Weird how they don't just use flappy sticks and paint for marking off construction zones. 😉
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Evan Roberts
@evanrobertsnz
Social, demographic, & economic history HMED, coffee, photos, Dylan, urban & transit fan, road & trail runner. in many places
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10 months after we put these planters in the road they have not been hit by a car. 4 of them are on a corner on a steep hill. Snowplows, trucks and school buses are around here regularly. Good evidence all traffic calming should be upgraded beyond reflective plastic sticks
Happy Election Day to the world’s oldest democracy! (New Zealand, first country to enfranchise all adults in 1893)
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This Rube Goldberg cartoon sort of predicted this outcome.
Done. Now I can speak with firsthand knowledge about #everysinglestreet in Minneapolis. Not a huge physical challenge for me, the tricky part is organizational, and that wasn't a problem with .
Some of the buses in Wellington and Auckland (NZ) have silver ferns on them.
Despite some recent challenges this analysis holds up pretty well a year after I first posted it.
There should be an ADA lawsuit against the city of Minneapolis for this block of Johnson St.
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When the postman wanders in front of your 25 second exposure with a headlamp on. Notice how there's no trace of the person who crossed the exposure, but the headlamp got its light in there for a while.
Hopefully we can all agree this is some of the least effective spending on public safety possible.
Minneapolis’ North Loop has developed nicely the last two decades, but for the life of me I’ll never understand why the city has maintained these absurdly wide streets.
Watching things in Minnesota (Brooklyn Center) right now, I am struck by the absence (AFAICT) of any public attempt to investigate the totality of what happened in May/June last year in the Twin Cities, and try to create some kind of shared understanding of what happened
Don't know if the are aware of this, but in the summer people are out "recreating" on the Stone Arch Bridge much earlier in the morning than 6am. This is an absurd restriction on normal use of the bridge in summer
This year I've run 80% of the street miles in Minneapolis. I run on the street as much as possible, because it's asphalt, and it helps me avoid dogs, and these days the "6 feet!" people. But you know, cars, it's not risk free. So far, so good ...
I don't get the "new building will make shadows" concern. Shadows are great. American cities need more shadows. Many more
These measures seem more appropriate to our situation in MN than what and have done recently. Consider copy and pasting.
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MDHHS issued a new emergency order that enacts a three-week pause targeting indoor social gatherings & other group activities in an effort to curb rapidly rising #COVID19 infection rates. For more information about the order, visit Michigan.gov/Coronavirus.
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One thing that could make Saint Paul’s road money go a lot further is narrowing the roads significantly. Having run 3/4 of the city’s streets I can say without a doubt that most of the local streets could be narrowed to 20 feet and still serve the traffic they see.
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Let’s fix the roads already. twitter.com/StarTribune/st…
My mug arrived. I'm using a French press to make the coffee. hoping it's a permitted use.
It's scenes like this that make me believe in the argument that sidewalks are a failing infrastructure in the upper Midwest (I have learned this from )
Mind boggling to me that ... checks atlas ... Minneapolis couldn’t tow a lot of these cars in a timely fashion. Like, that’s our specialty.
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Looks like this is being sponsored by a libertarian ("ACT" is the name of the party) member of parliament. MPs can host events on parliamentary premises. Not an official government thing.
Repealing a mask mandate now is like pulling the goalie because you’ve gone up 3-2 with a few minutes to go.
Classic example of a path they should make permanent because it serves people's needs for more direct routes.
Rare-ish Mpls example of a house so far back on the lot it's front door is by the back door of the neighbors' houses
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Prediction: A likely seasonal (it's cold) reduction in crime will be used to support the argument that the extra police were effective.
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There's awesome electric options nowadays that would meet climate and emissions goals. I typically do our driveway and about 400 yards of our block on a single charge
Stopped to take a photo of these houses with unusually short (for Mpls) <10' setbacks, and there was a guy sitting on his porch, so I said neutrally what I was taking a photo of. He raved about how good it was ...
The penalty for this should be?
a) license revocation or impoundment for a week
b) a fine sufficient to fund a block of fully protected bike lanes
c) a and b
One way for the state of Minnesota to increase the value of the SWLRT line would be to require cities to upzone all land within a half-mile radius (or further?) of stations.
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Clearly this guy had thought about this issue a lot, because he went onto comment [correctly] that a bigger backyard might be more useful for most people than the swathe of lawn on the front. All in all, a pleasantly surprising chat & a nice moment of connecting with strangers
Modest proposal: until sidewalks are free of ice all Twin Cities streets are shared spaces, and have a 10mph speed limit for vehicles. Police will direct effort to enforcement and ticket speeders.
Thrilled to announce that ( and ), Ben Wiggins () and I have been awarded an NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grant to run a multi-year institute for groups building crowd-sourced transcription projects.
Downtown Minneapolis is dying ... of boredom 😉 a coffee shop at a big central library should be a vibrant happening place, and yet this space has been quiet, sterile, and disappointing since it opened. Nothing has changed post-2020
Wow, looks like someone voted for weekday morning closure of West River Road to cars
It's having the right ordinance number down to the 4th clause that ensures people don't block your driveway
I'm just a biker/pedestrian/driver, and it's becoming clear to me that traffic engineering standards for how close vehicles can park to intersections and allow visibility of the cross street are based on shorter, more transparent vehicles than the current average American vehicle
11 years on a lot of these parking lots are gone
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This nice infill housing in Longfellow (36th and 42nd) is 2500 sq ft of house on 3700 sq ft of lot. It's really nice. But you couldn't build this by right everywhere in Minneapolis.
Many things are notable about this 1922 zoning map of St Paul. One is that you could build 4+ stories everywhere (maybe 5 with a 10 foot setback). The other is the long stretches of commercial zoning. Not nodes, miles of streets.
Excited and a little terrified* to share that along with twitter-less colleagues Henry Thomson (ASU) and Robert Schub (Nebraska) I was just awarded an R21 to study the mortality and life expectancy effects of randomized land redistribution in New Zealand (1/12)
Not an infectious disease epidemiologist to be sure, but how can you argue with evidence like this? Even if the methods are a little off the public health advice to drink more Antipodean wine to survive the pandemic is sound.
Death spiral of Twin Cities transit. It's really sad. Given the budget and political constraints (look at the struggle to get a bare mile of non-downtown bus lane) Metro Transit run a justly recognized system for an American metro area.
The Census Bureau is apparently hoping to force all schools and services for the elderly to be located at a central point in a … county. Because who cares what the geographic distribution within a county of the population is? Madness.
mailchi.mp/umn/nhgis10721
Yeah, it's almost certainly the case that we're closer to getting the level of concern right for construction workers, and not concerned enough about other traffic related fatalities.
Urbanism on the run 🏃
1. This is a Saint Paul lane, it's got a name. This is all the asphalt we need for most residential streets
Interesting how Minnesota drivers will voluntarily stop mid-block for turkeys in the middle of the road, but not obey the human law to stop for humans at crosswalks. Makes you wonder who's really in charge around here, and it might be the turkeys.
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Macy's necktie models meet to compare knot techniques
One of the best public outdoor spaces in the Twin Cities. Trees and enough seating in close proximity that there is good energy and yet rarely too crowded.
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Classic car in a little snow, York Avenue Payne-Phalen neighborhood, Saint Paul
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This one picture I think sums up snow clearance for pedestrians in Minneapolis this past week.
Kinda wild that the Minneapolis city meters are on a different app than Minneapolis Park Board meters. Like they couldn't coordinate on this?
Once you've seen this done, you wonder why it's not the default in urban areas.
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#FridayThought
Do you think it is time to change our mindset from ‘people crossing roads’ to ‘cars crossing pavements’
Many countries already use speed bumps at entrance-ways so cars have to slow down and pedestrians can continue on a straight even surface.
#ActiveDesign
Do you think it is time to change our mindset from ‘people crossing roads’ to ‘cars crossing pavements’
Many countries already use speed bumps at entrance-ways so cars have to slow down and pedestrians can continue on a straight even surface.
#ActiveDesign
This could only be more truly American if you got a small tax break for using one
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Replying to @MnDPS_DPS
We recently purchased some Not-Reaching Pouches to help reduce deadly force encounters between law enforcement and citizens during traffic stops. The pouches store a driver’s license, and insurance card in plain sight in the vehicle on an air vent or other visible location.
Good on for having a marked bike lane in the drive thru. I was 1 of 3 bike/ped customers in line
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varies regionally and seasonally in US in my experience.
1960s urban renewal and freeway building gets a lot of criticism, but when you read the plans from the time and empathize with the problems people of the era thought they were addressing, it's more explicable. A thread, with examples (outtakes from a paragraph for a paper)
IPUMS is why I moved to Minnesota, part of why I stayed, & the data is great. More than that tho I’ve been privileged to have great dissertation advising & grant writing mentorship, and ongoing inspiration to dream boldly about research and make good public data. Thanks
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Exciting news today! IPUMS founder Steven Ruggles (@HistDem) was named a #MacFellow by @macfound. Known as the “genius grant” he is being recognized for the incredible contributions he’s made through IPUMS in providing easy access to harmonized data. macfound.org/fellows/class-
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This encapsulates the generational aspects of housing in one tweet
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Automated
15 Budock Road, Hillsborough
Estimated value $2,830,000
Last sold in 1981 for $55,000
One of the best signs of spring in Minneapolis is when the trees prepare to migrate from their winter breeding location. Lots of people have tried to catch them in the act of walking out of here and putting their roots down in far flung boulevards, but they are hard to spot.
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Beyond the shoveling issue, we really need to make incremental improvements to sidewalk design when we do street and sidewalk reconstruction. They are literally in little valleys. We need more boulevard rain gardens and education of homeowners to landscape in better ways twitter.com/mplsalex/statu
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Great (forthcoming, but online) article by in Annual Review of Sociology about how sociologists can and should pay more attention to zoning
Honestly drivers should be empowered to give bus stop shovelers a month's free rides. twitter.com/mplsalex/statu
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Surprised to see the Minneapolis DFL Senior caucus not out here demanding the road be reopened to cars 😉
Minneapolis doesn't look its best in early April, TBH
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Grew up in New Zealand, still study it, etc, etc ... The argument for wild policy swings is overstated. For sure, there's reversal of some policies. But major reforms are rarely overturned, they are modified and incorporated into the policy settings of the next government
When you come across these really wide roads in Minneapolis, and wonder why so much road for so few cars, and then you remember the true story that many streets in Minneapolis were designated as emergency landing strips for the space shuttle
citypages.com/news/the-incre
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Fundamental concepts referred to as Type I and Type II, because that’s super helpful.
It's a climate emergency in Minneapolis, so of course the city's procedure is still to clear the roads for cars to go a few mph faster, and make the sidewalk / multi-use path harder to use by covering it in ice and snow chunks.
Sure it's bad, but imagine how much worse it is in cities that don't win "most bikeable city" awards.
October trail running is why I pulled the plug on my marathon effort when it was clear it wasn't going well. Today was one of the rewards. 9 miles in the leaves by the Mississippi
I went running to photograph lawn signs for a class exercise, and found this gem. One of the all time greats. I laughed the rest of the way down the block.
I could just stand here all day and watch this simple bumpout do its work
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the message of "you must hydrate" got bad enough in long distance running in the 1990s/2000s that about 10 years ago they had to start really dialing it back as more slower runners were showing up with symptoms of over-hydration than people with dehydration
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The widespread use of wooden planters has been a big success in London. Put in thousands of them, and some will get hit. But fewer will get hit than plastic sticks (I refuse to call them bollards, they’re not). The only thing we need to experiment with in the Midwest is plants.
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To put the "not hit by a car" in perspective: 10 months on the road is 300 days. A conservative estimate would be 100,000 vehicle movements. How many plastic-stick only installations are unscathed after 100,000 vehicle movements? Firmer traffic calming changes driver behavior
Michael Weaver (UBC, not on Twitter afaict) has this amazing data visualization using railroad timetables about travel times between parts of the US in 1880 and 1900. Lose your day to it.
mdweaver.github.io/times_year/
Made a good attempt at one of the cakes from the classic Australian Women's Weekly cookbook. They'll let me back into the Antipodes with this effort.
The decline in reliability of the Twin Cities transit system in the pandemic is really sad (I get why it's happening, I was fine, I found my way to the bus ... And yet, it's still sad)
One of the saddest things about Minnesota is how few murals there are. For a place that has several months (November - snow, February-flowers) of dull color weather this is a real shame. We need more color in our lives!
Regression continuity design: this pothole spans the Minneapolis/Saint Paul border
This tweet begins organization of the traditional, non-official, publicized #PAA2023 group run. Meet at 6:30am Friday in the hotel lobby. We’ll check out the new Lafite Greenway for just under 5km and return. Retweet, and share with your Twitter-less demography running friends
One of the greatest pieces of dataviz I've ever seen, and trust me, US federal government reports from the 1930s are full of amazing efforts at data visualization
(from Biennial Survey of Education, 1934-36)
babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nnc1
Where have I seen a map of disparities in Minneapolis that looks like this before? 🤔
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Replying to @WedgeLIVE
I just discovered the city has a covid-19 neighborhood map.
www2.minneapolismn.gov/coronavirus/da
I went and checked out the new Highland Bridge development/neighborhood/soon-to-be-shrine-to-the-effects-of-Saint-Paul’s-rent-control-policy, and it was … ah … really good, and we need more places like this, but maybe not so long to get them going.
Metro Transit deserves better land use in the area it serves, because it really does a very good job in general
