“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there” -Will Rogers

Earlier this week, Hennepin County and the City of Minneapolis released preliminary design options for a reconstruction of Minnehaha Avenue (or County State Aid Highway 48 as the folks on 148 acres in Medina call it) between Lake Street and 46^th Street in South Minneapolis. Full PDFs were posted showing on-street bike lanes similar to the existing layout or a separated two-way cycletrack on the west side of the street.

Out of these two options, the cycletrack option is clearly the better “complete street,” providing enhanced amenities for walkers, bikers, and transit riders. Yet there are still valid concerns to be addressed- intersection conflicts between bicyclists and cars, and concerns from local businesses and residents over the loss of on-street car storage and mature boulevard trees. Those minor difficulties can be mitigated and pale in comparison to the advantage to users and the potential for nuanced design which would enhance placemaking along the corridor.

For good insight into the tradeoffs of both options, check out Rebekah Peterson’s articles on TC Daily Planet covering impact on bikes and businesses. Peterson reports that Hennepin County will recommend the on-street bike lane option to the Minneapolis City Council (so if you disagree, make your opinion known to the project, your county commissioner, and your council member).

But do these two alternatives represent the two best choices for those who use Minnehaha Avenue to access adjoining land uses?

Credit: Oregon Department of Transportation, Transportation and Growth Management Program

Multiway boulevards are a great answer to retrofit existing stroads, but what about scaling them down a little and using the main principle of separation to get more mobility and placemaking utility out of our narrower urban arterial streets? Challenge accepted.

What do we have to work with?

Minnehaha Avenue has 100’ right of way for most of the project length, tapering a fair amount wider near Lake Street. Yet for most residential blocks, it’s unrealistic to encroach upon the outer eleven feet of the right of way, which contains the existing sidewalk and about five feet of lawn. Additionally, it is preferred to keep the existing boulevard trees and the wonderful canopy they provide. Even within these constraints, a multiway boulevard is possible.

For the typical cross section, I propose a middle carriageway of 11 foot travel lanes surrounded by buffer medians. These medians serve multiple purposes. They allow for a tree canopy to be planted about 25’ apart in the middle, calming the perceived width of the street. Street lights can be provided on the medians providing better coverage and more diffused lighting options for the slip lanes and sidewalks. They can contain gutters on both sides, so the entire stormwater system can drain to these two medians even if the outside needs to change between a standard slip lane, cycletrack, or woonerf. Finally, they provide some snow storage space for the primary travel lanes.

Is flexibility valuable?

At certain spots, it makes sense to widen the center carriageway beyond 22 feet to accommodate bus stops or left turn lanes. This is completely doable by sacrificing street parking just the same as the two plans proposed by the county. Yet, unlike the bike lane plan, bus stops would not create conflicts with the cycleway. And, unlike the contraflow cycletrack alternative, vehicular conflicts at intersections still abide by the right-side behavior we find predictable.

But the true flexibility comes from the variety of treatments on the outside of the buffer medians.

In residential blocks dominated by single family homes, curbside parking supply may outstrip demand (despite a price point of $0 – really a testament to how zealously our culture adopted the religion of free parking that we’ve supplied so much of a private good that people can no longer consume more of it for free, but I digress).

Additionally, these are the blocks where the boulevard tree canopy is particularly valuable and adds significant value to the adjacent properties. Solution? Switch one side of the street to a six foot cycletrack rather than a 18.5’ slip lane and parking space. This allows for even larger grassy boulevards than we have today.

What about commercial nodes?

Business owners have shown a desire to maintain on-street parking and access to their existing driveways. Yet the conflicts between cars traveling multiple blocks and cars looking to parallel park or exit a parking lot creates frustration for everyone (and that’s without the additional problems found by squeezing bikes in a danger zone between the two). The concept of a woonerf helps solve this problem, separating these slow vehicular movements from congested traffic lanes. It means people can get to businesses in these nodes easier and safer, whether arriving by car, bike, or foot. The woonerf right of way is flexible and can accommodate nuanced needs on a parcel by parcel basis, such as on-street bicycle corrals or valet parking.

Woonerfs can also be more flexible and welcoming to bicyclists and pedestrians, since it is truly shared space. The sidewalk can actually blend right into the slip lane in these cases, virtually extending the pedestrian realm from storefront to café/display space to sidewalk space to car/bike throughway space to parking with one unified look and feel, capped off with the buffer median providing a vegetated/canopied buffer between people-centric space and space reserved for cars, buses, and even fast bikers who would rather not use the cycleway.

How could this be better than a cycletrack?

Cycletracks are great. I love riding on them. But we don’t like cycletracks because they’re cycletracks, we like them because of their advantages. By defining what we really like, we open up the possibility that there are other alternatives which also meet our needs but have fewer opportunity costs and more synergies.

Here’s why NATCO likes two-way cycletracks, and why I think a multiway boulevard could be just as good.

• Dedicates and protects space for bicyclists by improving perceived comfort and safety. Eliminates risk and fear of collisions with over-taking vehicles.
  Slip lanes are shared space. So, while not dedicated, it has roughly the same perceived comfort. Just like cycletracks, slip lanes and woonerfs would be segregated from the travel lanes, buffering bicyclists from fast-moving cars. Slip lanes and woonerfs, designed for very slow vehicular travel of a block at most (except for bikes) mean that vehicles would not be in a position to try and overtake bikes.
• Reduces risk of ‘dooring’ compared to a bike lane, and eliminates the risk of a doored bicyclist being run over by a motor vehicle.
  With multiway boulevards, there’s a wide and slow lane, so the normal condition would be for cyclists to “take the lane.” Furthermore, by placing parked vehicles on the left side, it further reduces dooring risk similar to a cycletrack.
• On one-way streets, reduces out of direction travel by providing contra-flow movement.
  When NATCO talks about the advantages of contraflow bike lanes, the primary advantage is on one way streets where sightlines and complex turning movements are not a problem. On a wide street like Minnehaha Avenue, there would be significant left-hook potential for left turning vehicles since there are no other conditions in existence where left-turning traffic needs to look over their left shoulder to spot fast-moving through traffic while simultaneously expecting and yielding right of way to traffic approacing from ahead. In this case, a contraflow design can become a liability.
• Low implementation cost when making use of existing pavement and drainage and using parking lane or other barrier for protection from traffic.
  On Minnehaha, the plan is to replace curbs, so we might as well take advantage of this investment to gain additional utility and placemaking potential for generations to come.
• More attractive to a wide range of bicyclists at all levels and ages.
  We really need to know what qualities make a cycletrack more attractive to users if we wish to compare it to alternative designs. Obviously a cycletrack is more attractive than a bike lane which is more attractive than riding in a traffic lane, but we need criteria to dig into comparisons that are less obvious.

The quality of our results will be determined at a fine-grained level, no matter what type of facility we build. This requires compromise, neighborhood engagement, and placemaking more than it requires pro-forma compliance to engineering standards. We need to be creative with our use of scarce space. We need to think outside the box to find ways to get the most placemaking potential and mobility out of our neighborhood streets. We need to ask the right questions and not be afraid to challenge assumptions. If a cycletrack is built on Minnehaha Avenue, it will be a huge improvement. But why stop at better when we can do better yet?

So, today, I bring you a salute to something awesome about Blaine: The NSC Velodrome. Tonight is the first night of Thursday Night Lights for the 2013 season. It’s the 23rd season of racing at the Velodrome. Outdoor velodromes are rare, putting Blaine in an elite space in North America.

Another cool thing: The Velodrome offers programs to teach people to ride on a banked velodrome track, and have children’s programs starting around age 8 to get kids involved in the sport. Track bikes require constant pedaling to ride, let alone race — there is no coasting. Control is vital. Strategy varies depending on the race, which doesn’t always go to the quickest but to the cleverest.

Velodrome racers have won US and world championships in both youth and masters categories.

Similarly, the clever can certainly bike to the Velodrome, depending on their origin point (and willingness to be out after bedtime). Those who are able to connect to either Mississippi River Road in Minneapolis, or Long Lake Road from Roseville can develop several good routes with a minimum of risk to life or limb. Naturally, this being Blaine, there is abundant vehicular parking.

Racing begins at 7 and goes until it is done. Adults are $5, kids under 12 are free. Prizes are there to be won by spectators and racers. Snacks can be purchased.

Racing happens every Thursday night, weather permitting, through September. Several special events, including the Fixed Gear Classic and the Minnesota State Championships, occur throughout the season.

So get out there some Thursday. Bring your own cowbell.

Yes, it’s apparently time for the Pets on Trains Act of 2013.

Per the Humane Society of the United States:

Amtrak currently does not accept animals unless they are assistance dogs. Passengers traveling on Amtrak must either leave their pets at home or seek alternate transportation. This can result in additional hardship and expense on behalf of the owner if Amtrak, the national rail operator, with more than 500 destinations, is their only option for transportation to a particular area.

You mean, the kind of expense faced by pet owners all the time, because you can’t always bring your pet everywhere you go? While pets are allowed on airplanes, they follow specific rules and seasonality due to temperature issues. Generally speaking, the pets are not allowed out of their carriers within an airline cabin.

There are specific rules proposed in HR2066:

• There will be a designated “pet car” on each train
• The pet must be contained in a pet kennel
• The pet kennel must be stowed as carry-on luggage per Amtrak regulation on carry-on luggage
• The trip cannot be more than 750 miles
• The passenger will pay extra for Fido or Fluffy’s passage

It is being touted as a source of revenue for Amtrak, which runs at a loss/on a subsidy. Is that really necessary, given the increase in ridership? Many trains and routes are full up, without designating a car for pets. In many cases, non-pet owners may be forced into the pet car against their will (or the will of their allergy medications).

Many countries allow pets on trains as a standard. Most British trains allow pets free of charge, on a leash or in a basket. Thalys, a joint service of the Belgian, French, Dutch and German railways, allows dogs free of charge, but passengers “must ensure that other passengers agree to the presence of your domestic animal.” TGV between Belgium and France allow pets, but charge passenger fees for them. Eurostar does not permit pets. So it’s not as though dogs (and cats) on trains is unheard of — or that failure to allow them will dog a rail line to failure.

The idea that it will drive revenue and demand in the US, however, does seem to be a solution in search of a problem. Ridership is already booming.

However, perhaps in a Congress of gridlock, this bi-partisan bill will be the signature transportation legislation passed. Dogged sponsors will drive success. Truly a source of pride in a representative democracy.

This legislation seems to mostly apply to cats and dogs. There is not specific mention of bunnies, guinea pigs, goldfish, or gerbils. There is also not specific mention of snakes.

Which is good. Samuel L. does not approve of snakes on a train, either.

We stood waiting for the Walk signal to get across 4^th Street and I detected a murmur from them as nothing was happening; there was no traffic, except for the one car that had come to a stop in the crosswalk in front of us, but nobody seemed to have a green light or walk signal. But the view across surface parking lots towards the Guthrie was…a view. Great, I thought, here is someone’s first exposure to our city and it is one of crosswalk confusion and lack of urbanity.

Why couldn’t I be pointing them in the direction of Nicollet Mall?

We finally crossed 4^th Street, maneuvering roller bags around the car still stopped in the crosswalk. As I pointed down Chicago Avenue towards Washington, past the surface parking lots and hardscape, I detected a possibly Scandinavian accent. I asked where they were from. “Ohio,” she said. I raised my eyebrows and the man, sensing my confusion, chimed in “We’re originally from Denmark.” Ah, that’s better. I apologized for our crosswalk and lack of shade trees. They joked that Copenhagen has more bike lanes, and I sheepishly said “yeah, but we look to you for inspiration.” Not to be deterred, I encouraged them to take a stroll on the Stone Arch Bridge after their meeting at Periscope.

They went on their way, and who knows how the rest of their visit transpired. I like to think they had a pleasant time at their meeting, followed by perhaps a meal at one of our fine restaurants and show at the Guthrie. Shaw and I went to the unveiling of the Downtown East plan and I kept thinking about them and all the people who get off the train for the first time or the hundredth time and walk from the platform to the Mill District. What about them? What kind of city are we showing off to guests? What kind of city are we building for ourselves? How will that experience change in three short years when it all this new development is planned?

In an attempt to answer that question, I spent time on the Ryan Companies website looking at images and watching the “flyover” presentation on YouTube. I was shouting at my screen “go left,” “slow down,” “zoom in,” “pan down,” “focus on that streetscape,” “is that street two-way?” “oh, hell, was that a skyway?” It is hard to tell, as there is not much detail yet, but according to the plan’s timeline, if I should run in to my Ohio/Copenhagen friends on the train platform three short years from now, we’ll be looking at a decidedly different surroundings.

To our right will be a “striking” new indoor stadium that will draw crowds but not necessarily give the Vikings the necessary competitive advantage an outdoor stadium would bring to help them return to the Super Bowl. To the left will be a green space, with any luck a fully programmed park that will be the focal point of the downtown, a gathering place for all, and a crowning achievement in this public/private partnership. Possibly the crosswalk at 4^th Street will be a little less confusing and more pedestrian-friendly. Across 4^th will be an apartment building that fronts the 4^th Street side of the easternmost Star Tribune block. As our friends from Ohio/Copenhagen walk down Chicago Avenue towards the Mill District, they’ll very likely pass under a skyway that connects a massive parking structure on that same block to another parking structure farther east, both of which are connected by skyway to the stadium. Unless some parking can be put under the new park, they will also very likely pass by that large parking structure. Maybe the streetscape along Chicago Avenue will be better, with street trees and benches, but only so much can be done to enliven a parking deck. Maybe there will be storefronts, but it is also possible that retail space won’t be viable at the street level because the skyways suck the life and customers from the street.

Maybe our friends will finish their meeting at Periscope and be intrigued enough to wander back to the Downtown East area and look around. They might walk along a pedestrian-friendly urbane street, with good commercial and residential frontage and plenty of pedestrian doors (their fellow Danish urbanist Jan Gehl would be proud). They could well pass a busker along the way, but whether that busker be leaning against the wall of a parking ramp as he wails on his saxophone remains to be seen. If they are seeking a late afternoon coffee, they may find it at street level, or perhaps it will be tucked away up on the skyway level, possibly not even open late in the day, as is often the case with many skyway-level businesses. Perhaps there will be a market event at the Armory and our friends can browse artisan crafts or sample some bacon-wrapped lutefisk on a stick. Maybe there will be a movie showing in the new park across the street. Maybe Wells Fargo employees will be emerging from work and populating the sidewalk tables facing across 4^th Street to the new park. It is possible that 4^th Street itself will be a safe, sane two-way street planted with trees that will provide valuable shade in a decade or so. Our friends might join others on the patio, sipping a drink and gazing across the new park at kids playing in the fountain, couples nuzzling in the glow of dusk, commuters biking across the park where Portland and Park Avenues used to run. Afterward they could grab a nightcap at a cozy wine bar in one of the new mid-block alleyways, while gazing at paintings in a small art gallery.

There is much to be resolved, as the site plan is promising but vague, but yet all of this is possible in Downtown East. Over the next few weeks and months, it will be very critical for us to demand good urbanism from the city council, Ryan Companies, CPED and ourselves. There is public financing going to this project and it will pay for parking and improving the green space to a “basic level.” I sure hope we get something in return, like an attractive public realm and an actual park with a reason to visit. We cannot afford another Gaviidae Common, City Center, Conservatory, or Block E, and we must raise the bar even above the Target corporate campus and store and even the excellent Midtown Exchange. There is much more on the line with this project.

We must have better streetscapes and fewer skyways, more pedestrian doors and no visible parking. This isn’t rocket science, it is just sensible urban values and attention to detail. A stadium, 6,000 employees, 1,700 parking spaces and a green space doesn’t guarantee good urbanism. Good sidewalks, doors, windows, crosswalks, trees, benches, activity and people do. I sincerely hope there will be a little more public vetting of this plan as it races forward to the deadline of ensuring enough parking for the Vikings on opening day 2016. The city cannot afford to “fumble” this opportunity. It costs more upfront, but the return to the private sector, public coffers and our overall enjoyment of our city will be much greater over time. But we must demand a good urban experience, not only to impress our friends from Copenhagen, but to impress ourselves.

This was crossposted at Joe Urban.

Remodeling Wrigley Field’s awesome urbanism should be a sin.

I have been a baseball fan all my life. I went to my first Twins game at Met Stadium when I was less than a year old (or so I am told), and saw them win the ’91 World Series from the upper deck of the Metrodome. I’ve been following the sabermetric revolution since 2001, when I started paying attention to the Twins new crop of young players — Hunter, Jones, Mientkewicz, Koskie, Santana (eventually), Mauer and Morneau — as they began to gel and win games. That’s about the same time that an excellent group of Twins‘ bloggers emerged onto the internet and began critically analyzing the best and worst Twins’ performances. Because of their great writing, I’ve endured the Twins’ last few seasons — the terrible trades of Bill Smith (especially Hardy, Ramos, and Young), the inability of the front office to sign a decent starter, the back-to-back horrible seasons — with an unflagging optimism.

That’s why last week’s article on “the sabermetrics of urbanism” caught my eye. (SABR stands for the Society of American Baseball Research, people who write statistically-minded outsider analysis.) The author, Michael Hathorne, talks about the movie Moneyball and how the same kind of analytical revolution might occur in urban planning. He asks “what is the currency of urbanism,” and identifies a list of possible statistical measures that might help cities reconsider value.

It’s an interesting question that I’ve pondered before. Let’s call it “saberurbanism.” While there are few crucial differences between cities and baseball that limit the metaphor, at the same time, there are important things that urban design fields can learn from the sabermetric revolution in baseball.

The Limits To “Saberurbanism”

According to pythagorean standings,the 2012 Twins were as bad as they should have been.

The first crucial limit to saberurbanism? One commenter on Hathorne’s piece wrote, “baseball is continuous, society is not.” Actually he’s got it backwards: baseball is discontinuous, society is not. A baseball game is an aggregation of hundreds of repeated, discrete events. Each individual pitch is a single data point, sometimes resulting in balls in play, seperated by long periods of standing around, kicking the dirt, and scratching oneself. This discreteness and discontinuity is the main reason why baseball is so amenable to statistical measure. The sample size and repeatability is very large.

Cities, on the other hand, are extremely complex systems that flow contiuously without separable “events.” (Think of an endless soccer game with millions of players, thousands of balls, and many different goals.) While certain things are measurable (traffic flows, tax receipts), so much remains inherently unquantifiable, and the complex interactions of everyday life are not remotely reducable to sets of numbers.

The second limit of saberurbanism: baseball is commensurable, cities are not. In baseball, even though some ballparks are large and “pitcher friendly,” some small and “hitter friendly”, and some  have giant green walls where left field should be, baseball takes place within relatively comparable spaces. Advanced statistics take into account park effects (even Coors field’s atmosopherics), so that you can make an educated guess as to how many home runs Mauer might hit if he played for Yankees [shudder].

Cities are not like this at all. Notoriously, urban planners often assume that an economic development idea from one city will work in another. (Thus everyone building aquariums back in the 90s, urban malls in the 2000s, landmark museums, university research corridors, downtown casinos today, etc.) But cities aren’t interchangeable like baseball fields. Omaha doesn’t work like Orlando. Portland, Oregon is incomprable to Portland, Maine. You can’t apply “park effects” to apples and oranges.

Finally, cities are moral while baseball games are not. Baseball is literally a game. The Yankees winning another World Series might seem like the 27th coming of the apocalypse, but it really doesn’t matter. On the other hand, the design of cities controls people’s livelihoods. Alex Anthopoulos excepting, the Toronto Blue Jays’ poor start to the season won’t ruin anyone’s life, but Toronto’s allegedly crack-smoking mayor Rob Ford’s policies certainly will. Cities can foster generations of racism, lift people out of poverty, start revolutions, or slowly destroy the planet. The stakes are rather different, and treating urban planning like a game does not do justice to the billions of livliehoods held in the balance.

The Lessons of Saberurbanism

One of many Delmon Young defensive gaffes / .gifs

That said, there are a few things that the sabermetric revolution can teach urban designers. First, baseball statheads rigorously test their theories. No old baseball assumption goes unchallenged at a SABR convention. For decades, there have been endless debates over whether pitchers can induce outs, the existence of clutch hitting, the importance of batting order, or how catchers “frame” balls and strikes. The adages of old school managers — e.g. the hit and run, bunting, always having a middle infielder in your leadoff spot (ahem, Gardy) — are continually being debunked by the sabermetric community.

That’s something that urbanists should be doing too. Do streetcars really attract investment? Are wider car lanes really safer? Do parking minimums really reduce congestion? Continually challenging the assumptions of the urban design professions is a noble cause, and we can learn a lot from sabermetrics. No theory should go untested.

Second, sabermetrics is excellent at noticing and ridiculing bad investements. Some baseball teams are legendary for signing aging players to long-term contracts. Some cities do the same thing, building spectacular economic development or transportation boondoggles. Ryan Howard’s contract is like Block E. The convention center subsidy is like signing Alfonso Soriano to an eight-year deal. The new Vikings Stadium is going to be for Minneapolis what Barry Zito was for the Giants. (A-Rod = the Big Dig?)

Rejecting bad investments, and developing alternative models for allocating scarce dollars, should be the goal of saberurbanists. Some teams are adept at trading players when they’re most valuable, and signing young players to long-term team-friendly contracts. Is Portland the Tampa Bay Rays of urban planning?

Before she wrote Death and Life, Jacobs pitched for the Racine Belles.

The final lesson of saberurbanism is that outsiders can change the rules of the game. As Moneyball shows, for a long time baseball insiders have been hostile to outside (sabermetric) analysis. People like Bill James have been writing critical analyses of baseball since the 70s, and new measures of value (like OPS, xFIP, WAR, VORP, etc.) have exploded in popularity for decades (especially on the internet). But most teams began paying attention only recently. The Twins just hired their first dedicated statistical researcher, and it seems that most front office people have slender grasp on even basic advanced baseball stats.

Saberurbanism can learn a lot from baseball about how critical outside voices create change within large risk-averse institutions. The same kinds of outside voices have long popped up in urban planning. Jane Jacobs was the Bill James of urbanism, re-evaulating city neighborhoods and activities that had been written off as worthless. For baseball nerds, it took years of building alternative narratives, attending conventions, and sharing publications before insiders began to listen to them. How long will it take for urbanists?

An outsider Gameday vendor from 2005.

For example, I remember when a group of dedicated baseball stat nerds used to sell their own alternative scorecards [called Gameday] outside the Metrodome. It was a far more interesting read, with actually critical thoughts about the Twins’ recent play and some snark about the opposing team. At first, the Twins’ managment saw this as a hostile challenge, and forced Gameday vendors to stand outside stadium property. Eventually the team realized that these devoted nerds were an asset, and now the Gameday notes appear on the official scorecard sold in the stadium.

The point is that it takes a long time to change institutions. Are cities more or less conservative than baseball teams? Are city planners, business leaders, civil engineers, politicans more open to new ideas, to letting go of misleading beliefs, than general managers or pitching coaches?

Changing the Rules of the Game (or Will the Twins have a strikeout pitcher before Minneapolis builds a cycletrack?)

Correia’s career xFIP is 4.44.

The danger of saberurbanism is that it becomes another form of economics. For example, When Hathorne writes that “consideration should be given towards a human being’s rights regarding free will (ability to choose) that are associated with the human condition,” it crushes my will to live. We can’t continue to measure cities strictly in terms of economic value, no matter how creative we get with the numbers.

But cities can dramatically improve how they quantify value. For example, saberurbanism might replace LOS for cars with LOS for all people, or think more critically whether “jobs created” aren’t just being moved around in the metro area. These kinds of changes, combined with an increasingly wide-ranging counter-narrative about what matters in cities, will hopefully start to change the rules of the game. Cities are not baseball, but cities are complex institutions resistant to change. Maybe by looking at how sabermetrics has changed the game, we can start re-evaluating the really important things about urban life.

I was traveling down St. Anthony Boulevard with my then 3 year old daughter. She was learning her alphabet and noted the P on a lot of street signs. Every time she saw it, she shared her observations. “P with a slash through it”, “P with a slash through it”, “P with a slash through it”, “P with a slash through it”, … “P with a slash through it”.

Well, this is one of the joys of parenthood, teaching reading and the alphabet through road signs. But it brings up a relevant policy question:

Why is the default assumption that we give away scarce public right-of-way for the free storage of private vehicles?

That is, the default assumption could be no on-street parking except where permitted, which would result in fewer signs on St. Anthony Boulevard, and more elsewhere.

There are three aspects of this:

1. Scarceness of public right-of-way. Are you not complaining of congestion? Are you not complaining of the cost of maintenance? If we make streets wide enough to store vehicles, we increase their construction and maintenance costs.
2. Storage of vehicles. Might we store private vehicles on private land? Would this not increase the cost of private vehicles (i.e. by removing one of the subsidies we do provide to cars)? Would that not diminish the amount of private vehicles (demand curves are downward sloping).
3. Free. If you do want to store private vehicles on public land, at least charge for it. This does not require meters, it could involve permits with enforcement.

Now I know we don’t want large areas of surface parking lots either, and if we have already built roads that are too wide for the purpose of moving vehicles, we might as well use them for storage, they aren’t earning interest doing anything else. But we are not done building and rebuilding roads, why are we building them with the intent of using roadspace for vehicle storage?

Perhaps it should be obvious where parking is permitted (the road is marked as one lane and more than say 15′), and where it is prohibited (freeways, right lanes narrower than 15′). Perhaps we need only sign when parking restrictions differ by time of day (no parking in peak hours). Perhaps we can paint the curb instead of putting up ugly signs. Perhaps we can change paving materials.

Certainly there are technological solutions with augmented reality which would overlay virtual signs on the environment, and if we all walk around with Google glasses, or their future equivalent, this might eventually happen. And certainly driverless cars will have a lot of this pre-programmed. But given the time it takes to fully deploy these advanced technologies, we are probably 30 years out before we can remove regulatory signs from our environment wholesale. There should be some intermediate solutions that can help us de-sign our streets.

The audio is here, and you can ride to the end of the podcast road at the feed.

Washington Avenue has been covered extensively on Streets.MN already, so I won’t go further into that now. The others are the Star Tribune site and the Stadium.

The Yard

The Ryan proposal for redeveloping the Star Tribune site is the best of the bunch, and their renderings are also much nicer. The “Yard”, as the park on the site has been dubbed, does a few good things.

• It takes developable land off the market. This makes the remaining land more valuable.
• It provides an amenity for the remaining parcels. One of the beautiful things about parks from a city planning perspective is that no one demands a Benefit/Cost analysis on parks, since the benefits are thought to intangible. In fact they are capitalized in land values.
• It replaces surface parking lots.
• It creates a mall or Central Park for the neighborhood, mall-like in that it one end is dominated by a large structure. In this case it is a Vikings Stadium rather than the US Capitol Building. The idea is the same, we pay taxes to the occupants of the respective buildings.
• It creates redevelopment opportunities for the Armory building (farmer’s market, rec center, museum, etc.)
• It creates valuable redevelopment opportunities for the Morgue, the Juvenile Detention Center, and the Hennepin County Public Safety Facility (and the Stadium in 20 years). These should enrich public coffers.
• It puts “tailgating” to rest, unless they allow tailgating inside parking ramps. Football fans will have to picnic instead.

It also does some problematic things

• It closes Park Avenue.
• It closes Portland Avenue.
• It builds a new parking ramp at Park and 5th. To be fair, this is because of the Stadium. And the location, adjacent to the stadium, HCMC, and the JDC is hardly a pedestrian paradise now or in the future anyway. Hopefully they can do something with the ground floor to keep it active, as it is adjacent to an LRT. It is also well placed given it has almost immediate on and off-ramp access to I-94 to the East. I think it would be better to put the parking ramp under “The Yard”, but I realize subterranean construction is costly.
• It makes the LRT station look like a scar on the landscape. If they eventually split the Blue and Green lines (not yet in anyone’s plans, but necessary if there is demand to increase service frequencies on either line), or put them below grade, this scar will go away. That is many years away.

I think it nets out as a good thing given the existence of a large stadium at one end. Closing Park and Portland are far more feasible than closing 4th St or 5th St. It reduces some vehicular access to the Mill District from the South (and Eliot Park from the North), and goes against the aim for better connectivity. On the other hand, reduced connectivity will reduce total vehicular travel (which is a good thing from an environmental perspective, and a bad thing from an economic activity perspective). Some have suggested that they just be closed part time, e.g. during events, and be shared space the remainder of the time. Others have suggested they stay closed, just like in Central Park. Nevertheless, the effects here will be relatively small.

The issue of “Wells Fargo” as a tenant is interesting. Presumably this is just a consolidation for them, as they already have facilities in town, so would just create vacancies elsewhere. Good for downtown, bad for the owners of the older space elsewhere. A win for the city would steal business from another city (which is still just a transfer). A win for society would be the growth of new business. Also there is a certain irony in that this would be the mortgage division, which got into trouble in the last building boom by over-financing new construction.

Forum discussion.

The Stadium

Well aside from not liking the idea of the Stadium, and its location in downtown being a strategic error on the part of the city and state’s political leadership, it could be worse. I am not as pessimistic on it as Nate. This is an improvement over the Metrodome from an aesthetic perspective. The glass facing West and South will be iconic, though a bit starchitecture-like. That it turns its back to the North and East makes sense given the land uses in place there (a freeway entrance ramp and LRT tracks). Yes it forecloses the opportunity to do something better there, but that wouldn’t be happening anyway, this is Minneapolis not Manhattan and there is just not the demand now (or for the next 20 years) to do something with good urban design in these forgotten marginal spaces, there are still too many better sites. Yes I would like more glass and less wall, but I am sure that costs money. Like the Saints Stadium in St. Paul, it is wedged into a corner backing onto the transportation network and fronting the city, that they don’t do anything with the back is no great loss.

Forum discussion.

Personally, I think it looks like a cross between a laser jet printer, a drunk Frank Gehry and something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is not a compliment. However, be this as it may, preference on architectural styling, no one should be surprised as this is the usual forgettable stuff that post-modernist firms like HKS Architects have been creating for quite some time.

I’ve been a critic of professional sports financing for a long time and will continue to be; but now that it’s a reality that the Vikings will get a new home, I’d like to see it be as good as possible. That means we need a combination of respectful architecture and urban design. This proposal fails on both fronts.

For all it’s faults, the City of Indianapolis built Lucas Oil Stadium. It’s a large, expensive taxpayer subsidizes stadium, but it does pay homage to classical architecture. It doesn’t always have the best street frontage, but it still pretends the pedestrian exists. Going into tonight, I had my fingers crossed that we’d get something similar to Indianapolis.

The architecture and urban design of the new Vikings stadium are bad, at best. I’ll ignore architecture here. The urban design isn’t shaping out to be an improvement over the current footprint of the Metrodome. Urban design is very important, and for this reason, I ask the City of Minneapolis Council to consider that upon their approval of the site plan.

Along the plaza, facing the current Metrodome light rail station, a large plaza opens up to large glass walls. This will likely be an impressive sight from inside the new stadium, but it won’t do much for pedestrian activity or promoting a lively streetscape during non-game days. The plaza needs more activity.

It’s a large building that adds a small park to the Metrodome’s existing footprint. We need more. But, what’s a green space with an active surrounding? The park like space will likely be empty without adjacent buildings nearby to add activity.

There are no new improved transportation connections between the Downtown East neighborhood and the rest of downtown or the River. It’s basically a new, modern rendition of the Metrodome: an over-sized, unquestionably ugly spaceship that adds nothing to the built environment.

The large plaza will be lively during the football season, but will likely be a wind-swept space during regular 9 to 5 Monday-Saturday. It’s a large, nondescript plaza that pays homage to the stadiums large set of windows, and not to the surrounding environment.

This will arguably be the worst part of the stadium. It’s a large, multistory blank wall. No activity here except a parking lot and some emergency exit doors. It’s blank, dark and ignores the urban environment. This is unacceptable – a 5 to 6 story blank wall? No windows. A few doors. Lots of emptiness.

There really isn’t much here that will act as an improvement in the urban design department, and it is hard to see how a building like this will promote additional development. Who would want to live by a monolithic, mega church of a building that only occasionally pays homage to the cultural Gods of Football. It’ll be empty 95% of the time and chaotic the other 5%.

Now, with e-pulltabs being as they are, all we need to do now is find a way to pay for itself (and, if you don’t care for it, well – if history repeats itself, it’ll likely be torn down in about 20 years).

Okay, maybe I wasn’t THAT frustrated about it. But, to be fair, I am biased because I interned for the city last summer under the engineer interviewed in the article, Tim Drew, and I helped install most of those cool, shiny new meters around the Metrodome area. And, I can say after sitting in many discussions and meetings about how the event rates should be charged, that a larger amount of good than bad has come out of the new “smart” meters.

I understand that the article was written as an unbiased journalist report. In my opinion, it had a sort of Dane Cook effect to it – a verbose, riling, pseudo-passionate presentation to illuminate a very specific problem on an otherwise ordinary subject. Although I give credit to the author for pointing out some of the shortfalls of the meter system, I would like to counter many of the seemingly negative-spun thoughts that were placed in the article.

“Beyond posting maps and information on its website, the city did a poor job getting the word out about these (event-rate) districts.”
Throughout the installation process last summer, much of the effort outside of placing the triangle-shaped meters on the poles was communication-related. Interviews on major media outlets occurred several times throughout the summer, including with KSTP, WCCO and the Minneapolis Journal. All businesses in the Downtown East area were contacted on multiple occasions to let them know what the new meters would bring, when the installations would take place, and what they would expect on Vikings game days.

Also, even if one lived in a cave most days of the year and only came to downtown once in a blue moon, every single pay station in the event zone states when the next event is coming, even if it is a week away. On game days, the electronic screen on each station states that it is currently an “event rate day”, and lists the subject price. Not looking at the station to make sure you don’t have to pay at a certain time is a fault of the user, not the city.

“(On 4th Street), on four Vikings playing dates, traffic officers wrote… 33 (tickets) on Sept. 23, nine on Oct. 7, and and seven on Dec. 30″

The fact that 33 tickets were issued in September on one street tells me that most of the cars were regular users who used the previously free parking in past seasons. That number diminished as the season went on, which either signifies that less people parked on 4th Street, or more people paid attention after getting that friendly little envelope under their windshield wiper.

In the Minneapolis metered parking world, each area of town is divided up into different zones, and each zone somewhat illustrates ward/neighborhood boundaries. 4th and 5th Street are in “Zone 1″, which encompasses much of downtown west, and the meters on Portland eastward are in “Zone 2″. (Next time you park downtown, note the first number in the 5-digit meter number – this signifies the zone.) Although the rates change throughout each zone, 5th street is often referred as the downtown boundary, and thus illustrates different rates from Portland or Park Avenue. Before the new meters were installed, 4th and 5th Street had free parking on nights & weekends, which meant free parking for almost all Vikings games. With the new event rates, nights/weekends are still free except for Vikings games on 4th/5th. I think this is a fair compromise for the few surrounding businesses that are actually open on the weekends.

“That’s right. Fifteen bucks to park your car on the street.”

I’m sorry, but I don’t really see a huge problem in this. The author made it seem like a big deal that you have to pay that much to park on the street, but it is still some of the cheapest parking around for game days. Last summer, my fellow interns and I did a short walking survey of the surrounding surface lots, and found that most lots within 3 blocks of the stadium charged $20 or more to park. Although on-street slots aren’t the same steal as before (The old meters charged $1/hour in all of Zone 2), they still are a good price.

Also, the $15 rate was also a compromise for fans wanting to linger the streets and bars after the games. As Tim Drew said in the article, “It gets you all the way until the next morning… We got a lot of feedback from fans who wanted to do something after the game, or were worried they might get stuck if the game ran late.” This is EXACTLY what Downtown East and Elliot Park needs – lingering fans wanting to check out the businesses before and after football. Before the new smart meters, all Zone 2 meters had 8-hour limits, so fans could not spend nearly as much time going around to different dining establishments. The $15 event rate lasts you all day, so you don’t have to worry about refilling the meter.

One more thing about the event rates – thanks to the new meter technology, pricing schemes around the area are able to be more appropriately set to match demand. Like stated previously, all Zone 2 meters were $1/hour Daily, including some of the residential areas near Elliot Park. Now, the event rate can accommodate all demand on game day while providing more realistic pricing schema on regular days. Looking at the map below, the purple area north of Elliot Park is now normally $0.25/hr, and no longer charges on regular Sundays. The green area to the west of Elliot park is both cheaper and charges less time: $0.50/hr between 9am-6pm M-F. The old meters had these slots charged $1.00/hr daily, so most of the street was empty except on the 10 Sundays a year. Now, on 355 days of the year, the residents can park where they couldn’t before and don’t have to pay for most of the evening. This compromise was approved by Ward 7 Councilwoman Lisa Goodman and Elliot Park Neighborhood Coordinator David Fields within a few meetings.

This is a fantastic way to better appropriate meter pricing around less desirable parking areas while meeting demand for Vikings games.

“That CALE won the contract at all takes some explaining.”

In my opinion, the author seems to be stretching his point here. I know I am biased, but I have received 95% positive feedback from a large array of individuals about the new meters and how nice/convenient they are.

But, to do a little explaining on this part: About 5 years ago when Minneapolis was starting to test “smart” meter technology (You made have seen some old test meters like these in places), two companies won different contracts: CALE and IPS. The IPS meters are the ones seen around the U of MN (Which have a completely different parking division from the city) and around St. Anthony northeast of the river. Although IPS are also very good meters and have a very good support system, they did not perform as well in the cold as the CALE meters did, thus causing most of the contract to go to CALE in the end.

CALE also had a better pricing scheme for citywide placement. Although I don’t know details, the bottom line was it was more cost-efficient in the long run to go with the CALE pay boxes rather than the individual IPS meters.

Grand Finale

Even though I don’t work for the city anymore, I do think the event rate metering is extremely fair and is extremely efficient for Vikings and Twins games (The normal day pricing scheme for the North Loop is also cheap). The new technology allows metered parking to operate both as a business in the form of event rates, and as a public good in the form of cheaper non-game day rates for the neighborhoods.

Based on simple economics, the event rates on-street now move parking demand lower, which encourages more people to take other forms of transportation into downtown for games (Do I hear the Blue Line coming?). As many posters on streets.mn have stated before, parking can no longer be considered a given right in urban areas, but rather as a luxury good where an appropriate price must be paid.

When I recorded this conversation, the Minneapolis city council was in the midst of a debate over a new car sharing pilot program using on-street parking spaces, and whether or not to include Hourcar in the pilot project. But last week, the council voted to open up the project to all car sharing vendors, including Hourcar, a new program called Car2Go, and others.

The link to the audio is here. Check out the whole fleet of recordings at the feed.

I went with my family to an event for National Train Day (as suggested by a recent post by Julie). We drove to St. Paul since the Green Line is not yet open. Driving is break-even with paying for 3 fares on the bus round-trip, and my once non-driving, Amtrak-riding wife wouldn’t take the bus anyway. Free parking in St. Paul is a little tricky to find on Saturdays now, but fortunately, the new Saints Stadium construction has not started and the free Farmer’s Market parking at the old Gillette plant is still open, so we parked there and walked a few blocks through the early season market, passing mostly preserves and garden plants, to the station.

We entered the dimly authentically-lit Saint Paul Union Depot (SPUD), a large but not magnificent space. A train station with no trains. The restoration is nice, and I am sure a better space than the restorers found it in, but the original structure was really nothing special at all. Having only been to the front of the station previously (the acoustically challenged headhouse), I was actually disappointed at the rest of it given how much fuss and money have been expended on the project.

The money spent on the restoration was $243 million, one-fourth of the cost of an LRT line serving 100 to 200 times as many people per day? Okay, it’s still better than a Vikings Stadium, but is that really the bar for public investment? We should always ask what else ‘we can get for that money’ given that our wants outstrip our wallets.

The building was perhaps constructed at the nadir of American railway architecture, missing both the Belle Epoque ornamentation of the 19th century, and the Art Deco of just a few years later. Instead going for the stern and spartan neoclassical style reflecting, if not appealing to, the sensibilities of pragmatic upper Midwesterners.

It is “considered to be one of the great architectural achievements in the city” sayeth Wikipedia. That does not speak well of the city, and I believe a false claim. Off the top of my head, I would rate the Cathedral, the Capitol, and the Science Museum significantly higher on the list. Frankly among transportation structures, I would rank Bandana Square higher on the list. And this is all leaving aside what has been destroyed. It is nicer than the Midway Amtrak station it will eventually replace.

As we entered, to our left some early twenty-something lady DJs for the Disney radio channel (apparently Disney has a radio channel) were trying to encourage some youthful dancing to popular music. They were getting no custom. Christo’s restaurant was also mostly empty, though one of the waiters was dancing with the DJs.

There was an Amtrak swag area farther in, with a longish line for stuff. The entire St. Paul rail fan apparatus was in place: from Choo Choo Bob’s, to the Twin Cities Model Railroad Museum, to the Minnesota Transportation Museum, to the NLX booth (with a brochure promising “profits” from their line), to the rail passenger association with a lot of lines drawn on a map of Minnesota. Red Rock’s booth was not manned (just like their trains).

The big attraction was the bouncy house and the bouncy slide. The Slide was manned by a security guard, to make sure the kids didn’t pass each other climbing up the inflatable slide, which could be hazardous.

At the end of the Depot was a sign advocating free train rides. We went downstairs. They were fake trains. Okay, to the extent that one motorized vehicle pulling a trailer is a “train”, they were trains, but they were untracked, not steam, diesel, or electric powered, small, and ran on the platform, not the rail. They couldn’t even get the transportation museum to operate a short-line run of one of their tour trains at the Jackson Street Roundhouse. The small train was nevertheless full, carrying a load of about 10.

Needless to say, the children were displeased. I had to promise a real train ride soon. Blue Line here we come.

I can’t help but think the cavernous space could be better used for almost anything besides a train station serving about 175 boarding passengers a day. (Yes of course more IF they add service.)

If we want to steal ideas from other cities, some thoughts for adaptive reuse for this future pale proboscidea include: An Exploratorium, an aquarium, a planetarium, an indoor market. I am sure there are others.

Bill, David, and I have all written posts about the upcoming reconstruction of Washington Avenue, primarily to comment on questions we have with the traffic analysis.  In advance of the public open house meeting on Tuesday (at the Mill City Museum, you should attend), Hennepin County has posted four potential street layouts (thanks to @mplsbike for the tip).

Two include a cycletrack design, one includes on-street buffered bike lanes, and one includes no bike facilities with a “wide pedestrian zone”.  All designs include 6 lanes of traffic.  For reference, (at least for the cycling facilities) here is some NACTO guidance on one-way protected cycletrack design.

Update: the detailed birds-eye layouts of each concept can be found at the bottom of this page.

Photo by Mike Hicks

Saturday, May 11 is National Train Day. In the past, I wrote a post about local train-related activities for the wee ones and their posse of elders. Today, there are a number of local activities of interest to rail fanatics, kids, and the curious to celebrate National Train Day.

Amtrak has a National Train Day web site with info on activities, as well as highlights on why trains matter. The event is a national commemoration of the May 10, 1869, meeting of the Union and Central Pacific railroads at Promontory Summit, Utah, which compled America’s first transcontinental railroad. None of Minnesota’s local events are listed on said web site, so we here at Streets.MN are here to help you plan your day.

This is what’s going down in Minnesota for National Train Day:

• Union Depot, St. Paul: Free family activities from 11am-4PM. The author of the new book “St. Paul Union Depot” will give a presentation and sign copies of his tome. There will also be bounce houses and music, trackless train rides, plus free bus rides to the Minnesota Transportation Museum.
• Minnesota Transportation Museum, St. Paul: Free bus rides to Union Depot (see above). Also, the Bacon Trolley will be on hand to sell food, plus kids can decorate train cookies. The usual museum experiences will also be open ($), including caboose rides on a vintage caboose.
• Lake Superior Railroad Museum, Duluth: Train rides both Saturday and Sunday on restored equipment ($). Free Golden Spikes for first 50 families Saturday. Various family fun activities alongside the usual museum experiences.
• Twin Cities Model Railroad Museum, St. Paul: The TCMRM will be holding its annual annual Spring Fairgrounds Hobby Show and Sale at the State Fairgrounds in Falcon Heights ($). Show will feature the museum’s traveling Thomas the Tank Engine layout, various other layouts, and collectors and vendors selling, swapping and trading model railroad paraphernalia. Admission to the show includes an admit to the TCMRM at Bandana Square for the rest of the day.
• Milwaukee Road 261 Excursion from Minneapolis to Duluth: The Milwaukee Road 4-8-4 No. 261 will be making a steam run from Minneapolis to Duluth on May 11-12. Tickets have been sold out for a long time, but if you want to see someone fire up the 261, you can certainly watch. It leaves at 9AM from Minneapolis Junction, and will be passing through the Northtown Yard on route north.
• National Train Day Winona: National Train Day festivities will be held from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Winona Amtrak station. The day will include a presentation about Winona’s railroad history (free!).

You can also just load the kids up and hop on the Hiawatha light rail line for a jaunt. Kids love trains.

There may certainly be other events I have not uncovered; the lack of listings on Amtrak’s official site is less than helpful. If you know of any additional events, load them right into the comments below.

1. What do you believe is the most significant land use and/or transportation issue facing Minneapolis in the next 5 years and how do you hope to address it in office?

The most significant overall issue facing Minneapolis is expanding our regional transportation network and effectively managing new development along these current and future transit corridors. If we tackle these interrelated issues right, I believe our city (and our region) will have many less things go wrong.

First, our transit network needs to be rapidly built-out. Strong investments in transportation infrastructure have proven to attract businesses and help retain the ones already here. Regional transit better connects suburban employers with potential employees who prefer to live in Minneapolis (too often we think of transit connections moving people towards the center, rather than away from it). These investments not only help to keep residents, but they draw new ones who want to both live and work in Minneapolis. Nationwide, college graduates want to go to where the jobs are, but they also want to live in cities where they are not forced into immediately purchasing a car.

All of this helps to build our population density, a necessary ingredient for increasing our overall tax base, and therefore allows the city to decrease property taxes. Expanding our transit network generates opportunities for residential development; it creates and diversifies our housing stock and alleviates the stress of our city’s remarkably low vacancy rate.

I support the legislation proposed by the Transit for a Stronger Economy coalition. I hope that a regional transportation sales tax bill will be signed into law in the next couple of weeks. Any new revenue should be split in 3 ways:

• Rapid build-out of LRT: dedicated funding for extending the Green and Blue Lines (Southwest and Bottineau).
• Enhance bus services: adding new BRT, arterial BRT, and local lines, improvements to bus shelters.
• Improve overall bicycle infrastructure, crosswalks, sidewalks, pedestrian access, and provide for overall winter maintenance.

Yet we are obligated to make sure that any new business or residential developments along these new transit corridors don’t replicate the troubling, sprawling suburban development we often see. We need smart, well-designed buildings: developments that add to our communities and not divide them, structures that look like homes with front doors and not warehouses with dominating walls.

Proper build-out along these transit corridors should compel Minneapolis to adopt a form-based code approach rather than continue the traditional zoning rules that have made our neighborhoods seem so disjointed. This approach, where we take the emphasis off of “use,” and instead focus on the design and placement of buildings provides greater flexibility and overall appeal for all parties involved: architects, planners, developers, and most importantly, the public. A form-based code can accelerate the speed at which developments can happen, as developers and project planners can better avoid the typical reviews and appeals that often plague the development process. Moreover, the public can remain in the know about the process for the entire length of a project and have a decisive say in it.

These types of developments in other communities have added to the atmosphere of a place (indeed, in many cases, they make A Place), they don’t simply add ridership numbers for a train, streetcar, or enhanced bus travelling to the center of a city.

2. How do you think the needs of pedestrians, cyclists, transit users and drivers can be met most effectively? Would you prioritize one or more of these modes over others?

There are three points to make.

First, the obvious—there clearly needs to be balanced attention to all modes of travel, by foot or on wheels. We need to make sure our streets and intersections, our sidewalks and crosswalks work for everyone.

Second, there is little doubt that overall road design and transportation projects have clearly favored 4+ wheeled vehicles—at the expense of everyone else—for generations. The balance I mentioned above requires the city to make improvements for anyone travelling our street network without the privilege of an automobile. If I were to prioritize any mode, it would be through investments in walking or biking that would fully render them viable alternatives to motor vehicle use.

We not only need to make sure that pedestrians have enough time to cross the street, we need to guarantee that crosswalks are clearly marked and the pavement itself is free from monstrous potholes that would force the elderly, wheelchair users, or stroller pushers to widen their path (I witnessed this issue just yesterday, while watching a wheelchair negotiate the southern crossing at Hiawatha and 38^th). Adding more bike lanes requires the city (and Hennepin County) to be more mindful of vehicular traffic turns at intersections—bicyclists shouldn’t get right hooked by a turning car.

The city also needs to make a concerted effort to slow motorized vehicles down. This isn’t just a matter of decreasing speed limits, but putting traffic calming measures in place: narrowing lanes, adding curb extensions and pedestrian refuges in the middle of the street (wherever possible), and converting one-way streets into two-ways. These measures are minimum recommendations.

This balance is also achieved in another way: education. There should be an increased push to teach all network users on how to make the system work for everyone. I believe in stronger education initiatives that can help drivers understand what a painted sharrow means, and help bicyclists get the idea that it is simply wrong to bike the wrong way down a one-way street.

Third, despite the fact that we are making valiant strides at diversifying our modes, we can’t completely avoid investments in our road infrastructure. As residents, as workers, and sometimes as travellers, some people still need to use a vehicle. The hope, of course, is to make these trips more infrequent, but no matter how this city rebalances our network, it cannot afford to neglect the roadways that we obviously still need. The trick, however, will be maintaining and strengthening our roadways without negatively impacting our other modes of travel.

3. Minneapolis has many plans for land use, transit, road and cycling infrastructure improvements in plans like Access Minneapolis, the Bicycle Master Plan and the city’s comprehensive plan. How do you think the city should fund these improvements in the future? Other than funding, are there other obstacles to realizing these plans and how would you address them?

Earlier I mentioned my hope for the passage of a regional transit sales tax that would be a major source of funding for transit, bicycling, and other pedestrian uses. This minimal tax (anywhere between one-half cent to a full-cent) could help raise hundreds of millions of dollars annually for improvements to bike infrastructure, bus routes and light rail service, and street lighting, to mention only a few.

The city could also look into increasing parking surcharges for its downtown ramps and lots, as well as diverting some fees it collects from critical parking permits (especially if these permits will be more widely implemented as more transit options become available).

Beyond funding, there are two other obstacles in the way of implementing these various plans.

First, it’s a matter of leadership. Our communities need to take advantage of road resurfacing projects that are already planned, using them as opportunities to include better pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure. This requires leadership that can effectively galvanize community members.  Yet the only way a representative can rouse public input is if constituents already feel like they have a relationship (even if adversarial) with their elected official. The public needs to feel that their representative is open, responsive, and sincerely willing to listen to all input, not to just the most agreeable voices.

Secondly, not only do I believe that the public would be more interested once they have a more open relationship with their representative (truly believing that a potential project component hadn’t already been largely decided by officials, actually thinking that the public input meeting wasn’t merely a mandated formality), but I also believe that they would be eager to push for some of these plans once they realize that the outcomes foster a reliable and safe multi-modal network.

In short, we need better public awareness.

4. As a council person, how would you respond to concerns about development impacts in your ward? Outside of your ward? Is there a recent controversial project (land use or transportation) that you would have handled differently?

There is an undeniable demand for rental housing throughout our city, and an undeniable opportunity for new housing developments throughout the twelfth ward.

That being said, no matter the project—from the Lime Building near Lyn-Lake, to Creekside Commons near Diamond Lake, to the multiple proposals for Howe School, the Simpson Housing plan for 42^nd and Hiawatha back in 2005, or the recently constructed Oaks Station Place—there are inevitably concerns about all housing projects. Some residents argue that their quality of life will be diminished by the new addition of a market-rate apartment building.  Other residents argue that their quality of life will be diminished by the new addition of affordable housing.

Some long-time residents simply aren’t willing to tolerate any changes to their neighborhood. Luckily, a majority of them are.

The job of a City Council member is to not only listen to community concerns and explore how they could be accommodated (whether that deals with set backs or parking or noise), but there also remains a duty to be willing to argue over what is in the best interest of the overall community. Considering the historically low vacancy rate in this city, as well as the need to broaden our tax base, Minneapolis needs housing: market-rate, mixed-income, and affordable. I would staunchly defend well-designed, neighborhood-oriented proposals that would make living in this city more affordable, expand our tax base, and rehabilitate underused properties.

Yet this question did not specify housing developments, just developments. If there is one controversial project I would have handled differently the choice is simple: the Vikings stadium.

By now, most arguments against the City Council’s 7-6 vote are well-known: it was wrong to invest in a billion dollar stadium to relieve us of a relatively insignificant, low-interest Target Center debt, it was wrong to lock up our downtown sales taxes for decades, it was wrong to merely think of this stadium as $150 million city contribution (when the numbers are significantly higher than that), it was wrong to base a decision off of a city attorney’s oral (not written) opinion, and most importantly, it was wrong to violate our City Charter.

Then, as now, I believe in all of these arguments. I would not have voted in favor of the stadium.

5. Where is your favorite place to walk (in or outside of Minneapolis)?

Avenue A in New York City.

I used to live on East 4^th between Avenues A and B about ten years ago, and still today this short walk—barely over a dozen blocks—remains my favorite stretch of any city.

Unlike the dull roar of traffic on nearby 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd Avenues, or the relatively sleepy avenues in the rest of Alphabet City, Avenue A always seems to sustain the best level of controlled chaos in the neighborhood. It has two-way traffic and bike lanes in each direction, so the pace of the street always seems lively yet calm (relatively speaking).

Avenue A supports an impossibly eclectic set of businesses, and even as you walk it daily, there is always a new discovery.  You can buy most anything and you can dine and drink on sidewalks almost anywhere. It has a flea market. It has its own urban oasis: Tompkins Square Park.

Finally, it smells simultaneously awful and wonderful, as most great streets do.

In Minneapolis, it’s an entirely different answer—the path along Minnehaha Creek that leads to Minnehaha Falls. It’s the nearest, safest outdoor stretch (beyond our yard) that my 2-year-old daughter can walk and run without randomly darting into traffic. Except for simply crossing the street, we can walk for nearly 20 minutes without having to cross another. I love that my daughter (and my son, not quite yet 1 year old) can be immersed in a ridiculously beautiful natural environment while being in the middle of a respectably large metropolitan area. Or, to put it another way, I am happy that my kids are growing up in a neighborhood that has both ducks and light-rail trains passing through it.

The comment was a reaction to a debate taking place online this week (in admittedly small circles) about the recently released Hennepin County study on over traffic projections and alternatives for Washington Avenue (downtown Minneapolis, between Hennepin and 35W). The street is up for a complete reconstruction this year, and over the past few months there’s been a a long-running discussion over how the street will be re-designed. Will it be the 7-lane status quo, a 6-lane version, a 5-lane boulevard with bike lanes, or something even more pedestrian friendly (e.g. something with cycletracks or extended sidewalks)?

This has proved to be a hot topic, and city and county politicians have probably spent some time sweating it out. It’s major issue for the bicycle coalition, for downtown residents, for city council candidates, and for planners and pedestrian activists. And I imagine there are interested parties with deeper pockets. (Zygi Wilf springs to mind, or Target…)

Recently the debate has turned rather wonky. The Washington Avenue study is a 73-page document filled with maps and charts of scrutable detail. Reading it provides little pleasure, and left to itself, it would be another of thousands of such documents produced yearly by Departments of Transportation or Public Works across the country.

This one seems different, though, because it’s so important. It’s refreshing that in the Twin Cities, we have people willing to read, understand, and critique these kinds of analysis, challenging both its methodology and conclusions. For example, Brendon posted earlier this week about the study’s assumptions about increasing VMT. (It’s something I’ve written about before.) And later this week, David suggested that the traffic numbers were slightly “massaged,” and Janne over at the MBC posted an epic rebuttal of the study’s conclusions, arguging that the reported results contradict themselves. For anyone interested in the fine details of urban planning and transportation debates, this is an excellent time to be online.

Textbook Case of Precision Without Accuracy?

I could think of nothing to add until Brendon’s tweet got me thinking about traffic modeling more generally, the methodological approach and effects of studies such as this one. This study seems to be an excellent example of what Donald Shoup, in his tome on parking policy, calls “precision without accuracy.” (I’ve written about this before, too.) In his chapter on the origin of parking minimums, Shoup wades hip-deep into the origins of minimum parking requirements, for example, why hair salons require one space per chair, restaurants require two spaces per thousand square foot, or swimming pools require one space per cubic meter of water (or whatever the exact numbers might be).

Shoup’s example of meaningless statistical inference.

As Shoup explains, most of these requirements come from studies with shoddy methodology. Most parking studies have very small sample sizes with widely varying contexts and low statistical significance. Yet in parking policy documents, they’re reported with a high degree of precision, often with a ridiculous number of significant digits.

(I.e, the example at right. The “parking generation rate” for a fast-food restaurant is reported to be “9.95 spaces per 1,000 feet of leasable square footage on a weekday”, yet the R-squared value of the study is a meaningless 0.038. For almost all land uses, the range of possible parking outcomes is widely varied, and few of these studies can make a meaningful claim to predict parking demand.)

Shoup correctly mocks parking minimum studies as quasi-science, but mourns the fact that these figures are treated as scripture by the civil engineers who use them every day. He suggests that cities should rid themselves of this kind of imprecise faux-statistics. Instead, he advises “accuracy without precision,” or that parking studies should offer up a range of possible outcomes that reflect the stastical rigor of the data. Such an approach would say that, for example, restaurants require between 2 and 20 parking spaces per thousand square feet (or something like that). That would give policy makers a range of possible outcomes, allowing cities to choose the kind of built environment they want, freeing cities from the yoke of traffic predictions.

Reading through the Washington Avenue study, the same principle might apply. Even without knowing the details of the traffic prediction model used in this study, how can any analysis pretend to know, to incredible degrees of precision, what someone’s commute time will be in 2035, twenty-three years into the future? The variables are intricate beyond measure. Twenty-three years ago it was 1990, and much has changed since then. Nobody had heard of the internet, a gallon of gas cost $1.16, and a barrel of oil was under $20.  How will our commuting patterns, transportation choices, and economic decision-making change between now and 2035, when I’m 67 years old and yelling at kids to get off my lawn? How many trends could you project forward that would completely change this model’s outcome? Google cars, car sharing servies, telecommuting, downtown population increases, increases in transit, increases in the gas price… any of these could change the rules of the game. How can we possibly say, with a precise number of seconds, what a driver moving this particular mile through downtown Minneapolis will experience in 2033? This is surely another case of precision without accuracy.

In 1990, this was cool.

But what are the alternatives? What might this study look like if it provided “accuracy without precision”? Without being a traffic engineer, I’d guess that, based on similar streets around the country and around the world, there would be a wide range of possible outcomes for a street like this. Can we even say that Washington Avenue will congested at 5:30 in the afternoon on Tuesday, June 13th, 2034? The odds are good, but it’s not a given. At the very least, we have to admit uncertainty. Ideally, a study like this would say that the 2035 traffic flows will exist within a range of X to Y (say between 23 and 35K cars/day), depending on a number of land use and planning variables.

An “accuracy without precision” approach would give city and county officals a bit more breathing room, more of a sense that they can affect the transportation future of Minneapolis. (Today, this report reads like one of Moses’ tablets.) By 2035, the experience of driving or walking down Washington Avenue might be radically different, based on what we do now. As Brendon tweeted yesterday, in what other fields are we trying to predict the interaction of complex human systems to within 90 seconds 20 years into the future? If you’ve stuck with this article this far, I challenge you to come up with an answer.

The 2035 estimates for cars in each lane at each intersection.

PS. There’s a public meeting about this on Tuesday (5/14), at the Mill City Museum, at 5:00

PPS. The answer is, of course, astrology.

Electric vehicle charging stations have appeared across the country in a flash. Source: AFDC.

Something remarkable happened last year: The country’s mix of alternative-fueling infrastructure for cars suddenly flipped from being dominated by biofuels and lighter fossil-fuel byproducts to being primarily composed of electric charging stations—at least if you go by the pure numbers.There is an asterisk by “Electric” in the legend of the chart above, and the footnote says that each individual charging port is counted separately. But there were still 13,392 electric-vehicle chargers by the end of 2012, and even if the number is inflated by four or five times, it still outstrips the 2,654 stations for the nearest competitor—propane. If that sudden spike in growth is the beginning of a trend, electric chargers will be in the clear majority soon.

In other news, who knew that propane has long been the most common alternative fuel out there? And the fact that it has been slowly decreasing in popularity? It sure was a surprise to me when I saw this data graphed on the Washington Post‘s Wonkblog last week, in an article bemoaning the slow adoption of natural gas as a fuel.  Natural gas also used to be propane’s main rival, but has now slipped to be the 4th most accessible alt-fuel.

Of course, public electric charging infrastructure isn’t everywhere yet. but electric fueling has always had a huge potential simply because of the pervasiveness of electric power in our lives. An electric car is most readily recharged from a high-voltage, high-amperage line, but if you have patience, a regular 120-volt socket can do in a pinch. The data for the chart above also ignores home charging stations—something that can allow an EV owner to completely avoid the need to make an extra stop to charge up if daily driving is always within the car’s total range.

I’ve seen a number of pure electric and plug-in hybrid cars on the road. The Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt models are the ones I notice most readily, though I’ve also seen a Tesla Model S (not yet sold in Minnesota) and a Mitsubishi i-MiEV (which I’m suspicious may have even been Canadian). It’s nice to see a technology that had been talked about for so many decades finally begin to appear nationwide and not just tucked away in the most populous or polluted areas of the country. It’s also a stunning rebuke to the much-hyped hydrogen car, which boasts a mere 10 public filling stations in the entire U.S. today.

There’s still a lot of room for electric charging infrastructure growth, though. There are about 120,000 or 160,000 gasoline filling stations around the country, depending on whose numbers you look at. While charging at home or at work shaves off a lot of the need for public chargers, there will still be markets to serve for those who can’t charge at home (such as apartment or condominium dwellers), folks who are traveling longer distances, and others who simply forgot to plug the car in overnight.  It’s also going to take a while for fast-charging infrastructure to become standardized.  Tesla Motors is deploying their own “Supercharger” network for the Tesla Model S because the industry-standard SAE J1772 charge plug doesn’t yet handle the high voltages and amperages that the Tesla is capable of drawing.

Geographic coverage is also still lacking. EV chargers have mostly been deployed around major cities, but are still almost completely absent in some rural states. There are zero public EV chargers in Wyoming, according to government data, and only one in Montana. North Dakota apparently has two—one in Fargo, and the other in Grand Forks. While that pure electric Minneapolis-to-Seattle trip might have to sit on the back burner for a while longer, there has been a dramatic change in just a few years, and it is likely to continue.

The acronym NIMBY, which of course stands for “Not In My BackYard”, popped up at some point a few decades ago and has since wiggled its way into the lexicon of tenured professors of urban planning and Star Tribune commenters alike. An approximate definition is someone who understands the broader societal value of something but doesn’t want said thing anywhere near property that they happen to own.

It’s easy to think of potential examples of NIMBYism that are close to the approximate definition—opposition to things like airports, oil refineries, prisons, and the like. The problem is that, at least locally in a city like Minneapolis, that’s rarely how the term ends up being used. It’s almost always used in conjunction with some high profile infill development, and hardly ever in reference to, say, increasing the garbage burning capacity of HERC (…the garbage burner).

At some point, we changed its meaning to be a catchall dismissal of people who are opposed to a given development, regardless of circumstances. This isn’t fair and it’s definitely not productive. Case in point: The instance where I first started to be annoyed by reckless “NIMBY”-accusing was during the Lyndale Trader Joe’s proposal about a year ago. I found myself and others being called NIMBYs for opposing the proposal—but we opposed it because the land use was terrible! And shoot, the site wasn’t even in my backyard.

I’ve also noticed that when we do this, we have a tendency to start painting with very broad brushes, which is just as unproductive. In particular accusations of racism fly quite freely, which is a bit of a sport in Minnesota anyway, but again isn’t very helpful. Even if we don’t always agree with our opponents when they’re opposing a project, it’s a bit of a leap to immediately throw them into Klan hoodies. There are legitimate, or at least understandable, reasons why a homeowner may oppose a six story apartment building going in next door to their one and a half story bungalow.

I guess the point is that when you just roll your eyes and call someone a NIMBY (or more likely, type it about them anonymously on the Internet amongst people you already agree with) you’re simplifying and trivializing a complex and important issue. If we want to change the status quo, we absolutely have to do a better job of communicating with the public. And quite frankly, we need to actually show up to some of these neighborhood meetings in the first place, instead of distantly complaining about how they don’t represent the best interests of our cities as a whole. There will always be people who are rabidly and blindly opposed to any change. But there are plenty of people who simply like things the way they are–and if we can convince enough of those folks that some changes, smart changes, could make their neighborhoods even better, we may someday live in a world where this lot isn’t across the street from Lake Calhoun.

• Lakeside Commons Park was opened in 2010 and built using standard set-aside land and monies from housing development in Blaine.
• The park has many features and amenities, including a large rentable pavilion for family reunions and large-scale festivities, a boat launch, running paths, beach and splash pad. A triathlon is held there annually. In brief, it acts more as a regional park than a “city” amenity.
• The park was built with 72 permanent parking stalls — fewer than advised for similar parks, for which a minimum of 200 spaces would be suggested.
• Permits, overflow parking and other approaches have been used to address the fact that inadequate parking was built, especially given the park’s location in the city it formally serves — and the fact that 35% of park users are not city residents.

Well, welcome to 2013. In prior years, the city of Blaine implemented permit-based and pay parking, and waived city ordinances to allow parking on unpaved surfaces/grassy lots. This year, parking at Lakeside Commons will be wholly restricted to the 72-spot parking area, with no grassy parking available because the field previously in use as overflow is being used for development — its original intended use. Permits will still be required to park in those 72 stalls, with permits free for city residents, and $5/day, or $25/season for non-residents.

But wait! The city is encouraging on-street parking in the surrounding neighborhoods, and has been so kind as to provide a map of where people can park in the neighborhood. The neighbors, who have previously complained about the noise, influx of traffic, and general chaos of the nice city park they live near turning into a regional destination, are undoubtedly going to be delighted. Plus, the on-street parking, while requiring people to actually walk a few blocks to access the beach, splash pad, and other amenities will be free, without any permitting requirement.

This is the inevitable result of inadequate planning. While parking is rarely an efficient use of space, it does have a purpose — especially in a space that can accommodate large groups, large events, and large numbers of people, with the amenities to make those people all wish to be accommodated. But the parking fails to accommodate. Even with an improvement of access to the area with bicycle-friendly amenities, better road crossings of Radisson Road, 72 stalls was nowhere near realistic. The picnic shelter alone accommodates groups of 150!

The city of Blaine rarely puts in place policies or infrastructure that actively encourages non-motorized transport. In this instance, they’ve also made their preferred mode of transport awkward at best, and the likely source of considerable neighborhood howling. And this year, they won’t even get the revenue offset to pay for the added policing required of this parking scenario.

Sometimes, parking is a necessary evil. Because the result of not having it? Worse.

Update, May 20: The city of Blaine has managed to negotiate use of a giant vacant lot near the park for overflow parking. There is a crosswalk between the lot and the park entrance. I’m going to assume the city rule about parking lots has been dealt with again, seeing as city ordinance forbids using vacant lots as parking save for Senior PGA tournaments.

In one of the great blessings of open data, Minneapolis makes its raw traffic counts available online. So I went to their website and looked for myself, under turning movement counts [TMC] on Washington Avenue South. These counts are summarized in Table 1 for Eastbound traffic (and the first 5 columns of Table 2 for Westbound traffic), along with the numbers from Alliant’s report. As you can see Alliant’s numbers (data column 3) are 10 to 35% higher than the counts in the City of Minneapolis database for the same period (data columns 1 and 2) (and I assume these are the source of Alliant’s resulting numbers, though the report is vague on the traffic count details). The ratios are given in data column 4.

Why does this matter? By being “conservative” and adjusting traffic counts up, they are over-estimating the need for roadway capacity, that is, they are being “liberal” with the number of lanes required to ensure a particular level of service.

Table 1: Eastbound AM flows on Washington from Hennepin to 11th Avenue

Table 2: Westbound AM flows on Washington from 11th Avenue to Hennepin

Reversible Lanes

I was also interested in some other aspect of traffic. Ethan said the traffic was balanced on Washington after I posited that it was unbalanced, and we could consider reversible lanes. In fact it is both, depending on where you are looking. The final columns of Table 2 identify the dominant direction, the directional ratio (WB/EB flow), and what flows would be with the lane split given in the final column. At 3rd Avenue, traffic is balanced, to the East there is much higher westbound traffic in the morning, to the West there is much higher eastbound traffic in the morning. Along Washington Avenue, the midpoint of downtown traffic is 3rd Avenue (not Nicollet as I would have supposed before looking at the numbers).

Is the imbalance sufficient to justify reversible lanes? The case is marginal. In general, with two lanes in each direction, left turn lanes, and good signal timing, I think a 2/2 split should work well enough. Near I-35W a 3/1 split (3 lanes westbound, 1 lane eastbound in the AM) is plausible. Similarly on the westside of downtown, a 1/3 split is also plausible in the reverse direction.

I am leaving the PM analysis as an exercise for the reader.

The Minneapolis Turning Movement Counts can be found here: WashAveAMFlows.pdf and WashAvePMFlows.pdf.

We did this for the Twin Cities. Go here:

Timelapse of Minneapolis – Saint Paul

Andrew notes:

I think the most amazing thing is seeing the path of the Minneapolis tornado appear in 2011

Ms. Wolford argues young people considering a move to a metropolitan area seek better connectivity and an urban lifestyle. Absolutely. Let’s pretend for a moment that we find the political will and funding to accelerate the build-out of our system; to get the “connectivity.” What about the “urban lifestyle” we seek? People aren’t moving here just for the train. The connectivity provided by new transit systems valuable, but we leave half the value on the table if we don’t create a truly walkable environment once riders step off the platform. We must not just connect dots on a map but weave a fine web of urbanism that everyone can share and enjoy.

What does that mean? Here’s an example: I just spent a few days with my family in the Eastern Market neighborhood in Washington D.C. From our rowhome, we could walk down leafy, wide sidewalks, across mostly narrow streets with boldly marked crosswalks (some of which were marked with signs reminding drivers it was a $250 fine for not stopping for a pedestrian), crosswalk signals with pedestrian-friendly countdowns, past storefronts with lots of windows and doors, not a single surface parking lot, narrow curb cuts where they existed,  It was easy to get not only to the Metro station but also throughout the entire neighborhood on foot. Sure, the Metro took us all over D.C., but we (my six- and two-year old) also were very comfortable in the city that lay outside the stations. Quite simply, it was walkable.

The Hiawatha Line continues to teach us lessons. Here we are approaching the ninth anniversary of service on the Hiawatha Line (Blue Line) and we’re just starting to address life beyond the platform. This year crosswalks on Hiawatha Avenue will be improved, a good first step, but ideally that occurs the day service begins. The private development market has certainly responded as expected, with plenty of residential and other development popping up near stations (and sometimes at the station itself), but ensuring a high-quality public realm has remained elusive. People stepping off the platform at Lake Street, for example, expect a better urban lifestyle, particularly a dozen years after approval of a plan by Peter Calthorpe. Moving forward, we must guarantee that when development happens the result will be to the high standards we should expect.

Granted, the federal funding process does not help. We have to do it all ourselves. We don’t even get trees. The City of St. Paul had to create a whole separate program for trees along the Central Corridor (Green Line). Who pays for these seemingly elemental things like trees, benches, enhanced sidewalks, crosswalks and better building facades? I think a large portion should come from property owners who benefit most from enhancements – those immediately adjacent to stations. In return, they can be allowed greater density to ensure profitability. Cities and the state should also ensure the right financing system is in place to pay for infrastructure and placemaking improvements even before private development occurs.

We are at an inflection point here in the Twin Cities. Not only must we build out transit system much faster, we must bring our urbanism “A-game” to the table.  Connecting the dots is half the solution. I encourage all stakeholders, including planners, residents, the FTA, traffic engineers, local and state elected officials and of course McKnight to come together and ensure that entire neighborhoods, not just train stations, are ready for people the day service begins. Only when we insist upon nothing but the best urbanism will we be able to provide that elusive “urban lifestyle” and literal value we need to be a successful and attractive metro area in the future.

This was cross-posted at Joe Urban.

Kris and I sat down last week in The Warren, on the corner of 44^th Avenue North and Osseo Road, and we talked about how she discovered this part of the city, the challenges of starting an Italian restaurant in Minneapolis, and how the internet changes development debates, often for the worse.

Click here for the audio. Chow down on the whole buffet at the feed.

Join local urban and transportation celebrity bloggers on the 1st Annual Minneapolis Bike ‘n’ Brew Tour.

The route is a simple 8 (eight) miles that start at Harriet Brewing Company at 5pm. The route will then progress up through Northeast as the night goes on. Here’s the line-up:

Illustrations from the original 1958 Fortune article.

I discovered Jane Jacobs rather late. It was 2003 a few years after college. Due to insufficient funds, I’d recently moved home from New York City, into my mother’s basement back in Saint Paul, and was spending much of my time reading books. The way I remember it, I was reading through a book of Jonathan Franzen essays and came across an intriguging quote by Jacobs, something about the paradox of feeling anonymity in crowds. It made me curiuos enough to track down a copy of her famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and I’ve been in love with her ideas ever since.

Jacobs is a curious and heroic figure in American urbanism, the epitome of low-brow common sense genius. She was a high-school educated writer from Scranton, Pennsylvania who began her writing career penning an architecture column for Architectural Forum magazine. Famously self-taught, she became more and more critical of architecture and planning throughout the 1950s, until she caught the eye of the Rockefeller Foundation, who helped her publish her masterpiece in 1960. The rest is well-known history, and it’s fair to say that the world of urban planning has not been the same since. Jacobs sits comfortably at the top of most every “most influential urban thinker” list you can find. It’s an ironic place to be, as Jacobs has become more influential than scores of well-educated and pompous men, experts like Lewis Mumford or Robert Moses who had easy access to the halls of influence. Hers is a story of women triumphing over men, common sense over the academy, and the people over the powerful.

Illustrations from the original 1958 Fortune article.

Downtown is For People, published in Fortune magazine in 1958, was Jacobs’ first major essay critiquing city planning, the place where she first tried out her ideas about what cities should be. Reading it now, fifty-five years later, you can see her early argument forming. She talks about the importance of small blocks, the need to have diversity in building types, ages, and affordability. She talks about the need to focus on people, not on architecture or planning diagrams. She describes her methodology, which literally focuses looking from the bottom up, keeping attention at street-level activities.

She also shares her admiration for Victor Gruen’s famous plan for downtown Fort Worth, which would have made the downtown a car-free zone surrounded by large parking lots, with intensified street activities. (It was never completed.)

1958 was also about the that downtown Minneapolis entered its midlife crisis. General Mills had just decamped from downtown to a suburban campus in Golden Valley. Dayton’s had just opened up Southdale. Suburbs were sprawling outward at record rates. In residential, office, and retail, downtown was on the verge of collapse. Business owners in the Minneapolis Club were sweating, and not just in the steam room.  Their solutions — the skyway system, Nicollet Mall, and razing the run-down Gateway district — were pretty typical of an American city. They did more harm than good, and downtowns across the US are still trying to correct these planning and design missteps.

The Gateway district in 1962.

If only they’d seen what Jacobs saw. Re-reading her pivotal essay today, you’d never know it was written fifty-five years ago. Her words are no different from any you’d find on Planetizen, on this blog, or during a planning consultant powerpoint.For example, Jacobs’ castigation of downtown malls is based on their uniform retail spaces. She writes that “lack of variety in age and iverhead is an unavoidable defect in large new shopping centers and is one reason why even the most successful cannot incubate the unusual – a point overlooked by planners of downtown shopping-center projects.” Truer words have never been said about Block E.

Even today, Jacobs would have disliked most of Downtown Minneapolis. Everywhere you walk, you’ll find “spacious, parklike” plazas, “long green vistas,” and skyway system that’s the epitome of  ”stable and symmetrical and orderly.” Jacobs would have had to wait a long time to discover her “cheerful hurly-burly.” Reading through her first famous essay today, you realize how far ahead of her time she really was. Over half a century later, we’re only beginning to catch up with her.

Currently, a public debate has developed around the fairness of the City’s approach to selecting a company to run the pilot program. On May 3 the Star Tribune detailed HourCar’s response to the staff recommendation; the local company contends it is just as capable of providing on-street car sharing as the Daimler AG-owned Car2Go.

“On-street” car sharing programs are an exciting new approach to offering car-based mobility without requiring car ownership. From the user perspective, the most important feature of these programs is that cars do not have an assigned “home” — when you are done with your rented car, you just park in any legal space, log out, and walk away. I think that users will find that flexibility very appealing compared to traditional “assigned-space” car sharing programs like ZipCar and the locally-run HourCar. There is a lot more to say about the differences between these two types of system, and I’m sure we will also hear more about HourCar, Car2Go, and the city’s selection process.

But I think a different issue will, in the long run, have both broader and deeper implications for the future of innovative approaches to transportation in Minneapolis. I hope that Mayor Rybak and the City Council appreciate the importance of choosing a provider that is able to provide detailed data for use in research, analysis, and evaluation.

The flexibility provided by on-street car sharing services make then an exciting new development in urban transportation. As the City has recognized by pursuing a carefully-controlled pilot program, new systems must be evaluated thoroughly and methodically. This is especially important in an urban context, where both the benefits and the costs of new technologies will be experienced by many people.

Therefore, I call on Mayor Rybak and the City Council to ensure that any on-street car sharing program which operates in the City of Minneapolis is required to produce detailed data — not merely summaries or reports — which describe each trip made by a car-share vehicle.

User privacy is a critical concern. Public data should never allow identification of individual users without their consent. However, privacy concerns should not be used as a scapegoat to avoid collecting or releasing data. There are no technical barriers to producing useful data that does not identify individual users.

The staff recommendation of Car2Go cites that Car2Go was selected in part because “the size of the fleet will provide [a] large amount of user data.” I’m glad to see this, but I’m not satisfied. I hope that, regardless of what vendor is ultimately chosen, the City develops a contract that explicitly requires detailed per-trip data collection that will be available for public research and analysis. The city should require vendors to demonstrate plans for collecting, storing, and publishing this data in a manner that preserves user confidentiality.

The Twin Cities’ Nice Ride bike-share system provides an example of the value that can be gained by establishing this type of data source.. Nice Ride released data describing every trip made using the bike-share system in 2011 and 2012. The data were quickly analyzed by local researchers to gain insight into the patterns of bike-share use and the ways that bike-share stations support local businesses:

• Streets.MN contributor Brendon Slotterback used the Nice Ride trip data to visualize the density of bike share traffic on roads and trails in Minneapolis and Saint Paul.
• MinnPost produced an animated look trips over the course of the day, and published the source code for their visualization so that anyone can use and expand upon it.
• A group of student researchers at the University of Minnesota discovered that bike-share stations are associated with increases in business traffic at some types of local establishments. Their study was presented at the national meeting of the Transportation Research Board.

Without the data provided by Nice Ride, this and other knowledge would not be available to the citizens of Minneapolis. If the City selects an on-street car-sharing provider that does not provide similarly robust data, we will have missed an opportunity to thoroughly evaluate how car-sharing systems meet or miss the needs of Minneapolis residents, and to expand our broader understanding of transportation systems.

In recent weeks we have thought about public subsidy for transit and university subsidy for parking.

But what about roads? Are roads worthy of public subsidy?

Let’s think about our framework of excludability vs. rivalry. The Transportation Economics wikibook says:

Roads exist largely to serve two purposes: movement and access (specifically, access to property). Different types of roads have characteristics of different types of goods based on their functional classification. In other words, there is a correspondence between the functional classification of a road and the type of good it represents. What types of roads are which type of goods?

Limited access highways (freeways) and some arterials with signalized intersections and few access points, could be considered private goods, since it is possible to identify and exclude users with appropriate toll technologies. These roads are also rivalrous since, in the absence of pricing or other measures to limit demand, an additional user can affect the use of the road by others.

It is very clear that users could pay for private goods directly. The most obvious way is a toll, a bit less obvious is a gas tax. Nefarious politicians in a few states have come to realize that a wholesale tax on gas is more hidden than a retail gas tax, even if the incidence is essentially the same. The gas tax collected on users of freeways at the state and federal levels would more than pay for freeways (even if some is diverted to transit and other uses).

Local roads lie on the other end of the spectrum in terms of functional classification, since they exist primarily to provide property access. Local streets can be excludable if access to them is restricted. Access restrictions may take many forms, ranging from the simple posting of signs indicating that access is restricted to residents to actual physical restrictions, such as gates. The latter type of restriction is typically associated with gated communities or other forms of private residential development. Local streets are also generally non-rivalrous in that their low levels of traffic tend to preclude problems with congestion. This combination of characteristics (excludability and non-rivalry) indicates that some local streets may be considered club goods. The oldest such example in the United States is that of Benton Place in St. Louis, Missouri, where adjoining property owners were required to join a private association which was responsible for road maintenance, with assessments being levied on each association member.

These kinds of local roads are essentially club goods. The ideal club might be the homeowners association, the downside is diseconomies of local management of roads and potential interruptions in the local road network (e.g. more cul de sacs and fewer gridded blocks). Division of labor is a good thing, but requires scale. So the club is usually the local municipality rather than the homeowners association. The revenue that is collected for this tends to be a property tax, paid for by everyone. Tolls are impractical for local streets because the cost of collection outweighs the benefits. A local option gas tax may also be impractical because the purchase area of gasoline exceeds the size of the municipality (e.g. our most used gas station might be in St. Paul, even if we live in Minneapolis). Any jurisdiction that tried to raise too much from this fee would see more out-of-municipality purchases, and the gas station (or the landowner of the gas station, if they differ) would bear much of the incidence of the charge.

An additional challenge associated with fuel taxes for roads is that some local roads, when privatized or used as a club, restrict auto traffic. In the Seward neighborhood Milwaukee Avenue is essentially a club good for bikes and pedestrians. In such cases property taxes are much easier and effective for financing the roads. St. Louis, MO, has long featured private local streets in all types of communities.

Local streets are typically provided by local governments with no restrictions on access. In the absence of access restrictions local streets may be both non-rivalrous and non-excludable, leading them to take on more of the character of a public good. Note the term “public good” in this case is defined by the economic characteristics of the good, and not simply by the fact that it is supplied by the public sector.

Some local streets are not excludable because of their functional design connecting places (one of the drawbacks of a connected network is that it is used to connect people who are not local). So design of the network greatly affects how it is best managed and funded.

Between limited-access highways and local streets are a middle level of road, collectors, that link local streets with limited-access highways. These “linking collectors” serve both access and mobility functions, since they may also provide access to some adjacent properties. These roads may be considered “congesting” or common goods.

The characterization of roads in terms of functional classification may also inform decisions about which level of government should be responsible for providing a given road (assuming the decision is made to provide the road publicly). Local units of government seem best suited to providing local streets, since they are closest to the problem. Roads that provide for a higher level of movement, such as limited-access highways, ought to be provided by higher-level jurisdictions, such as states. Of course, there are tradeoffs involved in each of these decisions. Smaller jurisdictions may not be able to fully realize scale economies, while larger jurisdictions may encounter problems with span of control. Between these extremes there is some optimal mix of expenditures between different levels of government that minimizes capital and operating costs.

The larger jurisdiction (the state) could set a higher fuel tax to redistribute back locally by some formula, but there still remains different preferences in different municipalities for different levels of service, which require some locally different levels of funding. How is that to be collected if not a property tax?

The property tax can be thought of as a charge for having the option to access roads and receive public services such as police and fire. There are other types for local tax that can be used; a variety of land value capture mechanisms, from the land value tax or split rate tax, to transportation utility fees change the basis of collection, but even TUFs are still not strictly proportional to use. If a mileage-based usage fee were already widely deployed, it could be varied by municipality to collect more revenue, but that ideal revenues collection scheme is not worthwhile to implement if the only user were local governments, and would require standardization and enforcement to enact.

Regardless of whether one favors or opposes subsidy for roads, distributional considerations of how the subsidy monies are generated are important. We discussed fuel taxes, tolls and property taxes, but many cities and states turn to sales taxes to pay for roads (and transit. For instance, the Minnesota Legislature is considering an increase in sales taxes dedicated to transit. Sales taxes are a shift away from direct user fees and impose the burden of subsidy broadly. Sales taxes also tend to be regressive in that households who end up paying the largest share of their income in sales taxes receive less than proportionate value in return. So subsidy is an issue of distributional fairness depending on how the money is raised as well as how it is spent. At the very least money used for subsidy should not rely on regressive tax policy.

Rationales for subsidizing roads:

1. Universality: Everyone uses roads, everyone should pay.
   

   Midwest Energy News quotes succinctly: “There isn’t a person in the United States who doesn’t get some use out of the roads,” says Levinson, who also writes the Transportationist blog. Even people who don’t drive still benefit from things like fire protection, ambulance services, and mail delivery — all of which depend on roads. “I suppose you could be Ted Kaczynski, but even he had to use the U.S. Postal Service to mail his bombs.”

   Even if you don’t drive, or bike, you still use roads. We had roads before cars and bicycles, and will continue to have them even when we have flying cars in the future. Their nature will of course vary, but at least some of the costs are communal. We collectively want the option to be accessed by ambulance should the need arise, or fire or other emergency services. We all make use of ground delivery for things like the mail or packages. We all partake of public utilities running along public rights-of-way. Even bus riders use roads. We also like to have things delivered. When we order a pizza we use the roads, but we have substituted our travel to the restaurant for the delivery person’s. When we order things online, FedEx, UPS and other carriers use the roads to deliver our stuff. It is impossible to “opt out” of using the road network.

2. Democracy: Most people drive, therefore it is a subsidy from everyone to almost everyone else, which is more democratic than a subsidy from everyone to the very few.
3. Administrative efficiency: Paying for roads out of general funds, or with imperfect gas taxes, is a lot easier to administer than trying to enforce specific payments for specific roads at specific times of day. Tolls are costly.
4. Cost structure: Uncongested roads are on the left-side of the U-shaped cost curve, and charging for them leads to suboptimal levels of use.
5. Non-excludability: There is not a good non-governmental finance mechanism for signalized arterials, roads which are rivalrous but not excludable. One could establish a congestion charging zone, but those are very expensive, and have yet to be tried outside a few center cities.
6. Agglomeration benefits: Accessibility leads to positive spillovers for the urban economy and increase total development.
7. Network spillovers: A better connected network makes all other roads more valuable. Much like the temporal Mohring effect in transit, there is a similar spatial for roads effect, each additional road reduces travel costs between places, increasing demand on other roads (and raising overall usefulness of the transportation network still more). Like the Mohring effect, this too reaches diminishing returns, but it is important when networks are sparse.
8. Mutually assured subsidy: Transit is subsidized, therefore roads should be subsidized.
9. Off-mode effects: More roads reduce congestion on other modes (transit, rail, air). Subsidizing roads can help support car-free roads, since bikes and pedestrians currently don’t directly pay for their infrastructure. However, relying on drivers to pay for roads used primarily by non-drivers may lead to principal-agent problems.

Rationales against subsidizing roads:

1. Overproduction: Subsidies induce overproduction of roads. The lack of pricing signals implies that supply conditions are out-of-whack with demand. In addition, the heavy use of subsidy leads to building roads in the wrong places. We cannot afford to maintain what we have already built, we should not build more. Many states (such as Michigan) are de-paving roads to reduce rural road maintenance costs. Even Minnesota is considering de-paving. North Carolina allocates roads subsidy by county, so lightly populated rural counties are paving every road they can find. Neither system is optimal.
2. Overconsumption: Subsidies induce overuse. This can lead to congestion.
3. Negative externalities: Roads, and in particular cars, generate negative externalities which we cannot properly price. At least we shouldn’t subsidize their production.
4. Off-mode effects: Reducing demand for transit (by subsidizing roads) worsens the strong positive feedback system that drives transit, lowering congestion on transit is seldom the critical problem, encouraging demand is more likely to be important.
5. Mutually assured subsidy: A key point is that just because we subsidize roads does not mean we should subsidize transit, and vice versa. The economics of the technologies differ significantly. One bad subsidy does not deserve another. Just because transit is subsidized is not a reason to subsidize roads. It may be an argument to remove the subsidies that exist. Mutually assured subsidy is the “fairness” logic of a 4 year old complaining about a sibling.
6. Obsolescence: Following the Great Gretzky, “Skate to where the puck will be.” Roads will be made obsolete by upcoming technologies, we should cut our losses now.

So what is the net?

1. In the short run, states should raise their gas tax to replace the general (property tax) revenue from a baseline set by lowest common denominator jurisdiction within their domain with user charges. That is, figure out which jurisdiction spends the least per capita on roads, and raise the gas tax to replace the property tax by at least that amount of money for each jurisdiction. In all cases states should be extremely wary of using sales taxes to pay for roads. (States will also need to cover the declining federal gas tax, but that is separate.)
2. Over time, states should move toward a vehicle mileage fee varying by weight (for trucks and other heavy vehicles), location and time of day to replace the motor fuel tax. This should be phased in with EVs (and Hybrids) which don’t pay (much) motor fuel taxes, and trucks which would be charged for weight and distance, going first. Off-peak discounts would encourage peak-spreading. Rates would vary by area to account for different costs of running networks.
3. Road networks should be organized and operated like public utilities, managing to generate revenue from users to pay for cost of operations. Restrictions on usage should be allowed in this model, where auto and truck traffic can be limited to specific times of day or excluded altogether. Road design that allows access for emergency services can be regulated.

Today I got an email about an upcoming public meeting for the project, and I noticed the project webpage includes a Traffic Operation Analysis with some traffic projections through 2035. Hennepin County is projecting a 0.5% annual growth in traffic volumes between 2011 and 2035.

Hennepin County provided traffic volume forecasting information for the Washington
Avenue study area. Several considerations included in the traffic forecasts are:
Minneapolis overall expects to add 36,000 residents and 30,000 employees over
the next 20 years.

• Closure of Washington Avenue through the U of M, east of the Mississippi River.
• Construction of the new 4th Street S on-ramp connection to northbound 35W.
• Reconfiguration of the interchange at Washington Avenue SE/Cedar Avenue.
• Construction of the Central Corridor LRT line.
• The impact of continued development in the downtown area including
• townhomes/condos, office space and retail businesses.

Given the above considerations and through a review of past studies completed within the project area, Hennepin County recommends that the traffic forecasts be based on applying a 0.5 percent per year growth rate (13 percent increase by 2035) to the existing traffic volumes, then adjusting Washington Avenue, 3rd Street S and 4th Street S traffic volumes to account for circulation changes with the future 4th Street S on-ramp connection to northbound 35W.

I don’t feel qualified to speak about hyper-local traffic patterns based on certain street closures and circulation patterns.  That’s traffic engineer stuff.  But here are a few things (and charts) to consider:

• According to Mark Filipi, who works on regional traffic modeling for the Metropolitan Council, the regional traffic model (based on old comp plan data) projects 0.3% annual growth in total Minneapolis VMT through 2025.  This is lower than 0.5%.
• Total Minneapolis VMT has basically been falling since 2002, with non-interstate VMT fluctuating around flat growth (all VMT figures from MNDOT).
• Minnesota total VMT per capita has been falling steadily since 2004 at over half a percent each year, and total VMT has been falling since 2007.  
• According to the Minneapolis Traffic Count Management System, two of the three traffic count locations on Washington Avenue in the study area show a drop in traffic from their peaks in the late 90′s/early 00′s.  The third shows flat volumes.

Does all this mean that 0.5% annual growth rate on Washington Avenue is incorrect?  I’m not sure.  Minneapolis does plan to grow a lot of downtown jobs and housing.  On the other hand, per capita VMT trends have been falling not just in Minnesota, but across the country and world.  In addition, Minneapolis policy makers have stated their goals to shift modes.  It’s troublesome to me that in the “considerations” that Hennepin County used in their traffic forecasts, they didn’t include plans for that mode shift the same way they include plans for development.

Given the severe lack of detail on how the 0.5% growth figure was developed, I don’t think the community should accept any design predicated on that figure without some additional explanation, especially if the capacity needed to accomodate that growth is given as a reason to reject elements that will make this street a livable, vibrant and valuable place, namely, pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure.

An icy sidewalk in Minneapolis.

The podcast this week is a conversation with two members of the Minneapolis Pedestrian Advisory Committee, Scott Engel and Peter Janelle. The Pedestrian Advisory Committee, or PAC, is one of the city’s citizen committees, and the PAC advises city staff and elected officials on how to improve walking in the city.

Scott, Peter, I sat down a little while back at Gigi’s Café in South Minneapolis, which was a bit busy and noisy, I’m sorry to say. We chatted about the challenges of walking in Minneapolis, why its necessary to think about walking holistically, and some of the progress they’ve made in the last few years.

The link to the audio is here. Subscribe to the complete quesadilla on the feed.

“A man doesn’t grow a beard. A beard grows a man” – Internet Proverb

A beard isn’t something you grow overnight. Neither is a city.

Both these seemingly unrelated entities need to mature, fill in and be properly groomed, yet still maintain their distinct ruggedness. But why when it comes to urbanism do we attempt to do it overnight?

With few exceptions, our made-from-scratch urban districts and suburban expansions never seem to turn out as we’d like. We’re never happy with them. That should be no surprise. It’s like gluing on a fake beard onto a pristinely shaven face. It looks ridiculous and no one respects you.

We need incremental urban growth that can mature. This includes not only architectural context, but also urban design. Let me explain. So, we’ve got yourself some stubble. It looks good, but doesn’t quite cut it. If you let it grow for a week or two, you’ll notice that the hair gets slightly longer, but it mostly fills in. It isn’t until the beard truly fills in that you have yourself the start of a good thick, dense and rich beard. This is precisely when the beard gains character.

That is what our cities and towns need: to fill in the blank spaces.

Incremental scale grows into something successful. It’s usually small and builds slowly over time, but it is tremendously resilient. However, it’s not going to be easy. This new economy, which I firmly believe we are transitioning into, will require multiple players who can produce small scale, incremental development. This is how urbanism will be accomplished in the next 20 years.

Growth will have to come from within. If you can’t get hair on credit for that beard of yours, then it likely won’t happen with your downtown.

No two beards are alike. Neither are cities. Facial structures differ like geographies. Results everywhere are likely to be different. Some will succeed, others will be tolerable and a few will fail. That’s okay. It’s like having a patchy beard. With time, some spots will grow in. Others may not; but that formula overtime will lead to a place with a heck of a lot of character.

There is something sophisticated, intriguing, and dare I say irresistible about a man with a mature beard. The same can be said about a city. Each piece of hair is like a citizen; some gray, others are frizzy, while some are crimped and ingrown. Each may not be much individually, but together as a whole, they can accomplish something great.

In the end, it’s all about creating a place where people can live, work, interact, and most importantly, be happy. And in a world of limited resources, the city and town structure have demonstrated the most efficient and effective way to make this happen. We need to fill in our towns with people to keep this big experiment going.

A city doesn’t grow its people. A people grows a city.

There’s an Ethiopian proverb which states, “When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion.” An affordable and effective transportation system is only one of the many lions of policy which need to be tackled in St. Paul. For Minnesota’s communities, the livability issues to tackle are more intricate and nuanced than the web cast by a project scoping document or a bill in the legislature.

The Maple Plain example

Included in the list was a request for a quarter million dollars for a single crosswalk in Maple Plain, a small community on Highway 12 in rural Hennepin County.

Appropriation.$250,000 is appropriated from the bond proceeds
account in the trunk highway fund to the commissioner of transportation for a grant to the
city of Maple Plain to install a High-intensity Activated crossWalK (HAWK) pedestrian
signal on marked Trunk Highway 12, near its intersection with Budd Avenue.

Since the completion of the Hwy 12 bypass around Long Lake, Maple Plain is now the first town requiring drivers to slow down all the way from where Interstate 394 starts 22 miles to the east in Downtown Minneapolis. It is 3 lanes plus shoulders through town, 35 MPH without any stop signs or signals, serving just over 16,000 vehicles per day.

Here’s an older aerial photo of the downtown node. There’s a crosswalk right at Budd St.

Sometime since then, sidewalks were extended a half block on the north and south side of Hwy 12, and the crosswalk was pushed to be midblock between Budd and Main St. No refuge island, and not at an intersection. We’ve already spent money to address this intersection. This solution was probably chosen because it checked all the boxes on some engineering standard for crosswalks at high capacity state highways.

Shockingly, it is still not safe, so solution is to spend a quarter of a million dollars to install a “proven safety countermeasure,” the HAWK.

Is this how we should “make infrastructure?”

I don’t doubt that everyone involved in these decisions had good intentions. They wanted a safe, cost effective, and community-friendly outcome just as much as anyone else. But at multiple points along the line, it seems like the system has transformed into a bad outcome machine, and we keep pressing the beg button waiting to get to a different outcome. Wouldn’t it make more sense to sit down and see what makes sense for this community, and what can be done to make a safer crossing?

Instead of looking at one intersection and one crosswalk, it helps to look at the system as a whole. It’s true, the majority of people traveling in Maple Plain are in cars, and they might get upset if the speed limit were lowered from 35 MPH to 30 or 25. Most are likely not coming from or headed to a destination in the downtown node, or even in the city itself.

Yet if this inter-regional corridor travels through an old town, don’t compromises need to be made?  Isn’t the only solution to find a balance between speed and safety, local access and highway mobility? It has been shown that 90% of car/pedestrian accidents at 40 MPH are fatal while only 10% at 20 MPH are fatal. Highway 12 is still a slow route for regional travel, and it’s still a chasm separating many towns. Even as we spent so much money trying to solve the balance between highways and our communities they cross. No, it’s too simple, costly and dangerous to think in terms of trade-offs.

What options do we have?

The speed limit at one intersection isn’t as big of a deal to drivers as how fast they can get through town. While engineers and the public balk at the idea of a 25 MPH speed limit for 3 blocks through a downtown node, they’ve stood silent while highway speeds and safety have been compromised at the edges of towns.

In Maple Plain, just like most towns, highway traffic now slows further out as the edges of towns have expanded at a rapid pace. There are dozens of private curb cuts and many new streets connecting to the highway. A half mile east of this Maple Plain intersection, there’s a full rural stoplight to serve Baker Park Road, a bar, and a gas station. A half mile west, a stoplight at Halgren Road, serving an industrial park and a residential neighborhood.

Instead of expanding our 45 MPH world and then wondering why a town’s sole highway pedestrian crossing is unsafe, let’s think about a structural fix. Highway 12 should function as a road between these old communities built as station stops on the Great Northern. Cars should safely be able to travel at 55 MPH, and new development should not degrade the speed or safety of highway traffic.

In these towns, there should be a clear point where the highway ends and the street begins. This could involve cues such as a vegetated median or roundabout, or even perceived lane width reduction, that would accentuate the border between rural highway and urban street. This street section would not only feature low speed limits, but design cues that cause drivers to drive slow without relying on enforcement. In Maple Plain, this would be possibly 1500 feet of 25 MPH zone, and then a quick transition to 55+ MPH.

Instead of having miles of 35 to 50 MPH speed limits with private property entrances and rural-ish stoplights which cause highway traffic to stop and bunch, the local road network can route into town to access the regional corridor such as Highway 12.

Let’s make it happen

I don’t claim to have the answers, and I don’t expect that any one person will. That’s not how effective governance happens. What we can see is that the status quo is failing us with poor results at high cost. We need to look at how the disperate proverbial spider webs interrelate, and we need to see how they can unite together in unconventional ways to tackle the problems affecting our built environment.

We just need to ask the right questions and give up our fear of challenging assumptions. A HAWK light may be a new technology in our state, but I don’t consider it to be a groundbreaking solution. We need to empower people to think a little differently, and we need to have the guts as a state to try new solutions (even if it means the occasional failure).

In this case, I’d start looking for solutions here:

• Get rid of a legislature-driven mobility agenda.
• Except for extremely basic guidance, MnDOT gives up design control of urban sections of trunk highways to local cities or even downtown neighborhood organizations.
• In return, MnDOT protects trunk highways from sprawl zones on the edges of town, where limited access can be restored to provide speed and safety.
• Cities will have to take a risk and potentially sacrifice growth in these sprawl zones, although that growth could of course happen so long as it did not compromise the trunk highway.

Do you have other ideas for how we could improve the interaction between our regional highway system and our smaller communities? Any specific ideas for Maple Plain or another city? I’d like to know your thoughts in the comments.

The cause of the Great Minneapolis Internet Fire of 2013. Myth has it that Mrs. O’Leary’s cow wrote it and it later burned down one-third of the local IP networks.

Obviously, this post may make you feel differently from your next door neighbor. You may feel like the description of your locale is right-on; on another hand, you may start to feel your  blood boiling from your idealistic Wedge neighborhood being called “Wannabe Hipsters”. (I can imagine the replies now… “To be fair, I lived here way before Target execs thought it was cool.”)

Before I say anything about the map itself, I’ll do the lawyer-like thing and list a definition of the word “satire” from dictionary.com.

“1. the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice.”

As far as my opinion goes, I don’t think it is in my best interest to say whether or not I liked the map. What I can say is, however, that I agree that the map composer (who later requested their name be removed due to the numerous complaints on the original website) used a generous amount of satire to describe the prejudice-based thoughts of peoples PERCEPTIONS of the areas. The “ridicule” element of the dictionary description of satire is very present. I really do think that the author was ridiculing the uneducated perceptions that these areas receive, not directly and ignorantly labeling them.  Yes, the whole “Compton of the North” label may have been a little harsh, but at the same time, I think the map composer wasn’t claiming it to be the end-all-be-all description of North Minneapolis. Rather, it summarized (exposed and denounced) the vice-ridden thoughts that many have of the area. (These thoughts are based off of a comment from who I think is the author of the map.)

Like I said, it isn’t my place to say if I liked the map or not, to loudly proclaim its success (“WHOO! It’s about time someone pointed out Minnesota Nice’s edginess!”) or to solemnly denounce its message (“Your relentless mockery disgusts me”). What I can say, however, is that I am extremely proud to live in a city where these types of discussion occur.

While you are at it, go ahead and take a look at the other maps on the Judgemental Maps site. Although the Minneapolis map may have had unintentionally direct racist undertones, there were no full-on shout-outs to racial differences. On the other hand, take a look at Chicago, Phoenix, New York, and Denver. The comment numbers on these much harsher maps on the evening of Sunday, April 28th is as follows:

Denver: 16 Comments

New York: 1 Comment

Phoenix: 0 Comments

Chicago: 0 Comments

And our map of Minneapolis? 144 Comments.

My main point in this comparison is that the conversation of racial, cultural, and class equality is happening in Minnesota. People in the great northern state actually give a crap about what people say and think of others. People are readily willing to defend others in the wake of prejudice, and the fact that people cared so much to thoughtfully criticize the carefully worded descriptions in this map is a virtue that should be acknowledged.

It also indirectly says something about how Minnesotans carefully accept and intelligently respond to certain types of things, including new developments, gentrification, transportation politics, and general civic pride. People care about what people do to and say about their neighborhood, about their city and state. When a new apartment building is proposed or a street is planned to be altered, citizens of Minneapolis (and St. Paul too) are often active at the community meetings. It was in the “Beer Snobs” neighborhood where the proposed I-335 was shot down and became one of the very few cancelled interstates. Although there are probably a large number of exceptions, a good majority of the population in Minnesota want to make sure that “all men are created equal”, that any stab at a certain location can be defended and argued, that any proposed land use or infrastructure project is questioned, intelligently altered, and built with the approval of the citizens.

Of course conversations like this occur in Chicago and Phoenix, and of course some people may have overreacted to the map, but the fact that the Minneapolis map gained so much attention, garnered so much discussion, and even had a Star Tribune article written about it, is a praise to the population of the Gopher State.

Today’s Star-Tribune features an article about current legislative activity at the state Capitol oriented to banning parking in bicycle lanes. Really?

Why is this even an issue? It’s already legal to park there? Why?

Is it legal to park in traffic lanes? No.
Is it legal to park blocking alleyways? Don’t think it is, but I could be wrong.
Is it legal to park completely randomly? Of course it’s not.

Now, sure. In some of Minneapolis’ creatively designed bike lanes for which the bike lane is along the curb, and the parking is near the traffic through lane, if you are driving a giant SUV in hopes of finding a dirt road and mountain in downtown Minneapolis, you may be wider than the parking lane. A delivery truck may also be wider than the lane. But there are generally parking zones for deliveries.

Legislator comments are hilarious:

Sen. John Pederson, R-St. Cloud, said the parking ban would interfere with delivery drivers.

“I’m not sure this body wants to stand in front of somebody’s hot pizza,” he told the Senate.

Really? First, most deliverators I see are not driving giant vehicles that use a ton of gas. The economics of that are prohibitive. Second, someone delivering a pizza should be in and gone within mere minutes, or the pie gets cold. Heck, where I work in Minneapolis, our pizza is delivered by bicycle when we order, unless we order mass quantities that challenge the delivery riders’ balance.

“I bet most people in the state don’t even realize what a bike lane is,” said Sen. David Hann, R-Eden Prairie, during a recent legislative session. He called a proposal to ban motor vehicle parking in bike lanes “ridiculous” and “a way to collect fines.”

Don’t read the comments. Ever.

Well, gosh. We believe drivers can’t figure these things out, but we’re licensing them to drive vehicles that weigh thousands of pounds? What a grand idea! And insofar as fines go… so? It’s a nice form of local government funds collection that isn’t property tax or LGA. Embrace that. It’s like a user feee, for goodness sakes! Maybe this is simply a reflection of the Senator’s constituency in Eden Prairie?

Needless to say, the user comments on the Strib story… well, needless to say. Don’t read them. It seems that many users of that site believe that since “bicyclists don’t stop at stop signs!” this means that everyone should park in the bike lanes. The logic is difficult to grasp.

This legislation seems so common sense it is amazing that this is apparently a hole in legal code. Parking is not allowed in traffic lanes, right? A bike lane is a traffic lane. How hard is that?

Really, really hard, apparently.

Linea and I sat down last week in her backyard on the corner of France and Colgate, and we talked about the race, her platform, and the challenges of development in Southwest.

The audio is here, and feel free to subscribe to all the podcasts excitement at the feed.

Metropolitan Council headquarters in downtown Saint Paul.

This is the headquarters of the Metropolitan Council, the Twin Cities regional planning agency. It’s located in downtown Saint Paul. Notice anything about how it’s laid out? If you ever walk past, it may take a moment, but you’ll soon realize that the building doesn’t have any entrances onto the street. There are doors along Robert Street and 6th Street, but they are all emergency exits without any door handles to let people get back inside. The story is the same on the east side of the building, where there’s a pedestrian walkway followed by a vehicle ramp which drops down one level to access parking underneath the block.

The only entrance to the building is along a pedestrian alley on the south side of the structure. That’s a unique feature, but not unique enough to make up for the bunker-like stance of the building everywhere else. It was either designed to fend off attacks from angry mobs or to keep the interior dry against floodwaters that will never reach that height. There are a few small trees and shrubs planted in the alley to soften the concrete and stone, but it still stands in stark contrast to Mears Park a mere block and a half to the east, as well as many other more traditionally-designed buildings in the city that have permeable first floors with windows and doors that can be opened from the outside.

Of course, I shouldn’t dump all the blame for the building onto the Met Council: It had originally been built in 1967 as an office building for the state government, acting as the base of operations for the Department of Economic Security for some time (that was merged into the Department of Employment and Economic Development—DEED—in 2003).

Downtown Saint Paul has a mixture of old and new buildings. Many of the ones built from the 1960s onward have major flaws like this: Either large expanses of blank walls, often where the only gaps are built for parking garage entrances or truck loading docks. But the Met Council building remains one of the most stark dismissals of the street. It’s not the way to induce exciting street life. Can buildings like this be rehabilitated?

A lone man waiting for the bus outside the Metropolitan Council building,.

Increased cycling has many benefits to the city and local businesses, and as a cyclist I believe we must continue exploring new bike routes and on-street solutions for cyclists. But on-street parking is and may always be a valuable asset to cities, and too often we acquiesce to moving traffic and sacrifice on-street parking instead, and I think that is a mistake. Not all properties in Minneapolis and elsewhere were developed with ample off-street parking. Some have none. A great number of businesses and residents rely on it. Thus, removing it for a bike lane is can actually hurt small businesses, making the city less livable. The answer is not to build more parking lots (many planning departments agree). I don’t know about you, but one of the wonderful aspects of cycling in the city is the many small businesses as destinations. I don’t want that to change.

During a community planning meeting for the RiverLake Greenway, I spoke up with concerns that a commercial node that includes Chris & Rob’s was losing parking, cautioning that lost on-street parking would not be good for business. (Here is my post from that time) I advocated for an alternative like sharrows or some combination of narrower driving and bicycle lanes in order to preserve that valuable on-street parking. Alas, a sensible solution is elusive because of the “Standard.” According to road standards, the volume of traffic along 42^nd Street requires a certain lane width which precluded sharrows. “Why not relax that regulation a little to allow for sharrows or painted lanes?” I asked. “Because we have to move traffic,” I was told. I then suggested that this portion of the route simply have signage but no alteration to the right-of-way; no bike lane, no sharrow, no lost parking. After all, just two blocks to the east the bike route to this day is just signage because it crosses Hiawatha Avenue, a state highway, and no suitable solution could be found that fit within MnDOT rules. (see image below for 42nd Street today – Chris & Rob’s at right)

I visited Chris & Rob’s a few months after the Riverlake bike lane was in and No Parking signs up across the street (the direction of travel from which most customers arrive), and they showed me how business fell off by 15% the DAY the No Parking went in to effect. I visited them again yesterday and that loss of revenue has persisted. So bravo – it worked! Traffic is moving as smoothly as before on 42^nd Street, but more if it is passing Chris & Rob’s without stopping. And Chris & Rob’s is now considering purchasing a nearby vacant lot to be used for surface parking (I don’t think this is the outcome the city, county or neighborhood would really prefer).

I was also told at the community meeting that the hoped-for outcome of the bike lane is to encourage more cycling to businesses. As someone who already cycles to Chris & Rob’s, I don’t buy this argument. Maybe some day the modal split will be so, but I don’t believe in hurting the income of a business in the meantime while hoping more customers will arrive by bike on what remains an unpleasant biking street.

On-street parking isn’t just a necessity, it is also an asset. It slows the traffic by placing parked vehicles closer to moving cars, and also provides a real and perceived buffer between moving traffic and the sidewalk, making pedestrians feel safer as well as making them safer from errant drivers.

I’m not the only one who thinks this – Jeff Speck explicitly points out in his book Walkable City that bike lanes and transit lanes should never displace on-street parking, just moving traffic lanes. I wholeheartedly agree.

Bikes aren’t to blame here, and the last thing I want to suggest is that we must choose between bikes and businesses. In fact, well-placed bicycle lanes (and parking) is good for business. I want cycling to be part of the city. What is to blame is the “Standard,” the expectation that free-flowing automobile traffic is a right rather than a choice, and traffic engineers’ ability to set of guidelines for lane widths, speeds and clear zones. Cyclists and businesses must form a stronger alliance to fight the real enemy – the “standard.” Unfortunately the standard for moving traffic is entrenched while urbanism doesn’t yet have a recognized standard, and while we allow traffic engineers to have the final say, all in the name of making roads safer by moving cars faster, when in fact the opposite is true.

Even if you hate bikes, you have to admit that slower-moving cars are more likely to stop at a business they are driving by. And I’m not proposing blocking traffic (although in some cases that is a very good idea!), but rather the powers that be need to relax their standard just a bit – allow narrower lane widths, slower speed limits, something. The solution is so easy and realistic it should be possible. A better, more complete street would likely have the opposite affect and increase business.

To compound things, just this past week the city put up No Parking signs two blocks west of Chris & Rob’s along 42^nd Street, in front of two more small businesses, one of which (the Nokomis Pet Clinic) has no off-street parking (see image above). All because the parking lane was yet again displaced by a bicycle lane.

To the city and county’s credit, working with input from our neighborhood association, 42nd Street striping within one block of commercial nodes at Cedar and 28th Avenues shifts to preserve critical on-street parking (effectively a sharrow situation), but businesses like Chris & Rob’s and Nokomis Pet Clinic lose theirs. This inequity must be corrected. Bikes aren’t the problem – road standards are. Sure you say, try fighting the various levels of officials and engineers who can cling to road standards, good luck with that. Well, that is precisely the fight we have to pick if we are to have a meaningful breakthrough on improving the urbanism of our cities so biking and small businesses can thrive. For now, I’m asking nicely; can we please restore on street parking on both sides of 42nd Street in front of businesses?

So that, my friends, is where I as a city council member might go against a recommendation of the BAC. But that doesn’t matter right now. What does matter is, for all the wonderful improvements the city has made with regard to biking, some are already or threatening to affect local business. Like I said, I comes to a decision between bikes and businesses, don’t make the false choice, make the right one. What good is a Complete Streets policy if there’s nothing along those streets? It’s time the lanes of moving traffic gave up something.

This is crossposted at Joe Urban.

A recent political car-toon from The Onion.

I was catching up with an old friend the other day, an economic geography professor who moved away for a job at a big West Coast university. We were eating dinner and swapping stories.

“What are you working on now?” I asked. We exchanged little bits about our lives, homes, friends in common. Somehow as we ate I ended up telling him about parking policy reform. (Note: I am a complete nerd.)

I began explaining the distortions in the parking market. With his economics background, I thought he’d be interested. I did my best to describe the cumulative effects of minimum parking requirements, the perverse incentive structure of parking meters, the hidden cost of asphalt, and so on. The solution, I said, was to externalize the price of parking, raise prices in certain areas and begin acknowleging the opportunity cost of urban space. (See my explanation here.) Prices should reflect the cost of parking, I concluded.

I was surprised at his reaction. ”What about poor people?” he asked me. “You’re going to make it impossible for them to drive. In my city, nobody can afford to live in the city. I’ve been to these towns and neighborhoods where the poor people live. They’re miles away from jobs. They drive everywhere. You have to think about them!” He began to get passionate, as he usually does. “If you make parking expensive, only rich people will be able to drive. Driving will only be for the wealthy.”

“But… um.” I stammered. “Yeah, that’s a thing.” I could think of nothing to say. I had forgotten about the pro-car populism.

Governor Dayton’s recent pro-car populist quote.

I’d encountered this argument before, every once in a while. It’s a perverse paradox where the automobile’d sprawling American landscape is justified because it helps the poor. For example, you’ll see the pro-sprawl lobby use housing costs to justify limitless development, or gentrification activists argue that transit or bicycling investements are bad because they increase property values, hurting the poor. Think of the congestion pricing debate, or the latest example: Governor Dayton’s use of pro-car populism to kill support for the state transportation bill. These arguments remind me of the famous saying that “what’s good for GM is good for America.” Cars are democratic tools of self-empowerment. Cars are freedom.

I’ve been thinking about the conversation with my friend for a few weeks now, running over it in my mind like a monster truck. I’ve a number of reactions, none of which I find completely satisfactory.

Reaction #1: Yes, that’s true. Kinda.

When faced with the pro-car populism, the first thing to do is to admit that its true. Parking (or gas, or a home in sprawlville) will be more expensive for everyone, including those who can least afford it. Driving and parking will increasingly be the purview of the wealthy. If it costs $5 a gallon plus an $8 toll plus $5 per hour to park in the city, only wealthy people will do it. You can’t deny it.

Reaction #2: The car system is regressive.

What this argument is missing is how the current system is regressive. The present structure of subsidizing driving, parking, and boundless urban development harms the ‘inner city’ through freeway and road expansions. It benefits the wealthy far more than the working or middle classes.

Next time you’re on the city bus, look around and think about who is riding with you. The vast majority of transit users are poor people. Meanwhile everyone pays for freeways and parking and the mortgage interest tax deduction, whether they use them or not. The current system of subsidies is not a progressive force of social justice. Free and easy motoring increases social and spatial inequality at the expense of more egalatarian urban fabric.

Reaction #3: Focus on the problem, not the solution.

When confronted with the pro-car social justice argument, raise the stakes. OK, you will say. Ending gas, parking, and exurban housing subsidies hurts poor people. Well, why not help poor people through a large new program of subsidized parking lots? How about cutting the gas tax in half, until you’re basically giving it away? How about doubling federal tax refunds for people buying homes in sprawling metropolitan fringes? Bulldozing more inner city property for the huge Rosa Parks Memorial Parking Garage downtown? In our city: free parking for everyone, all the time!

Motor oil is not freedom.

Obviously, those proposals aren’t be the best way to end inequality and poverty in America. The thing to realize is that we’re basically doing all of those things right now. We’ve been deeply subsidizing automobile travel for generations. Few people think we’ve created a social utopia.

In fact, I’d argue that the opposite has occurred. We’ve demolished affordable housing to make room for freeways and parking garages. We’ve eroded government services through municipal fragmentation, civic tax shelters, and fostered spatial segregation. We’ve abandoned our transit systems, relegating them to the margins. We’ve refused to accommodate transportation alternatives in ways that foster deep inequalities.

Solving the problems of poverty in the USA won’t happen behind the wheel of a car. We need to focus on the real problems faced by poor people: affordable housing, affordable transportation, access to jobs. Currently, we’re spending large amounts of political and economic capital subsidizing a car-oriented system that only makes these problems worse. Whether its the gas tax, gentrification, or sprawl lobby, when faced with pro-car populism, it’s worth remembering the real problem.

Join local author Chris Wells (recent Streets.MN podcast interviewee) for a reading and discussion of his new book, Car Country: An Environmental History, at 7 p.m., April 30, at Common Good Books in St. Paul.

“Witness the emergence of [America's] automobile-dependent landscape in the pages of this book, and you will never again see the world around you again in quite the same way.” –William Cronon. Get a sneak preview here.

Of course, not everyone in the U.S. lives in Car Country. Some live in places like this:

Houston and Broadway, Manhattan, 2010.

And they walk. A lot.

Why? In walkable places, the entire built environment encourages people to move around on foot. Driving, not to mention parking, isn’t particularly welcoming. Such places manage to confer the automobile’s normal advantages of convenience, speed, and safety on other ways of getting around. (In addition to all the people moving around on foot, note the bus in the background and the cabs on the left. You’ll have to imagine the subway stop around the corner.)

To understand the full significance of how the built environment conditions the ways that we move around, compare Manhattan to a typical American suburb. For the sake of convenience, let’s look at Eagan, Minnesota.

Located south of St. Paul, Eagan houses a bit over sixty thousand people on 34.5 square miles of land, and is organized as a series of exit-ramp neighborhoods along I-35E. Built mainly in the 1970s and 1980s in relation to the newly constructed interstate, which connects it to downtown St. Paul, Eagan’s land-use patterns differ little from those that have dominated suburban design since the end of World War II. From a transportation perspective, its street system follows a clear hierarchy. The interstate sits at the top, and is followed, in descending order of size, speed, and traffic load, by arterials, collector roads, and winding residential streets.

Cartography by Birgit Mühlenhaus, 2011. From Christopher W. Wells, Car Country: An Environmental History (2012).

Although its street system reflects a clear orientation toward cars, it is Eagan’s land-use patterns–not just its street system–that make it such a good example of Car Country. Most importantly, note the concentration of commercial properties in just two places: clustered around the intersection of I-35E and Cliff Road (this neighborhood’s primary arterial route) and at the intersection of two arterials, Cliff and Thomas Lake Road.

Imagine yourself living here. Imagine yourself needing a loaf of bread, a gallon of milk, or a haircut. Because prevailing land-use patterns have concentrated all commercial activity in just a handful of places, you don’t have the option to walk a block or two to a corner store. Instead, you’ll need to follow a residential street to a collector, follow that to an arterial, and then travel along it to your destination. With the nearest thing you need a mile or two away, located on a heavily trafficked arterial next to the interstate ramp, do you walk? Do you ride your bike? Or do you drive?

For residents of densely settled Manhattan, of course, the calculus is quite different. Most of life’s minor commercial needs there can be satisfied by heading outside and taking a relatively short walk.  Manhattan is Car Country’s antithesis, a rare example from the opposite end of the spectrum. But you don’t have to go as far as New York to find less car-dependent places than Eagan. You can find them right here in the Twin Cities.

Take, for example, the neighborhood around Macalester College, where I work. This neighborhood, Macalester-Groveland (or Mac-Grove, as it’s commonly called), is one-third of Eagan’s size, measured by population. Measured by area, on the other hand, it is considerably smaller, just 2.25 square miles to Eagan’s 34.5– occupying five times less land per person than Eagan.

Cartography by Birgit Mühlenhaus, 2011. From Wells, Car Country.

In addition to housing more people in less space, Mac-Grove’s zoning patterns differ markedly from those of a typical suburb. Unlike Eagan, where all retailers are located in a couple of concentrated, high-traffic areas, Mac-Grove’s retailers form small clusters every few blocks along the neighborhood’s four big arterials (all but one of which are physically smaller, with slower speed limits, than Eagan’s). As a result, nearly every home in the neighborhood is located within easy walking distance of multiple small retail clusters.

Not everyone in Mac-Grove walks to the store, of course. But when they do drive, the closeness of local retail means that they drive much shorter distances than residents of Eagan.

From Wells, Car Country.

Not only do Mac-Grove’s land-use patterns have lower “designed-in” mobility requirements, but they also make getting around without a car much easier. Because so many stores are located nearby, and because low-traffic streets parallel and connect with high-traffic streets, it is easier and safer to bicycle here than in a place like Eagan, even with its separated bike lanes. (See what these look like on the right side of this Google Street View image.) In addition, the linear layout of Mac-Grove’s retail corridors makes it easier for residents to get to the businesses they want relatively quickly and painlessly by bus.

Mac-Grove did not achieve its greater residential density, walkability, bikeability, or transit-friendly status because its residents have notably anti-car attitudes. Nor did it achieve these things because it has adopted particularly forward-thinking policies. Its local zoning discussions, in fact, sound much as they do in Car Country.

So what is its secret?

To put it bluntly, the neighborhood inherited its walking-, biking-, and transit-friendly street system and land-use patterns from the past. The entire neighborhood grew up around streetcars. Today, many decades after the last streetcar made its final trip through the neighborhood, its residents still benefit from the lower mobility requirements that were woven into the basic fabric of this streetcar-oriented neighborhood.

So why did we abandon the walkable layouts of streetcar neighborhoods? What transformed the United States into Car Country? I tell the story of this national transformation in my book. But there is also a larger, more contemporary lesson. Our everyday transportation needs–and the distances that we travel to conduct our daily affairs–are as much a product of the places that we live as the choices that we make about how to get where we want to go. Whether you want to drive less as an individual or you want to work for policies that will reduce the carbon footprint of the entire transportation sector, begin by paying greater attention to the built environment. The solutions to our current dependence on cars lie at least as much in building better places as they do in developing better transportation technologies.

In most of the United States and much of the world, public transport is publicly subsidized. Everyone in an area pays for transit whether or not they use it. This was not always the case, and need not everywhere be the case. Once mass transportation was provided to the public for profit (in Minneapolis and St. Paul as well as most other US cities) from the late 1800s through the first half of the 1900s. While rights-of-way were often publicly provided, the companies operating transit paid for the maintenance of those rights-of-way above and beyond what was required for transit.

Subsidy should be considered two ways: capital subsidy and operating subsidy. These are related, but different enough that they should be considered separately.

Capital subsidy can be direct or indirect (such as assistance with land acquisition), and these monies come from federal, state, metropolitan, local and sub-local sources. Traditionally capital subsidy has largely come from federal and state sources, though recently local sources through sponsorship (see the Emirates Airways gondola in London, for instance) or value capture have been used. Capital subsidy for transit expansion rarely, if ever, considers the effects capacity and network expansion have on operating subsidy, however. Since every transit system in the United States requires an operating subsidy, every service expansion increased the required operating subsidy and makes the financial position of transit agencies worse over the medium and long term.

Economics defines 4 types of goods: Public, Private, Congesting (or Common Pool Resource), and Club. Public goods are, by this definition, neither excludable (to use it, you must pay for it) nor rivalrous (the good is scarce and only one person can use it at a time). Yet public transport is both excludable (at the cost of validating payment), and rivalrous (when congested). Under those conditions it satisfies the definition of a private good. Many private goods are privately provided, hence the name.

However sometimes transit is operated non-excludably, for instance the Campus Connector at the University of Minnesota, or an elevator in your nearest multi-story building. Similarly, sometimes transit operates with an honor system payment with lax (or no) enforcement.

Often transit is not rivalrous, (non-rivalry implies my consumption does not affect yours, by increasing its cost or diminishing its quality) e.g. in off-peak times. The off-peak Campus Connector is a public good. It is paid for as a Club Good by the University of Minnesota and its students, since they are the primary beneficiaries (almost no one outside the U community would bother riding, so even it if is technically non-excludable, it is functionally excludable in that no one who isn’t going between campuses would bother riding, and the people going between campuses have something to do with the University).

The case for subsidy for some public goods is obvious. In the absence of excludability and rivalry, one needs to get revenue from somewhere to operate a service that provides public benefits. The classic example is national defense. I can’t just “not subscribe” to national defense, it protects me whether I want it or not. We can of course debate the amount of public good we want.

1. Transit often operates on the left-hand side of the U-shaped cost curve. Fixed costs are spread over more and more users as the quantity demanded increases, while marginal costs remain small if not zero. If we charge riders e.g. an average cost for a service with near zero marginal cost (which is an approximation of the situation in transit in the absence of crowding, certainly in terms of the short run marginal cost, ignoring a few things like the delays which boarding imposes on other passengers), we get under-consumption and under-supply compared to the social optimum. That means if we charge more than the marginal cost of the ride, we get a less than socially optimal number of passengers (there is a deadweight loss). Somebody who would ride at a lower price that was still at least as high as their marginal cost cannot. The social benefit (consumer’s surplus) of that unmade trip is foregone. Unfortunately because of high fixed costs, this implies that fares at marginal cost will not recover total costs. Thus the natural monopoly / economies of scale or density / declining fixed cost is one aspect that might warrant subsidy.
2. There are network externalities associated with public transit. The more users of transit there are on a system, the more useful the system is for everyone. This is sometimes called the Mohring Effect, but the basic idea is that if 50 people want a ride each hour, you send one bus. If 100 people want a ride each hour, you send two buses, each a half-hour apart, and the average rider only has to wait half as long, (reducing wait times, and over a network, reducing transfer times) benefitting everyone. Similarly, the more riders, the more spatial coverage that can be provided (reducing access and egress times).
3. Transit helps the transportation disadvantaged. Equity or welfare has often been an argument in favor of subsidy, that we do it to provide benefits for people unable to afford otherwise, or transportation for the disadvantaged. This gets more into values than economics, but there are some people who would be employed but for their ability to access jobs, so some subsidy on the transportation front is at least partially repaid by more economic productivity.
4. Transit subsidy helps poor jurisdictions. This has also been argued at the macroscopic level, e.g. Yonah Freemark justifies the federal transit program by arguing in favor of spatial cross-subsidies, i.e. benefitting poor jurisdictions rather than poor people.
5. Transit reduces congestion on other modes, by taking cars off the road, and therefore benefits drivers (who should thus pay for it).
6. Transit stimulates economic development.
7. Cars are subsidized, therefore transit should be subsidized.

These aspects argue in favor of subsidy. But then the question arises, subsidy from whom? That is, what is the appropriate base for providing subsidy? Here we argue in favor of a Club Goods model. People in the Club should help subsidize the service.

The beneficiaries of transit are relatively local. If I live in Minneapolis, the option of riding transit in Las Vegas or Curitiba is of essentially zero value to me. The option of riding transit within the greater Twin Cities region is of some value, and the option of riding transit in Minneapolis is of high value. The option of riding transit that runs past my house to my desired destination is the highest value. Benefits diminish with distance from the system.

We can define the Club more narrowly as anyone who might want to use transit and is willing to pay (or whose employer or University  is willing to pay or help pay) for a season pass. An advantage of using a season pass model (rather than pay per trip) is the ability that it presents in providing services without excessively under-pricing the transit service. Whoever wants to provide transportation benefits for the transportation disadvantaged can subsidize those whom they want without subsidizing everyone.

We can define the Club a bit more broadly as landowners whose property value is increased by the presence of transit. The option of riding transit sometimes is public good (i.e. the option is neither rivalrous nor excludable), and its value is embedded in locations near transit stations. This appears to justify some form of value capture approach (of which property tax is the most widely used, but certainly not the most direct or efficient mechanism).

Both of these clubs are smaller than the municipalities in which transit operates, and much smaller than higher levels of government, like county, state, or nation.

Though there are clearly some arguments in favor, this post promised arguments against transit subsidy as well.

1. Transit is basically a private good. Private goods can be privately provided, which aligns incentives of the producer with their revenue model directly, better performance is rewarded, worse performance is punished. When all transit lines—and road networks for that matter—are planned and operated below cost we simply don’t have any idea what the true value of any service is. If fares increase to cover costs or at least come closer to covering costs service can adapt to revealed demand and firms and households can adapt accordingly. Without proper prices we don’t know where to increase capacity or improve service. We can’t identify actual bottlenecks or spread peak demand across more hours in the day by using dynamic pricing. By planning service while blind to the value of the service everybody is a bit worse off and many actual transit riders are substantially worse off.
2. The network effects might be relatively small (either because they are already played out (high frequency service in a high density city), or because they never will be (low frequency service in a low density city)). The best opportunity is thus low frequency service in a high density city, in which service can be increased. Downscaling may need to occur in places with high frequency and low density. Many technologies have network effects but don’t require public subsidy. From Facebook to your ATM networks the amount of public subsidy is zero, or small. What is usually required is a monopoly (AT&T of yore, airline hubs), some type of lock-in (social networks), collusion (credit cards), or cooperation (the English Language, which readers of this blog all use without the government subsidizing [we can argue about schools separately, if you grew up in the US, you probably learned to speak if not read and write English before you went to school]).
3. Though there are always returns to density (more riders on the bus always lowers the cost per passenger on the bus), bus systems have approximately constant returns to scale (more buses are not less expensive per bus than fewer buses). Many places have figured out an economic model which does work from a profitability stance. There is little reason economically to run a service with many buses under the auspices of a single monopolistic organization. Constant returns industries don’t warrant the same subsidy as increasing returns industries.
4. While it is claimed transit should be subsidized to stimulate economic development, it is also claimed that economic development should be subsidized because it stimulates transit. It is not clear which, if either, or both, are driving this cart.
5. Fixed route transit may be made obsolete by new technologies, especially outside of cities.
6. One bad subsidy does not deserve another. Just because cars are subsidized is not a reason to subsidize transit. It is an argument to remove the subsidies that exist. Technically (if not politically) it would be relatively easy to charge cars for their full cost (i.e. eliminate their subsidy) via higher fuel taxes (or mileage fees) but the amount of the incremental charge would have a very small effect on total automobile use.
7. As for the Mohring effect, how much should a transit rider pay for the bus or train not taken (subsidy for options)? Consider a downtown worker who prefers to take transit to work, but sometimes has to work late into the evening. There is lots of service for typical 9-5 employment, but a major reason workers are comfortable on transit is that they know there is adequate service for occasional trips such as when they work late. Let’s say that a optimal fare that covers direct costs for a rush hour bus is $2, but every other week a worker has to stay until 9pm when service is infrequent. Should the regular fare be $2.20 to reflect the required subsidy for the not-full 9pm bus? Or should occasional trips be shifted to taxis or made the employers’ problem? In Manhattan most corporate employers will pay for a taxicab home for employees who work past 9pm, and a recent survey in San Francisco shows that employees are more likely to ride transit to work if they know that they can take a cab for their return trip. As this is off-peak time for taxicabs perhaps this is a more optimal solution than subsidizing increased fixed-route services.
8. Finally there are lots of reasons not to trust the recent experience in transportation with investment. The costs are too high and the benefits are too low. Giving more funds to existing institutions to build more capital-intensive infrastructure while existing infrastructure deteriorates may not produce the hoped for results.

So how does this net out? We believe that in most places at most times, transit operates like a club, it is excludable but not rivalrous. Therefore we should do what we can to encourage utilization, and play on the idea that people dislike paying out-of-pocket, which discourages use, but are happy to pay for “unlimited services” so they don’t have to think about every little transaction cost.

1. Systems should over time pay for their own operation and maintenance from usage-derived revenue. Anything less is not likely to be financially sustainable with a shift in the political winds. Like other public utilities, transit can and should be able to cover its operating costs from user revenue. If it can’t, the users perceive insufficient benefit. Yes, we are all for congestion charges and conversion of other auto costs to a better basis (e.g. pay-as-you-drive insurance), and that will help transit in selected areas at selected times, but the problem of transit primarily is in the service it provides to transit users, and it needs to operate in the real environment of today, not an idealized transportation financing system of a decade or two from now. The number of articles with the phrase “transit funding crisis” in quotes from Google is over 40,000, and perpetually stressing the system has adverse health effects. Unlike most businesses, when transit’s ridership increased, it was in even direr straits to believe the advocates. More money may be an answer, but money does not buy happiness, transit agencies would be better off if they could reconsider their scope.
2. Users should be financially incentivized to get season or annual passes (paid monthly with bank debits) and become “members” of the transit system rather than pay-as-you-go “riders”, which will encourage more usage, and many users to get subscriptions so they have the easy option of taking transit. As with many museums and zoos and other clubs, membership should be reciprocal, so joining the Twin Cities Transit System gets me “free rides” in Chicago or New York. This will increase the perceived ownership that passengers have for the service.
3. Land value capture should pay for capital costs of infrastructure. But we should only build new infrastructure which has a financial model for recouping operating and other ongoing costs. If the infrastructure generates benefits that accrues to landowners, it is both fair and efficient to use some of those benefits to pay for the infrastructure in the first place. For value capture (not just land value capture) as a tool for subsidy, it needs to be recurring rather than a one-time fee. The largest beneficiaries of transit services in the Twin Cities are downtown employers, the airport and the Mall of America. Downtown Minneapolis employers and employees receive a very large benefit because of reduced parking costs. If true, then a tax on downtown/airport/MOA wages (perhaps one-quarter of one percent) makes sense to subsidize additional service and frequency because of the Mohring effect, and these employers act essentially as a club. We still need a financial model for recapitalizing the system after the land is developed. Value capture is still appropriate, but it requires different mechanisms.
4. The public should subsidize transportation for the disadvantaged from non-transportation specific revenue sources. Perhaps the biggest problem with current subsidies is that they are place-based and not people- based. Why should the entire system be subsidized? Also, why should a professor pay the same fare as students? Or in New York, why should Mayor Bloomberg, the richest guy in the city, pay the same fare as the cleaning staff of Bloomberg, Inc.?

Plymouth: April 24, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
Plymouth Library
15700 36th Avenue N, Plymouth

Chanhassen: April 25th, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
Chanhassen Recreation Center
32310 Coulter Blvd, Chanhassen

I went to White Bear Lake’s quaint downtown to participate in one of many Metropolitan Council Bike Study meetings. The library meeting room was packed with 40+ people including cycling and walking advocates, bike shop owners, and suburban residents – all who want cycling to be safe for everyone.

Suburban cyclists aren’t creatures entirely different from their city-dwelling counterparts. In fact, their concerns are right in line with cyclists everywhere.

The elephant in the room: MnDOT

While no MnDOT representatives were present, you could sense that infrastructure they oversee is a huge concern to everyone who attended. Before introductions were over, several people brought up the fact that there are great bike corridors which disappear as you approach any MnDOT highway.

The intersection of University Avenue where it crosses 35W is a great urban example of magically disappearing bike lanes in MnDOT territory. A suburban example that was cited is County Road 96 which goes between Long Lake and White Bear Lake. It has a very nice, very wide bike trail for 90% of the road. But as it approaches 35E, 35W, and Highway 10, cyclists and pedestrians are forced to duke it out in the road with the automobiles. Not exactly friendly considering 96 is mostly 50MPH.

One gentleman at the meeting likened some of the MnDOT public meetings as “talking to a deaf elephant, which continues to lumber on its current path.” I like Charles Marohn’s Strong Towns view that public infrastructure meetings are often about giving residents a choice between dumb, dumber, and dumbest. If you have ever had time to attend a MnDOT meeting you may realize when you arrive that the choice has obviously already been made for you.

While we all agreed that MnDOT is a major source of systematic problems, it was not productive for the study. MetCouncil can only steer MnDOT in the right direction when MnDOT is receiving money for a project from the Metropolitan Council, which is rare. Many people don’t realize that there are only about eleven (11) people in any given city that can influence MnDOT while they’re wielding their power in your area. They are your city council, and the mayor.

We needed to get back on track and find an idea with legs.

Suburban Hell: How do I get out of here?

One idea from the brainstorming session that seemed to resonate was the issue of sign-age. Out in suburbia, where no street seems to be straight for more than a half mile, navigating can be utterly confusing.

Individual cities may have designated bike routes. If there is any sign-age it’s usually the ubiquitous and ambiguous “Bike Route” sign:

If that bike route happens to lead you into another city, you may no longer find yourself on a useful or friendly bike route. You may simply get lost, or worse find yourself on an unsafe road where bikes aren’t welcome.

While the specific actions that the Metropolitan Council would take after completing their study were unclear, it was clear they were interested in identifying routes, destinations, and all pleasure and pain points in between.

The idea of sign-age seemed like one of those things that MetCouncil could help coordinate between municipalities. Minneapolis was cited as a good example of useful named bike route & trail signs. If this extended out into surrounding cities, it would make navigation much easier.

Clearly marked routes may encourage more cycling which will in-turn acclimate drivers to seeing cyclists on these routes. More use means more safety for cyclists, and a greater chance that in the next road construction life-cycle, the route will be given additional bicycle and pedestrian treatment.

Whatever doesn’t get put into this plan, may have to wait another ten years. As Bill rightly points out, one issue we cannot wait on is addressing climate change. Given the myriad ways that the regional plan will impact the land use, transportation and energy systems we use and their atmospheric impacts, ThriveMSP should address this issue in a systematic fashion, and the Metropolitan Council should incorporate it into every subsequent policy plan that’s based on the regional plan.

There is some hope that the plan will address this generational challenge. As the Council continues its conversations about the plan “goals”, the phrase climate change, and the idea of preparing for its impacts, does appear in the proposals.

The region and local governments are prepared for and respond to the opportunities and challenges presented by climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions and energy use per capita decline.

Why, as a creation of the state, Met Council doesn’t simply adopt the mitigation goals enshrined in state law, I’m not sure. But it’s at least a start.

The other good news is that the Met Council has some clear models to follow. In a previous post, I laid out a few ideas, but there are even more concrete examples. Other regional governments that have done this before.

The Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission has completed a regional greenhouse gas inventory to support the region’s goals of reducing emissions 50 percent by 2035 and 80 percent by 2050. Doing this inventory at the regional scale removes one of the major barriers an engaged city faces when preparing for climate action. Inventories can be time and money-consuming, and are a highly technical process. A regional inventory provides consistency, and makes sense since many of our emissions sources (like road transportation) are not confined to one community, but occur on a regional scale.

The DVRPC is also coordinating efforts to respond to climate threats in their region – like rising sea levels, and has published renewable energy ordinance frameworks to help local governments make development of renewable energy easy.

The Chicago region has also completed a regional greenhouse gas inventory to support the emissions reduction goals of their GO TO 2040 plan. GO TO 2040 has aggressive goals for improving energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the Chicago area.

So where do we go from here? Well, Met Council is still in listening mode, but soon enough they’ll begin drafting the plan that will shape land use, transportation and other infrastructure decisions throughout the 7 counties. Many of these issues, and their related emissions impacts, are clearly best suited to be addressed at the regional scale. Regional governments were created to plan our transportation, water and wastewater systems and address significant regional issues.

Our region should look to other areas of the county for successful models and make sure we use this opportunity to address what will likely be the most significant challenge of the next century.

Advisory Bike Lane

First, an important disclaimer.

My previous employer, a local engineering consulting firm, was asked by City staff for a proposal to provide the planning and design services for this project. I personally wrote this proposal, and City staff later recommended to the City Council that my employer be awarded the design contract. Several months later, the contract was ultimately awarded to one of our competitors, another local engineering consulting firm with an excellent reputation for delivering high-quality bikeway design projects.

Whew! Ok. Now that the formalities are out of the way, here are a few reasons why I think the City of Edina is making the right decision, even though a lot of local bike advocates aren’t too happy about it.

• Edina is trying really hard to be bike friendly. They take a lot of heat from the local biking community for not having the best bicycle network. Sure, it’s a fair criticism to some extent. However, I know from working closely with the City Staff and elected officials on a number of projects that they genuinely care deeply about bicycle and pedestrian safety and are serious about promoting bicycling. They are very aware that they have inherited a city from previous generations where the transportation system is almost entirely focused on motorized transportation. There are significant barriers to overcome, but they are making progress and are implementing bicycle infrastructure into a number of projects throughout the city. It is simply not fair to draw any conclusion from the City’s recent decision that the City is not supportive of bicycling or bicycle infrastructure.
• Let’s not forget that Edina bicyclists play an important role in Twin Cities bicycling in recent history. Before the Minneapolis Bicycle Coalition was formed, the Bike Edina Task Force had been forging new territory in local advocacy for several years. The City of Edina also adopted the first citywide comprehensive bike plan in the state. When it was adopted in 2007, it was no small effort. It set a new standard for bicycle planning in Minnesota, and ushered in a new wave of municipal bike plans.
• The City legitimately took a chance to experiment with a design that is still unproven in a context like Edina. Let’s give them credit for that much. In addition, they overcame major hurdles just to install it in the first place. As far as I know, Edina was only the second city in the US (behind Minneapolis) to implement advisory bike lanes (if anyone knows otherwise, please do leave a comment). I know Minneapolis is claiming success with their implementation of this type of facility, but clearly it is a completely different context, and also a completely different context from their homeland The Netherlands. I suspect that we will continue to see advisory bike lanes with increasing frequency, but it was too soon for Edina. For the record, I know advisory bike lanes are all over the place in The Netherlands. I rode a dumb rental beach cruiser through tulip fields across Holland on advisory bike lanes taking photos of windmills and fueled by nothing but delicious Gouda (which I actually purchased in Gouda). I had the time of my life and felt completely safe bicycling in the process. This type of facility works extraordinarily well in that context, and it may work well in Minneapolis. It didn’t work well in Edina.
• The City is not removing all of the advisory bike lanes. To the best of my knowledge, they are only removing the ones that have proven to be problematic along Wooddale Avenue. It is my understanding that there are also advisory bike lanes along parts of 54th Street that will remain in place. The City is not waffling. They implemented a design, and are now modifying it to better meet the City’s needs.
• It was a legitimately confusing design to have advisory bike lanes on a roadway with a parking lane that is empty the majority of the time. If there is one key difference between the Minneapolis installation and the Wooddale Ave installation, it’s that the parking lanes are very well utilized along 14th Street in Minneapolis, and almost always nearly empty on Wooddale. I have heard from a number of cyclists that it simply felt awkward for them to try to hold a position within the advisory bike lane 10-ish feet from the curb when the adjacent parking lane was empty.
• This was souring city residents on bicycle infrastructure generally. The City Council felt that to some extent, the controversy surrounding the bicycle facilities in this one location would make it more difficult to implement improvements elsewhere in the City.

If I can add another disclaimer, I have never actually ridden the advisory bike lanes in either Minneapolis or Edina, so feel free to take this post with a grain of salt. I should also say that I’m supportive of their decision to terminate the advisory bike lane experiment, and while I expect the new design will be a better overall fit for the community, I’m not necessarily asserting that I think they’ve landed on the best possible design for the corridor either. But I think they are heading in the right direction.

We need to reconnect Nicollet Avenue- not redesign Nicollet Mall.

Nicollet Mall, the nation’s first pedestrian transit way, is one of Minneapolis’ great success stories.  It’s the heart of downtown Minneapolis and has history of being the Minneapolis’ Main Street.

The Mall came about in a time of urban turmoil across most of the United States. Cities were desperate to attract people downtown while residents were fleeing to the suburbs. Minneapolis got stakeholders together and created what was really one of the few urban success stories of the 1960s. Many cities followed suit. Most of them failed.

Fast forward to 2013. Nicollet Mall is still a great artery running through the heart of downtown. It’s bike, walk and transit friendly. It has retail, food and good amount of street life. One could even argue that Nicollet Mall is downtown Minneapolis.

Minneapolis is still waiting on $20 million in state funding to redesign for the State government. However, the city is still moving forward on a design competition. This is a bad idea for two reasons:

1. There is nothing particuarlly wrong with how Nicollet Mall looks or functions that can’t be fixed by land use tweaks, and
2. To achieve a much higher return on investment, the money would be better spent on other needed projects

First of all - there is nothing wrong with Nicollet Mall that can’t be fixed by a little land use tweaks (and adding some more amenities on the north side of the mall besides parking). If you traverse Nicollet Mall, you’ll quickly notice that building don’t always address the street frontage in a responsible way. That is the main culprit.

The main problem is that the buildings need to do a better job of addressing this pedestrian elements of the Mall. It needs more cafes, more food trucks, and more informal activity that integrates with building programming. But, by and large, the street does well. If anything, Nicollet Mall needs more small storefronts. It’s as simple as that. It adds to the diversity of the environment and gives people something to enjoy. Large monolithic towers may look good from afar, but often do little for the street.

Now, there might need to be a brick that needs to be fixed here and there. Add a few climate-appropriate tree. The sidewalk heating system might need some updates and some fountains re-tooled. The Mall was reconstructed in 1991. At the time, a sidewalk heating system was installed – and it’s not worked since. And guess what? It doesn’t matter. The Mall still works because snow shovels still work (and they are much cheaper).

There is also something to be said about Nicollet Mall as a historic place. While other cities were giving up, Minneapolis fought back. There is something beautiful in that. It not only fought back in 1965, but also in 1991 (which was another decade of big city turmoil). Minneapolis’ endevour worked, and it should be celebrated because it tells the great urban story of resiliency.

Re-design or not – the Mall will still be a central part of Minneapolis life. In the process of acquiring this $20 million in State money, there might be some great re-design submissions. And, I certainly do not mean to criticize city officials for trying to make downtown as great as it can possibly be, it’s just that money can be spent more strategically elsewhere.

If the City of Minneapolis is looking to really create a noticeable difference in a world of limited resources, they need to look at the corner of Nicollet Avenue and Lake Street. One would be hard pressed to find a single decision that would have a greater impact on the lives of Minneapolis residents than opening up south Nicollet to Eat Street and connecting them to the Mall in downtown.

A redesign might make Nicollet Mall more modern, green and more landscape urban-y. But, I think we need to concentrate on places where we can get the highest return on investment. When I say, “return on investment” – I’m not just referring to the city’s financial bottom line, I’m talking social and culturally. We can take a hub that has been depressed for 30 years, connect it north and south to downtown – not just for automobiles – but for pedestrians and cyclists.

___

It’s been talked about for years; and people are going to keep talking about it until it’s fixed: let’s re-connect Nicollet Ave! Let’s get people together and let’s get politicians on board! Today is DFL Caucus Day in Minneapolis – bring it up in your ward! Let’s do something about Nicollet and Lake!

I took note because my son is named Ellis. He is six years old now, and as you can see, I’m trying to raise him (and my two-year-old Shaw) to understand there are more ways to navigate his world than from behind the wheel. Sure, we don’t live in the East Village with its impeccable walkscore and transit service, but I think my kids are getting it. We ride bikes, the bus and train at home, and recently spent spring break happily car-free in the Eastern Market neighborhood of Washington D.C. My observation is kids respond positively to the freedom of exploring their world not tethered to a car seat.

Reading the Road & Track article should give urbanists some joy, but be sure to read the comments. I couldn’t help but notice a sense of driving enthusiasts fearing they’d have their cars “pried from their cold, dead hands,” if you will. This is apparently a genuine threat to drivers, but even if a full quarter of millennials choose not to drive, there still will be millions of drivers in this emerging generation, so I think Road & Track will be OK. I appreciated the one comment indicating it was fine for some to choose not to drive, as it frees up lanes of traffic for those who really enjoy driving. Everybody wins, right?

Indeed, cars and the open road will continue to exist for a long time to come (even I love my car), but the future of our country may actually be richer if more of us choose not to drive.

Meanwhile, in the suburbs? We learn that Park-and-Ride lots make intersections less safe, and apparently invite predators to watch baseball practice. Who knew? Well, it’s happening in Blaine. (Of course it is, you say.)

In general, Park And Ride lots are an overlay solution to deal with the impact of poor planning and sprawl. MN65, from Northeast Minneapolis and northward, is a fine example of a road that is a freakshow of poor planning, wretched light timing, and strange use. Businesses along much of the corridor once you cross into Anoka County are only accessible from side roads, which can be baffling to the outsider to access. MN65 through Anoka County has a notable accident rate.

The proposed site of this Park-and-Ride is at Paul Parkway and Ulysses Street, which functions as a sort of frontage to MN65 in sections of Blaine, with some sections close in to MN65, and others where it curves away and functions more as an independent through street. (Paul Parkway is also known as 121st, for those of you who like to get your bearings numerically.)

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Several neighbors of the lot complained that Blaine was to take on the “burden” of increased traffic on its local streets to improve traffic on major highways. From this new lot, buses are expected to go south on MN65, west on US10, west on MN610, south on MN252 and east on I94 into Minneapolis. Residents complained that it would benefit the no-goodniks of East Bethel and Ham Lake (a town, for the record, that does not feature a large body of water with buoyant pork product).

However, given that the parcel is (and has always been) zoned commercial, neighbors may actually benefit from the more targeted use as a Park-and-Ride lot, rather than as a Taco Bell or similar. The baseball complex can use it as overflow parking on weekends, keeping cars OUT of the nearby neighborhood.

At least one of the four community dissenters was concerned about the children biking to the baseball complex. While it’s a little early in the season to evaluate via observation, it’s my highly educated guess that this number is really low and the “children biking” is a total red herring. Most of the baseball games at the complex are not played by kids from the nearby neighborhoods. A lot of the games are for traveling team baseball — kids who live insufficiently close to ride bikes to games. And relative to the kids of Blaine who may have this as a “home” field and/or practice site, the complex is most accessible to those kids who live in west Blaine and need not cross MN65. Crossing MN65 via any means (including in a tank) is of dubious safety. Crossing as a pedestrian or cyclist is positively horrifying, even as a full-gown adult. Creating a Park-and-Ride cannot make the intersection less safe, because “less safe” suggests any degree of safety exists. It does not.

In the end, all but one of the Blaine Council voted in favor of the lot. But, I leave you with this comment from Concerned Citizen Agnes:

My major concern is the kids at the Blaine Baseball Complex. [snip] Not to mention more “strangers” in the neighborhood. Are the children that play in their yards gong to be kept safe from these extra people driving through their neighborhoods?

The Ham Lakers aren’t going to be driving through the neighborhoods, based on placement. Most of the Blaine-iacs won’t be either. Core access is likely to be via MN65 and Paul Parkway. Are creepers really going to be leaning out their car to snatch the delicate children because there is now a Park-and-Ride? What prevents them from doing so now in the absence of a Park-and-Ride? Why would one want to park in a well-lit lot near a baseball complex with a snatched child when you can get on MN65 and flee to Ham Lake instead?

There are legitimate reasons to object to Park-and-Ride lots. They encourage car use and abstract transit, although it has also been found that they can serve a stated use of reducing arterial traffic when applied properly. They can end up as semi-abandoned asphalt if transit funding is cut. They don’t contribute as much to a local economy as an actual commercial use of similar land.

However, it seems that in Blaine, the reason to object, for some, comes down to STRANGER DANGER. It seems that the attraction for creepers isn’t the nearby Baseball Complex, with its abundant adult supervision and dedicated parking, but it’s going to be a Metro Transit lot. Creepers on buses! Insert your standard-issue paranoia about the sorts of people who use public transit here, apparently.

Welcome to suburbia! Sigh.

Podcast action shot!

The podcast this week is a conversation with Tim Springer, who is running for city council minneapolis’s Ward 9, which covers the East Phillips and Powderhorn neighborhoods in South Minneapolis. Tim was the head of the Midtown Greenway for 19 years, and is a property owner and bicycle consultant in Ward 9. He’s running for city Council in the open seat in Ward 9, focusing on social equity, the green economy, and how to design fast safe and pleasant bicycle spaces in the city.

Tim and I sat down last week at the Guyaquil Restaurant on the corner of Lake and Bloomington, and we talked about the race, his platform, and how to look at Minneapolis challenges as all part of the same problem.

The audio is here, and feel free to subscribe to all the podcasts excitement at the feed.

For your interest, we created word clouds for each response, and they are posted below. Enjoy!

Lisa Bender

Ken Bradley

Elizabeth Glidden

Lisa Goodman

Diane Hofstede

Andrew Johnson

Kendall Killian

Matt Perry

John Quincy

Kevin Reich

Meg Tuthill

The 2012 Nice Ride Saint Paul Kick-off Event

I saw my first NiceRider this week, an Asian student crossing the Wasington Avenue bridge on the University of Minnesota campus. It seems that, barring massive snowstorms forcing the bright green bikes to scuttle back to their hibernation caves, the Nice Ride season is upon us. They’re even expanding again, adding 24 new stations along the river and in South Minneapolis.

This time last year, St Paul was celebrating a different expansion. The Nice Ride system installed 30 stations in downtown Saint Paul, and along Grand Avenue.

According to the NiceRide organizer, Bill Dossett, the focus  of the Saint Paul expansion was on the downtown:

“The real focus this year is to do downtown St. Paul,” he said. “St. Paul is so tied to the river and is very much a river city.”

He said hotel patrons and downtown workers will be able to use the bikes to enhance what might otherwise be a walking lunch.

“The bikes make it easier for people to go a little bit farther on their lunch hour,” Dossett said. “Rather than being able to walk eight blocks, they’ll be able to go a mile or two and access the riverfront.”

Yet if the goal of NiceRide was to get people to ride around downtown Saint Paul, last year has to be considered a failure.

I did a rough survey of a representative sample of 10 stations from each of the downtowns, and the results are disheartening for Saint Paul bicycling. Of the ten stations in Saint Paul, only two locations came close to the 1,000 trip barrier. Most spots stayed well below 300 trips per season (or about two rentals per day per station). By contrast, even the worst performing Downtown Minneapolis station was almost at 2,000 trips, with the most popular (the IDS Center) exceeding 10,000 trips during the bicycling season. The total trips at the 10 Minneapolis locations was 46,379, while Saint Paul’s locations equaled  just 5,594, a tiny fraction of the city to the West.

A comparison between 10 Nice Ride stations in each downtown.

Why Were Saint Paul’s Numbers So Dismal?

There are lots of potential culprits for the gap between downtown Saint Paul and downtown Minneapolis’ bicycling numbers. Most obviously, Saint Paul is more hilly. Lowertown is literally lower than the rest of downtown, and to escape from the core, you’ll encounter a hill in almost any direction. That might explain some of the variance. (On the other hand, last week I watched a Pedal Pub very slowly go up the hill at 4th Street, and they were having a great time. Overall, downtown Saint Paul is fairly flat, so I don’t think this is explains the difference.)

Similarly, there are more jobs and people in downtown Minneapolis than in downtown Saint Paul. The downtown Minneapolis residential population is 36,000; Saint Paul’s is only about 8,000. Likewise for jobs: Minneapolis has about 160,000 jobs while Saint Paul has about 60,000.

Still, that doesn’t really explain the gap to me. At worst, you’d have to expect that Saint Paul might have one third or one fourth of the number of bicyclists. (They currently have 12%.) The dismal numbers must have another explanation. What might it be? Are people in Saint Paul so different from people in Minneapolis?

In my opinion, the huge gap can be explained by one simple thing: Nice Ride bikes are mostly useless without Bike Lanes!

The downtown Minneapolis bicycle master plan.

Downtown Minneapolis is filled with bike lanes. In fact, at least a dozen streets (except Washington Avenue) have designated space for bicycles. In Saint Paul, unless you’re a tiny section of Jackson Street, you’re not even going to find a single bike lane anywhere downtown.

That’s not to say that people don’t ride bicycles in downtown Saint Paul. I do, others do, lots of people ride bicycles through the city. We just do it in regular street lanes, because we’re used to riding bikes in the city, used to navigating in traffic.

However, Nice Ride is aimed at a different audience. Throughout the US, bike share systems target people who aren’t that comfortable riding bicylces: tourists, museum goers, office workers on their lunch break. These kinds of riders really need designated spaces to ride, places where they feel comfortable and safe on the street. And that means bike lanes or off-street trails, which are about as common in downtown Saint Paul as a snowplow in July.

Saint Paul has good intentions and fine goals. The city has a new bicycle coordinator (who writes for this very website), and has been working on a bicycle plan for some time. But without bike lanes in downtown Saint Paul, those eye-catching green bikes are are for urban bicycling what those Snoopy statues are for street life. They’re strictly symbolic. Maybe this year will prove me wrong, but I’m afraid that until Saint Paul has contiguous and comfortable bike lanes downtown, Nice Ride will remain a underused symbol of good intentions and lack of action.

See particularly Section 6:

“Parking fees for all employees, irrespective of their office location, (resident and community faculty, staff, and administrators) are mandatory …

The estimated annual parking fee for full-time staff and faculty is $400 per year … The anticipated rate for students will be $10.50 per credit. … “

So if you take the bus to the Midway campus (nowhere near the main St. Paul campus), you still subsidize parking in St. Paul. If you pay for parking in downtown Minneapolis and walk to the Minneapolis campus via the Skyways, you will subsidize a parking ramp in St. Paul. If you take an online course (distance learning), you still subsidize parking in St. Paul.

Leaving aside the urban design aspects for now (see below) and the creation of a fortress campus, this is so misguided from an economics perspective I don’t know where to begin.

(1) Why is Metropolitan State University in the parking business? Is this a core part of their mission? Shouldn’t they contract with someone to build and operate the ramp and charge parkers (students and staff) market rates? If they need to subsidize staff to work where it is more expensive (or lose people), they can pay them more. (I realize other universities have parking as well, but they charge users directly, and don’t charge non-users, since parking is profitable.) If they lose students from their St. Paul campus, that might indicate they have a bad location.

(2) Why don’t they charge people who want to buy parking contracts directly, or charge people who use it on an ad hoc basis directly, instead of charging everyone? The incentives they are creating will encourage more people to drive to campus rather than fewer.

(3) Why doesn’t Metro State have a subsidized transit program (like U-Pass) for their staff and students?

(4) Why doesn’t Metro State work with Metro Transit to coordinate service with class schedules. The longer-term plan seems to be providing BRT or LRT on the Gateway Corridor, with a stop at Mounds Boulevard (on either 3rd or 7th depending on which alternative is picked), easily accessed from campus.

(5) If the neighborhood is concerned about student (or staff) parking on public streets, why don’t they start putting meters on the street (maybe exempting residents who pay for a seasonal pass), and make some money for the neighborhood. Parking benefit districts are a logical and positive response to parking spillover.

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Now to the urban design aspects. Metropolitan State almost has a quad (with a driveway in the middle, but that is easily remedied). It actually has nice architecture on the St. Paul campus. Why muck that up with a parking ramp? You could see from their existing surface lot how the campus might naturally extend across Maria Avenue, and later across Bates Avenue. If you must build something, do it underground rather than wasting precious above ground space that could be used for better purposes. Stored cars need no natural light.

Yes, parkers should pay for parking. No, non-parkers should not pay for parking. No, parking costs are not the same everywhere, nor should the prices be. No, St. Paul does not require more parking ramps.

Disclosure: I have a family member who is an employee of Metropolitan State University. These views are my own.