the pool. This complaint was voiced from the passenger seat again later when we were driving to go out to eat, with the classic solution this time being the installation of speed bumps. During this discourse, we rounded a corner that used a tight radius and an approaching car was forced to yield for a second or two while we passed. “They need to widen out that corner,” was the analyses from the passenger seat. I pointed out the connection between the fast speeds and the sharp turn, but it was not heard. I actually would have had more credibility had I suggested a pedestrian overpass or traffic signal.

At Disney World, I see thousands and thousands of people each day embracing a built environment whose basic structure they otherwise loath. There’s a lesson to be learned here, although I’ve not figured it out myself yet. More importantly, I’ve not quite figured out how to transmit it, but it gives me some hope.

If you’d like to learn more about Disney’s approach to design, building great places and how gingerbread is the perfect Spring compliment to pirates and ghosts, consider signing up for our Strong Towns tour of Disneyland. This April 14 in Anaheim, CA, just prior to the APA conference, I’ll be giving a planner’s tour of the Disneyland park. This is a fundraiser for Strong Towns with the donation of $200 which includes a park ticket and lunch with us. There are only five spots remaining so sign up today.

And finally, I love this little tilt shift video that highlights transportation within the place known as Disney’s Magic Kingdom. Enjoy (and it’s okay to smile a little too).

Barmi in the 6th century, from Jordi Ballonga's website

For better or for worse, children are the future, and that’s why it’s important to get them started thinking about cities now.  Just like many children are unaware that meat comes from animals, many children are unaware that suburbs come from cities, or that many cities were once suburbs, or of numerous other urban paradoxes that seem to perplex even many adults.

My interest in cities was kindled in my youth by a series of books primarily written by a professor at the University of Barcelona, Xavier Hernandez, and primarily illustrated by Jordi Ballonga, “a specialist in the illustration of urban subjects”.  Barmi and Lebek tell the story of two cities in southern and northern Europe respectively from their founding to the present (well, the late 20th century anyway).  Measuring a good 9″x12″, the books depict every phase in the development of these cities in an amazingly detailed birds-eye perspective splashed over two pages.  You will never see Barmi and Lebek on an e-reader.

A detail of a cathedral in Barmi from Jordi Ballonga's website (alas the book is black and white)

As a child, I spent hours following the two cities on their journeys through time, with each era illustrated in such incredible detail that I seemed to never run out of new unnoticed details.  (Reopening the books many years later, I see that I apparently added my own details in the form of pencil-marked walls or buildings in places.)  Perhaps less linger-worthy but no less fascinating were the pages between the birds-eyes, which gave a narrative history of the era depicted and had detailed cut-away drawings of specific buildings or infrastructure, such as cathedrals, skyscrapers, or subways.

Barmi was the first book I got, and today it is the most yellow, worn and pencil-marked.  Sometime later I got Lebek, but I never was able to find the third book in the series, San Rafael, which tells the story of a fictional city somewhere “in the region that lies south of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and north of Guatemala’s Sierra de las Minas, an area that includes the Mexican state of Chiapas, Guatemala’s central region, southern Belize, and western Honduras.”  Finally I got around to digging in the children’s nonfiction stacks at the Minneapolis Central Library, where San Rafael lay waiting for me after all these years.

Uaxacmal thrives in the 4th century

While the Central American city obviously represents a history far removed from those of the earlier two books, it has the same familiar format, including the gorgeous two-page birds-eyes alternating with narrative history and details of certain buildings.  San Rafael’s story begins in 1000 BC, when a small village of corn farmers cut into the jungle on the banks of a large river, and continues through the late 20th century, by which time the small village has been replaced by a sprawling metropolis centered on a Spanish colonial center and a cultural park of preserved Mayan ruins and ringed by factories, housing projects and slums.

The writing in San Rafael is concise and unadorned enough to avoid overwhelming younger readers, but not too dumbed-down or simplistic for adults (at least this adult) to enjoy.  Hernandez doesn’t shy away from more complex topics such as class conflict or religious persecution, but perhaps could have spent a bit more time on them.  But it’s not surprising that the focus is on the physical characteristics of the city that are so brilliantly depicted by Ballonga (with the assistance of Josep Escofet for this venture).

"The game of pelota has fascinated Central America's diverse peoples for centuries."

The depictions of Mayan life are probably the most interesting parts of the book to me as a result of my unfamiliarity with the topic, and so the lack of a bibliography is probably the most obnoxious intrusion of the characteristics of children’s literature.  Scenes of villagers in the act of constructing the famous pyramidal temples – “Stonemasons squared blocks with hammers fashioned from stone.” – will excite any adult with even a remnant of imagination.  The stimulating scenes continue through the Spanish military colonization and the American corporate colonization – I just can’t emphasize enough what a jewel this book – as well as the previous two – is to anyone with an interest in cities or history or human culture or life itself.

In the course of writing this blog post, I’ve found a fourth book in the series – Umm El Madayan, which apparently depicts a North African city and is not primarily written by Xavier Hernandez or illustrated by Jordi Ballonga.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get to the library to check that book out.  I promise to read it quickly – I don’t want to interfere with any younger readers who may stumble upon it, kindling their imagination and stoking a lifelong love of cities.

Cross-posted to my blog, gettingaroundmpls.wordpress.com

On Wednesday, President Obama signed a bill authorizing the construction of a new Stillwater Bridge, a $690 million project that will serve possibly 18,000 car trips per day.  Here are some other transportation segments that serve at least 18,000 trips per day.

• Nicollet Mall, north of S 7^th Street SE – 20,000 pedestrian trips per day
• SE Washington Ave, west of SE Union St – 19,000 pedestrian trips per day
• Hiawatha LRT line – 30,000 trips per day
• Metro Transit Route 14 (6,494) + Route 21 (12,886) – 19,380 trips per day
• Metro Transit Route 6 (8,878) + Route 18 (10,759) – 19,637 trips per day
• Proposed 11-corridor Twin Cities Arterial Bus Rapid Transit current weekday ridership – 73,000 trips per day
• Proposed 11-corridor Twin Cities Arterial Bus Rapid Transit 2030 projected weekday ridership (with rapid bus improvements) – 137,000 trips per day (total capital cost: $352 million)
• S Washington Avenue in Minneapolis – 22,000 car trips per day
• Hennepin Avenue S in Minneapolis – 19,000 car trips per day
• Oak Street SE in Minneapolis – 18,000 car trips per day
• Snelling Avenue in Saint Paul – 30,000 car trips per day
• Lexington Parkway in Saint Paul – 25,000 car trips per day
• Dale Street in Saint Paul – 18,000 car trips per day
• E 7^th Street in Saint Paul – 22,000 car trips per day

To name just a few.  Some of these facilities may currently have adequate capacity, but I’m sure quite a few are in a state of deferred maintenance (potholes, surfacing) or could use significantly better infrastructure (bus signs, shelters, pedestrian facilities, intersection redesign, etc) to serve existing users.  I assume that if any of these segments need improvement, we’ll see bipartisan support and state and federal funding up to $690 million per.

(A special runner-up goes to the SE Washington Ave Bridge, which in 2011 saw an estimated 6,850 bicycle trips per day.  That’s only about 38% of 18,000, so $262 million for bike improvements on this span should suffice.)

Cross-posted at netdensity.net

It has been said that energy is concentrated most on the borders and boundaries of human psychology. Edges are where communities touch and where conflict, growth, and learning occurs. Along edges is where we find opportunities for transformation as individuals, communities, and society.

My good friend, Alex, and I were recently talking about the shape  of our own neighborhoods in Minneapolis. We started to question: what is the play between defining self and defining self in community? How do we tell the story of our communities? Our neighborhood? Where do our lives and experiences intersect? And how do physical environments shape the interactions that weave together our stories?

Out of this conversation came Border Places –a crowd-sourced multimedia project exploring the borders between geographic space and human communities. We want to call attention to the in-between places, looking for sites of interaction and transformation, being and change.

Residential meets commercial

Our communities are surrounded by natural and designed boundaries –boundaries that are often saturated in politics. How are our perceived community borders shaped into physical boundaries? What role do sound barriers and language borders play in creating community? As you can tell, I ask a lot of questions; I take photos to visualize them.

One of the most profound ways communities are constructed deals with the infrastructure we build in and around them. Roads, bridges, highways, schools, grocery stores –these structures and institutions shape our neighborhoods and the ways we engage our neighbors.

Through Border Places, Alex and I hope to cultivate conversation around urbanism and cultures, spaces and places –and we want that conversation to be grounded in storytelling. We’ve posted a few observations to get the project rolling…

…and here’s the part where I ask you to be involved!

Share your stories, videos, photos, etc with borderplaces@gmail.com

What is most inspiring to me, as the plan was reported in this article in The (Downtown) Journal is the idea of a “shared road.” The West River Parkway will slice right through the site, the speed limit slowed to 15 MPH and bollards will replace curbs. What a great idea!

The site is small and narrow, and I recall speaking with a colleague last fall about the potential for plans there. We discussed a possible pedestrian bridge or something to mitigate the road. I distinctly recall wrinkling my nose and thinking “why waste money on a stupid bridge? Just make the cars slow down!” I’m thrilled to hear others think along this wavelength. It’s just a parkway, and in many ways routing the road through the site increases the potential visitors to the new section of downtown park.

I sincerely hope the shared road concept survives this approvals process. We have a long and checkered history in the Twin Cities of separating our roads from pedestrian routes with bridges, tunnels, viaducts and skyways, and this presents a much saner, cost-effective opportunity to integrate and beautify our public realm. It is time to just slow down a little and enjoy our city.

It probably goes without saying, but compared to any of the glowing robocar pangyrics, my take is a bit more cynical.

Every time a text rings, someone may become an angel.

As Vanderbilt suggests, and as I’ve argued here at Streets.mn in the past, robocars point to a key paradox at the heart of 21st century society. There’s an unavoidable conflict between cars (the definitive 20th century technology) and smartphones (the definitive 21st century technology, so far). The more people are distracted while driving, the more accidents happen. That’s why it’s so eerie and problematic when companies like Mercedes start putting wifi in their cars and Facebook on their dashboards. That’s NOT a good idea!

The “cars vs. phones paradox” is perhaps one reason why a company like Google is investing so much time and money into robocar technology. For Google, not only is the robocar a great techno-utopian demonstration project, but it begins to solve a fundamental problem for internet companies. And Google isn’t alone. Car manufactures from Germany to China are focusing on robocars. Their very future may depend on it.

There are two huge problems, though, with the robocar concept in the real actual world. And other than a few brief asides, these problems aren’t really being talked about.

The first is the huge quantitative and logistical complexity of the US automobile system. There are over 200 million cars on the road in the US right now. We’ve gotten to the point, thanks to huge government investments spanning a century, where cars are a default mode of movement for almost every American, no matter what income level. Cars equal mobility and movement, and allow people to access jobs, food, schools and just about everything else too. They’re not a privilege in America today, they’re a right. That’s why gas prices, snowplowing, parking spots, and traffic jams are such hotbutton political issues. Many a political career have been built atop the automobile.

The massive number of cars involved – over 254 million registered – means that any new technology is going to take a long time to get implemented across the country. Think of all the old clunkers on the road. Think of all the cars that don’t receive proper maintenance. They aren’t going away. This doesn’t include the uninsured unregistered cars, which according to some estimates, are 16% of the cars on the road and rising dramatically every year. There are cars in my working class neighborhood that are literally held together with duct tape, or where the windows are plastic sheets.

All these facts mean that any change to the US auto system that’s as fundamental as the robocar revolution will not happen quickly or neatly or evenly. Robocars will create a two-tiered system of auto transportation that will be obvious and stark. There will be robocars for the rich – Mercedes-Benzes and Audis and GoogleToyotas – and used Hondas for everyone else.

Is this just the beginning of a car segregation system?

Not only will this pose problems for the promise of robocars, dramatically reducing many of their efficiency and safety gains, it will create a deep divide within the social geography of our transportation system. It’ll be a lot like at airports, where you have different lanes for business travelers and the masses. It’ll be like the difference between limos and bus stops. In an era when more and more Americans are out of work, overworked, or facing decades of declining wages, spending increasingly precious tax money on transportation investments for robocars is going to become politically and socially problematic. It’s something that we need to think about.

At this point, you’re probably thinking that this is yet more neo-luddite social justice nitpickery. And, sure it is.

You’re probably thinking that, of course the transportation system is huge and complex, and populated with a billion (no exaggeration necessary) constantly moving independent variables, e.g. potholes and skateboarders, each different and unique and unevenly distributed throughout society. But, you might say, this is solvable given vastly improved supersmart technology and effective and sound government policy. (That second one is a big if, by the way.)

The second main problem with robocars, though, is potentially a dealbreaker. That’s the question of who is liable when something goes wrong.

There are currently 32,000 fatalities on the US roads every year, and over ten times as many injuries and accidents. Just as an exercise, multiply EACH of those incidents by a million dollars, and you start to get a sense of the potential liability of the US automobile system. (It’s mindboggling number in the hundreds of billions of dollars.)

I’m not a lawyer, but under our current political and social system, most of those potential liability dollars don’t exist. Almost all the fatalities and injuries on our roadways are classified as “accidents”. They’re seen as inevitable by-products of a road system that’s impossibly complicated, ubiquitous, and disbursed across hundreds of millions of different individual actors, all of whom can’t be responsible all of the time. We write off all these accidents as “the cost of doing business.” It’s a social choice we’ve made, a trade-off for the mobility and “freedom” offered by the car.

This whole system depends on the profound lack of responsibility at the center of the picture. This whole system depends on placing a inevitably distractible and semi-non-responsible driver at the center of the picture. (The exact responsibility of the driver is an area of much heated dispute, but our social and legal system has basically given drivers a free pass almost all of the time.)

What if every time your computer crashed, your car crashed?

But what happens when you take that driver away, and let them start to doze off or read the newspaper or surf the web? Who’s responsible then when something goes wrong? Sure, in a robocar society, accidents will be greatly reduced.

But they’ll still happen! (And, this is what none of the dozen or so robocar articles I’ve read don’t bother to mention.) Something will go wrong. With 200 million cars and millions of other changing variables, something will always go wrong. Nobody who’s ever seen the “blue screen of death” or the “spinning beach ball of stasis” can possibly disagree. (What happens when a robocar system gets too old, and doesn’t get maintained? What happens when a small part breaks, and nobody notices?)

Well, the obvious answer is: the car company / robocar software company. If GoogleToyota is driving your car, what happens when something goes wrong and your car runs over someone’s grandma?

How many cars are recalled every year? How many more would there be if automaker liability was increased 100-fold?

A good analogy for this problem might be the US aviation system. Airplane crashes really disturb people, and for good reason. So, as a result, airplanes come with two pilots. And because even they doze off or use their computers while flying the plane, we have a ‘backup system’ costing billions of dollars in place, staffed by highly trained people whose only (very stressful) job is to coordinate 28,000 daily US flights.

Now multiply this problem by three or four orders of magnitude (1.1 billion daily auto trips), throw in a countless dogs and kids and deer and bicycle messengers and old ladies and out of control shopping carts and huge potholes and drunk drivers. How many air traffic controllers would you need?

The thing is, we already have an “air traffic controller” whose sole job it is to pay attention all the time to the world around them, and to keep their foot on the brake pedal in order to make sure that nobody is going to get killed or horribly injured by a 2500 pound steel machine moving at 50 miles per hour. That person is the driver. Do we really want to let them start taking naps?

There is a lot of promise behind the idea of robocars. But to my mind, most of the good effects of them seem to come from reducing the need for cars, not increasing it. For example, picture a world without parking spots. That world is possible with robocars. They can become a shared commodity, and not something that we all need to have all of the time.

Well, if that’s the great benefit of robocars, why bother? We already have a “robocar” technology that works really well, that allows you to surf the internet, sleep, or read while you travel. It’s called the bus. It’s called the sidewalk. It’s called a bicycle or a subway. All these things already exist!

For a time, my dad had a Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham with an “automatic trunk closing” feature. You would lower the lid of the trunk to a certain height, about one inch from the top of the lid, and then the car would “take over” and close the rest of the trunk for you. If that’s not the stupidest innovation in the history of technology, then you’re reading the Skymall catalog. Who had trouble closing their trunk in the first place? When the robo-trunk mechanism inevitably broke, my father had to spend a thousand dollars to fix it.

Maybe the robocar is a solution in search of a problem. If the problem is that our current road system is unsafe, unhealthy, bad for the planet, and incompatible with new technological norms, there are two roads before us. The first is to develop highly complicated new technologies that will “solve” the problem. While I’ve wary of the complexity of the situation, I’m not saying we can’t do this. Computers are amazing, the US is the wealthiest country in the world, with the best engineers and software designers you’ll find on planet Earth.

But for the cost of a single backup camera, you could buy someone a really nice new bicycle. For the cost of a single robo-interchange, you could implement a system of safe and comfortable bike lanes all through an entire city.

This is just one example of the road less traveled. If we go down this road, we start reducing our dependence on technology. Instead of robocars, let’s build cities that privilege people. Instead of thinking about ever more complex ways to depend on the automobile, let’s start thinking beyond it. To me, that’s a visionary future. It might not be as shiny, and it might not be up there with the Jetsons or Norman Bel Geddes’ Futurama, but it’s far more equitable, practical, and affordable than the robocar alternative.

The robo-car of the future. (PS. I did NOT have them pose for this picture. This is how young people ride the bus.)

A campus that has the the appurtenances of a classical college: medieval architecture, bricks or stones, a quad, and a bell-tower seems to be preferred. These are the icons of the modern university.

In the Greater Twin Cities, we have been dealt a large number of college campuses. Minneapolis is a college town in a way that most people don’t realize, much like Boston, where more than 10 percent of the population is undergraduates.

I of course work at the University of Minnesota, which is famous for its classical Cass Gilbert quad (apparently derived from Jefferson’s University of Virginia and McKim, Mead, and White’s Columbia University). There are a number of other old buildings, though recent administrations seem allergic to nice architecture, and instead build mediocrity.

St. Thomas University has several campuses, but has achieved a faux medieval branding with its architecture both in St. Paul and in downtown Minneapolis.

The College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University are a bit farther out, stretching the definition of Greater Twin Cities, but both have a lovely campus, especially in autumn.

Metropolitan State University has a main campus east of downtown St. Paul, which is sufficiently iconic that it is the campus logo. Other buildings include some nondescript office buildings in Energy Park and a share of a building in downtown Minneapolis.

The best Twin Cities campus without a college on it is Bandana Square, a former railroad maintenance facility that was remodeled and transformed into several uses. The original transformation was to make it a festival marketplace. That did not succeed. Now it is an underutilized facility off of Energy Park Drive, housing the wonderful (but obviously low rent) Twin Cities Model Railroad Museum. This is a set of iconic structures, with room to expand over acres of empty parking spaces. Notably, it is near Metropolitan State, Hamline, Bethel, and Concordia.

There are other similar locations that are underutilized for what they are. The office complex at St. Anthony Main is another example that would make a great, distinct, iconic campus. There are also several vacant breweries around town, though the signaling might be difficult to say you went to school at the old Schmidt’s or Stroh’s Brewery. It would give a new meaning to the idea of imbibing knowledge.

If only there were a growing university that was seeking a new campus in the Twin Cities. There is at least one. It turns out Metropolitan State is seeking a West Metro campus, as it is losing its space in downtown Minneapolis due to internecine warfare with MCTC. It also is seeking to abandon its classroom space in Energy Park (near Bandana Square). Other universities, including other McSCU campuses have been sniffing around, as it is already university-ready and centrally located. MnSCU really needs to be strategic about its universities and colleges and their territories, in a way that it currently isn’t. Why are MSU-Mankato and St. Cloud State opening up Metro campuses? Why are they not one Minnesota State University with multiple campuses and departments?

As part of my CE5212 class last Fall, student groups were tasked with finding the location for alternative campuses of Metropolitan State. They were given the job of finding the location if there were (a) 1 campus, (b) 2 campuses, but one was fixed at the current St. Paul main location, and (c) 4 campuses, but one was fixed. Each group came up with different locations.

This is interesting for a variety of reasons. There was more convergence on the 3 additional sites than on the one “west metro” site. While an analytic /computational geography approach can help, the differences between various nearby sites are relatively small, and small differences in the optimization criteria can shift the location. In any event, modeling optimization for student travel times is never the deciding factor in something like this (or otherwise, almost everything would locate on a point). Prices, building availability, history, culture, etc. also play a role. A growth trajectory also matters (you want to locate your second campus in a place that makes sense if you also have a third and fourth).

Clearly there should be some semblance of image in locating a college campus. Do you want your university in an office building? If so, you can have it. It takes more work, some thought, and a lot of patience, to cultivate an iconic campus.

Images from Cass Gilbert society, and wikipedia, and author.

Where else should new college campuses think about locating in Minnesota? What colleges should locate there?

What is a form-based code? It is a land use regulatory tool that is based on the allowable/preferred form of buildings versus allowable uses on the site. The perceived value is to help guide good urbanism in a more effective and efficient manner than traditional zoning. They can be especially helpful in a corridor or district that seeks unified building heights, scale and/or frontages, and help overcome the hodgepodge that occurs from normal zoning schemes. Mind you, form-based codes are relatively young in practice and they are not a panacea, but they show some very promising results. Allow me to explain.

Several recent developments in Minneapolis have provided some solid evidence that our planning/zoning/approvals system needs some adjustment. The first is Linden Corners, a proposed project in the lovely and charming Linden Hills neighborhood that was recently approved by the Planning Commission but then appealed by neighbors and the appeal upheld by the City Council. The zoning allows three stories, but the proposal is for a five-story, mixed-use building. Under normal city processes, a conditional use permit can be granted to allow the additional height, among other things like setbacks and parking issues. Even though conditional use permits are granted all the time, the height was too tall for the neighborhood, and was the one thing NIMBYs could hang on to successfully get the approval appealed. This may have killed the project.

So who is right about the height? Based on the current system, everyone is. But would the outcome have been different with a form-based code? Perhaps. I think five stories is acceptable there, but that is my opinion, and five stories is 66% taller than three, a big difference. For agrument’s sake, let’s say a form-based code, tied to a visioning plan for the neighborhood and adopted by the city, provided specific guidance as to height. If three stories was the actual maximum height allowed, the developer may never have proposed his five-story building, knowing it wouldn’t go anywhere, and saving us all time, angst and tax dollars. The flip side is only allowing three stories may preclude any possible redevelopment from occurring, even with a form-based code, due to the economics of redevelopment and density. (The present use on the site is perhaps the best no-development scenario ever. Far from a blighted site, a restaurant, Famous Dave’s, currently occpuies the site, providing a delicious dining option and a fine-smelling presense in the neighborhood. Albeit fronted by a surface parking lot, said parking lot is shrouded by a row of healthy evergreens and there is a little public plaza at the corner.) So the verdict? Perhaps a form-based code would have provided a better guide for development, but at least provided more clarity to the developer and neighbors alike.

The second development in question is in the booming Lyn-Lake neighborhood is a proposed six-story mixed-use building called 2900 Lyndale. Here the issue gets pretty murky. The developer may very well be within the zoning for the site, but needs a conditional use permit for various pieces of the design, including height. The Midtown Greenway Coalition opposes the proposed development, citing excessive shadowing on the adjacent Midtown Greenway bike path. The Midtown Greenway plan asks that buildings on the south side of the corridor be stepped back to reduce shadowing. To me, simply “asking” for that is not enough, particularly when we’re talking about millions of dollars of development and potential tax revenue for the city – or not. The plan should be more clear and tied to specific zoning in order to better guide development (if it were, we wouldn’t be having this discussion, right?). The plan is way too open to interpretation, since you can reduce shadowing anywhere from 1% to 100%. Not good enough. Would a form-based code help? Yes, if specific guuidelines were put in place that dictated the setback and stepping up and back of the design of any proposed building. Again, this would have created more certainty for the developer and public alike. But just as with Linden Corners, the City Council has upheld an appeal of the project, and the project is in limbo as a result. And who is right? Everyone. Not good enough, and very costly to the developer and city in terms of time and resources spent on fighting and revising this.

The third case in Minneapolis is last year’s approvals process for the Oaks Station Place development, a really promising TOD currently under construction adjacent to the 46th Street Station. The development follows by 10 years the plan for the 46th Street Station area, and is an interesting contrast to the plan and development adjacent to the Pleasant Hill BART station in the Bay Area, which uses a form-based code. At the time of the Pleasant Hill planning charrette (also 10 years ago, around the time the 46th Street Station Plan was adopted by Minneapolis), the county commissioner in Contra Costa County said of the plan “what you see is what you will get.” Amazingly, she was right. The developer and planners marvel that the form-based code was strong enough that the resulting mixed-use project, which opened in 2010, was almost exactly as it appeared in the plan (a plan that was created before the developer came forward with a project). The process provided certainty, and the public had their say in it. Not so at the Oaks Station Place at the 46th Street Station in Minneapolis, where developer Norm Bjorness had to spend consdierable time with an approvals process that could have derailed the project had the City Council made that determination (as they did with Linden Corners and 2900 Lyndale). The plan called for three stories at the station and two-stories along the fence behind the existing residential homes, so when the proposal came from the developer for more height (four and three stories, respectively), one could argue the neighbors had a legitimate beef with the process. The plan and the zoning didn’t agree.

A form-based code in place for almost a decade in the Columbia Pike in Arlington, Virginia has helped guide better development along that corridor. What is amazing to me is that while the old code has remained in place, not one developer has chosen to use it, because the clarity of the code and the sped up approvals process in the form-based code are preferred for obvious reasons.

In the Pleasant Hill example, after all was said and done, Contra Costa County spent $700,000 on the planning charrette and the writing, implementation and policing of the form-based code. A sizable amount to be sure, but it was a big project. What was jarring to me was the conclusion that the sum of $700,000 was a major savings versus the alternative – having to deal with NIMBYs, lawsuits, ongoing planning and revisioning, and lost tax revenue from development being delayed or simply not occurring.

For all of the good work of the Minneapolis Planning Department and talented developers in the Twin Cities, I can’t help but think there is room for improvement in Minneapolis, as is evidenced by the fallout from the Linden Corner, 2900 Lyndale and Oaks Station Place process. Form-based codes aren’t a silver bullet, and you’ll never make everyone 100% happy, but when coupled with a good vision and plan, they have proven to provide clarity to the approvals process, which satisfies neighbors and developers, and perhaps saves cities money. All of these are results I can strongly endorse. Oh, and the built result is better quality urbanism. Something for everyone.

There are 13 parking lots on this block along University Avenue in Saint Paul (give or take)

The amount of parking along the Central Corridor in Minneapolis and Saint Paul could be measured in square miles. It is huge. Business owners have expressed frustration over the loss of hundreds of parking spaces along University Avenue itself, but those spots are dwarfed by the total amount of parking in the corridor. The Metropolitan Council’s FAQ on the Central Corridor states:

• What will happen to on-street parking on University Avenue?
  University Avenue will retain 175 of its 1,150 on-street parking spaces after 675 spots are removed to make way for mandatory elements such as the LRT stations, 250 are eliminated to accommodate non-signalized pedestrian crossings, 40 are removed to provide secondary station access, 20 are lost to make room for three-car station platforms and 40 are eliminated to allow space for minimizing traffic lane transitions. Project studies show 560 on-street parking spaces are available on north-south cross streets within a block of the corridor and 15,300 off-street parking spaces are available within one block of University Avenue. A 2006 city of St. Paul study found 25,000 spaces in private lots within one-quarter mile of the LRT stations.

One of my projects this winter has been to add detail to OpenStreetMap along the Central Corridor, and I’ve had a bit of morbid fascination with the parking lots spread all along the route. Anyone who’s visited University Avenue has seen the massive lots at the Midway Shopping Center and other retail districts adjacent to the street. But small-scale parking has managed to consume huge amounts of land as well (and a lot of it has been around for a very long time).

The image at the top of this article shows the most egregious example I’ve found of small-scale parking spinning out of control, located along University northwest of the intersection with Raymond Avenue. Depending on how detailed you want to be, there are 15 to 20 buildings on the block. I count 20 curb cuts for driveways and alleys. And thirteen parking lots, give or take.

This absurd little chunk of land in Saint Paul seems to document a transitional period in history. There’s aerial photography for the block dating back to 1923—a time when railroad and streetcar ridership was peaking in the Twin Cities and across the country. Back then, the Raymond Avenue side was mostly filled in, but the block was otherwise fairly sparse.

The area as seen in 1923

By 1953, the block became as built-up as it was ever going to get, and already had about eight parking lots.

The area 30 years later, in 1953

Since then, it seems that two buildings have been demolished and two have been added. Parking expanded into most of the green space on the block and also into the spaces left by the demolished buildings.

This block seems like a poster child for parking reform and consolidation. I’ve ambled along its sidewalks many times over the years, and it can be a draining experience to wander past some of the more industrial buildings, and to deal with all of the curb cuts. One particularly dreary day about a decade ago, I looked at the piled-up sand and melting snow on the Cromwell side and said to myself, “Wow, this looks like a third-world country.”

However, I’m a bit surprised by this block now that I’ve dug into its history a bit. Compared to the surrounding neighborhood, this actually seems to be an island of calm in an undulating sea of transition. Several nearby blocks have been completely destroyed by highway construction since 1953, and others have completely changed due to urban renewal efforts. I had expected to find that a bunch of buildings had been destroyed to make way for parking, but that only seems to be a minor culprit in this case.

With my knowledge of what happened to downtown Minneapolis as urban renewal took hold, I often look at fields of asphalt in the core of the Twin Cities and think that they were once buildings, but that’s not always the way things happened. Parking has tended to consume open, undeveloped space just as much (if not more).

I’ve gained a little bit of nostalgia for this little piece of the city because it has actually remained relatively intact, though I think it’s best to divorce myself from that sensation. Clearly, a lot more value could be extracted from this land if some of these individual enclaves of parking got merged together and were shared more readily among neighboring businesses. There’s an economy of scale to be found by from combining parking lots together—the asphalt could be used much more efficiently. Consolidated parking would also reduce the number of driveways, leading to improved pedestrian experience, more on-street parking, and open land that could be developed.

Few other blocks along the Central Corridor are quite this crazy, but there are still countless opportunities along University Avenue and elsewhere in the Twin Cities to redevelop asphalt “grayfields” into new homes and businesses. Rather than holding tight to as many parking spaces as they can get, existing property owners should look at those empty lots and try to imagine what could be in that space instead.