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Pedestrians prohibited on streets.mn

Today on streets.mn I examine Bloomington’s latest bungle. Bloomington is the suburb I lived in the longest, it has some really nice topography for the Twin Cities that great parks like Hyland, Moir, and the Minnesota River recreational area takes full advantage of, and it has some decent bones in terms of the integrity of their street grid. But man do they fuck up a lot for pedestrians. See for yourself on my post (or I suppose you could go to Bloomington and walk around, but then you might die and I’d feel bad).

Oh yeah and I tacked on this graphic for some reason:

Because all of these signs are bad for pedestrians except the No Turn on Red

Loring Greenway, this is your life! on MinnPost

Respectable citizen Andy Sturdevant has generously provided me space in his weekly The Stroll column on MinnPost to rant about an area near and dear to my heart, the Loring Greenway. This figment incarnate of Al Hofstede’s imagination is not interesting, but it is highly livable and walkable and spurred a degree of private investment unmatched by any other single piece of infrastructure within the city limits, with the possible exception of Nicollet Mall. For these reasons I believe it to be worthy of emulation, as I finally get around to arguing in my MinnPost piece. As a special bonus to those who tolerate a feed subscription to Getting Around Mpls blog, here is a map I made quick of potential Loring Greenway emulators:


View Larger Map

Thanks Andy and MinnPost!

The best laid plans

Last week the Transportationist noted and reposted the Comprehensive LRT System Plan for Hennepin County, a 1988 vintage addition to the Twin Cities’ sky-high stack of written-and-forgotten plans.  This particular collection of fantastical fireplace fuel was posted on the official site for the Southwest Transitway, presumably to display their staff’s inability to use a scanner (a deficit I share as you’ll shortly see).  The Transportationist concluded his post with a call for a map of the routes planned in the “1970s ‘Regional Fixed Guideway Study’”.

At last an opportunity to share the fruit of my many hours of sequestration in the Minneapolis Stewart L. Central Library!  I’m not sure if I have exactly the map he’s looking for, but I do have a few items that likely will be of interest.  The first comes from Rail Rapid Transit, a report produced by Vorhees & Associates for the MTC in 1969.

The other is the Fast Link System, which I got from a doc called Fast Link Rail-Rapid Transit for Minneapolis, produced in 1972 by Don Fraser’s City Coordinator IIRC in a desperate effort to influence the Met Council and the Legislature (aka the decision-makers) to choose a transit policy that would actually benefit the city.

I believe, based on the references I’ve stumbled on occasionally, that the Fast Link plan was the one that had the most support, as opposed to the Vorhees plan.  It’s kind of hard to tell based on the scan that I made a few minutes before the library closed, but most of the Fast Link plan was proposed to be subway, with a few aerial segments.  As the 70s slithered on, this plan seems to have evolved into an option that had PRT-like segments through the downtowns and at the University, and curiously split into two one-way segments in St Paul, one of which was proposed for University and the other for I-94.  This iteration appeared in the Met Council’s 1975 Automated Small Vehicle Fixed Guideway Report along with a more traditional subway plan.

I have to admit that I didn’t have a chance to read through this one in detail, so I’m not sure if these were plans that were being seriously advocated for or if they were merely sacrificial lambs.  This is the report that set high-quality transit back for decades in Minnesota, as it was forwarded by the Met Council to the Legislature, which promptly banned the study of fixed guideway rail transit (as will be seen later).  These rail plans were compared with the Met Council’s adopted transit policy, which favored a network express buses with possible people mover systems in the downtowns.  According to the report, the rail plans would somehow not have serviced non-downtown locations as well as express buses, and the non-PRT plan wouldn’t even have served the downtowns well.  35 years later we know what hooey that was, as anyone who’s attempted to take one of the routes in today’s highly developed express bus network anywhere besides Downtown Minneapolis or Downtown St Paul.  But I concede it’s possible that at the time they really didn’t know that people would be willing to walk a bit further in exchange for reliable, fast, frequent transit, just as they didn’t know that gently suggesting that cities not allow non-sewered large-lot development wouldn’t contain sprawl.  On the other hand, the apparent lack of effort to develop a true bidirectional express bus network for the next three decades is also compelling evidence that this “Report” was utter bullshit, designed to funnel state money into highways.

Anyway, my sense is that by this point transit advocates were feeling a sense of panic and despair comparable to that I imagine is currently being felt by the GOP, at least at the MN level.  This can be gleaned from the timeline provided in the 1988 Hennepin County LRT plan, which I would really love to have been able to just copy and paste:

Planning for a variety of fixed guideway transit systems has proceeded almost continuously in the Twin Cities since the late 1960s.  [Here I would have added "to little or no effect."  -Alex] Some of the major events of that history include:

  • MTC sponsored analyses of various technologies, early 1970s
  • MTC – Small Vehicle Study, 1974
  • Minnesota Legislature prohibition of fixed rail planning, 1975 [! -Alex]
  • University of Minnesota Transitway, 1976
  • St. Paul Downtown People Mover, 1976-1980
  • Minnesota Legislature lifts prohibition of fixed rail planning, 1980
  • Light Rail Transit Feasibility Study, 1981
  • Hiawatha Avenue Location and Design Study – EIS, 1979-1984
  • I-394 High Occupancy Vehicle Roadway, 1982
  • University/Southwest Alternatives Analysis, 1985 (draft)
  • Metropolitan Council/RTB identify LRT as preferred mode in University, Southwest and Hiawatha Corridors; University is the priority corridor
  • LRT Implementation Planning Program, April 1985
  • Minnesota Legislature prohibition of fixed guideway planning, 1985 [This is not an accidental duplication - it apparently happened again.  How did this get past Perpich? - Alex]
  • Transit Service Needs Assessment, Regional Transit Board, 1986
  • A Study of Potential Transit Capital Investments in Twin Cities Corridors – Long-Range Transit Analysis, Metropolitan Council, December 1986
  • Minnesota Legislature lifts prohibition of fixed guideway planning, 1987
  • Comprehensive LRT System Planning for Hennepin County, 1988

So next time you’re feeling proud of Minnesota’s history of relatively sane governance, remember that the Legislature managed to interfere in what should be a technical decision not once but twice.  And lest you think that these poxes on transit are just a product of overreach by Republicans on the rare occasion that they gain complete power, the 1975 Legislature was overwhelmingly DFL, and Wendy Anderson of St Paul was in the Governor’s Mansion.  Of course, in 1975 it wasn’t necessarily an anti-transit attitude that was prevalent; more likely it was a misunderstanding of the nature of urban systems masqueraded as futurism in the form of People Movers and PRT.  This same Legislature, after all, further empowered the Met Council, which itself is a culmination of the suburban experiment – the failed idea of the Broadacre City, made more palatable in its rationalization of the overdelivery of infrastructure that’s inherent in such an individualistic urban form.

Anyway, in the above timeline is included the 1981 LRT Feasibility Study, which was produced by an apparently repentant (or possibly begrudging) Met Council.  This is available in a form that patrons of the Stewart J. Central Library can check out, which I did last summer, resulting in these atrocious scans:

West LRT

Southwest LRT

University LRT

Northeast LRT

And a summary sheet indicating that the fully built LRT system (including a Northwest line, which I didn’t scan for some reason but was probably pretty similar to the Bottineau LPA) would serve 32,900 more weekday passengers than an existing or minimally improved system, and would actually turn an operating profit of $4.8m a year.

With that, I’ll close the vault for now.  If you liked these and want more, don’t worry – I spend a lot of time at the library, and unlike our transit system, the archive of old transit studies is almost limitless.

To a mouse.

BURP #666: Things that go BURP in the night

5 pm Tuesday October 30th!

Relatively little precipitation

Clubhouse Jäger!

923 Washington Ave N, Minneapolis

2-4-1′s on Domestic Taps & Rail Drinks till 10 (!)

Every kid’s favorite holiday is Halloween.  You may not get a day off school, but you do get to stay up late, and you get to wear face paint, run around the neighborhood and push the doorbells of all the neighbors your parents usually tell you to stay away from.  And best of all CANDY!  The best Simpsons episodes!  More CANDY!

When you’re a grown-up, beer is your candy.  And talking to other nerds about urban planning is your Simpsons Treehouse of Horror.  So, in honor of the most scawiest howiday, we’re having the most scawiest BUWP evew at Minneapolis’ own drinkable castle, Club Jäger.  I hope you can join us… IF YOU DARE!

Yet another reference to a 90s TV show

Traffic Control Device for Non-Vehicular Traffic Vehicles

Encountered by a traveler to the Champs de Targets…

How exactly does a pedestrian comply with a stop sign?  Do both feet need to be firmly planted, approximately parallel so as not to suggest movement, in order to come to a complete stop?  Is a pedestrian at a stop sign required to turn his or her head in each direction, or does a nonchalant scan of the field of vision suffice?

Pedestrian activity has been compared to such graceful movement as ballet, clouds, and animal migration.  Why wasn’t a simple LOOK OUT FOR THE TRAIN YOU IDIOT sign good enough?  Why do we need to be subject to the same confining rules as our twitchy vehicular brethren?

Drunk Driving & Other Delights

George Smith… A name that will live in infamy…

1897:  Officers make first drunk driving arrest

On this day in 1897, a twenty-five-year-old London taxi driver named George Smith became the first person ever arrested for drunk driving after slamming his cab into a building.  Smith later pled guilty and was fined twenty-five shillings.  In the United States, the first laws against operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of alcohol went into effect in New York in 1910.  In 1953 Robert Borkenstein, a former Indiana state police captain and university professor, invented the Breathalyzer.  Easier to use and more accurate than earlier devices, the Breathalyzer was the first practical device and scientific test available to police officers to establish whether someone had too much to drink.

From my History Channel page-a-day calendar today.  Btw, apparently 25 shillings in 1897 would be £114.27 in 2011, or $182.87 at current exchange rates.  Luckily the penalty is a bit steeper these days.

When is National Year Out?

Tonight is National Night Out, the one night a year where we block cars from certain streets so they can be used in a way that actually enriches the community.  The City has a list of all the “official” NNO events, and it’s fun to look at the column that lists the planned activities to see what people would use their streets for if they didn’t have to fear for their lives every time they set foot on it:

  • Grilling/kids games
  • sit in street, watch planes
  • kids riding bikes in the street
  • Johnny Cash tribute band
  • Welcom[ing] new neighbors
  • hanging out for adults, sidewalk chalk/colors for kids
  • Plant/book exchange
  • a lot of laughter
  • Gospel rap
  • Barbecue, pinata, water balloon toss
  • kids running around
  • discuss cute dogs
  • Basketball Tournament
  • Share how things are in the n’hood
  • Hopefully visit from fire engine !
  • Kids “own” the street
  • Zumba
  • Beers, Brats, Buddies
  • self defense demo
  • celebrate life of a long-time neighbor who passed away recently
  • schmoozing
  • chicks-on-sticks
  • Chili cook-off
  • Chicken Wing Contest
  • kids bike decorating
  • possibly tours of gardens and/or guitar playing
  • the kids like to ride their bikes/play games in the street

As you browse the 33 page list, it becomes almost overwhelming how many of the activities that people have to wait till this one time a year to use their street for are just plain everyday activities.  When I was growing up in the suburbs, we played in the street all the time.  City kids I guess can only do that once a year, and only if you jump through enough bureaucratic hoops, and only if your street is deemed “inessential for traffic flow.”

By far the most common activity listed is “socializing” or a variation of it.  Of course socialization happens on these blocks on other nights, too, but only in people’s yards, or squeezed onto a narrow sidewalk.  Since most neighbors drive, random socialization can only happen if no one’s listening to music, or no one is stopped behind your car.

Sure, driving is an easy and comfortable way to get around, but is it worth it?

Yes, I am sitting in my apartment on the computer instead of at NNO event.  Leaving now…

 

Why I hate the suburbs

The suburbs appear to be furtively resuming their six-decade binge of eating up productive farmland and scenic woodlands and prairies on the now vast fringe of the Twin Cities metro.  That’s a real bummer, because the predatory weasels who build this crap with very few exceptions don’t give a fig about walking, biking or transit.

They should, because for the most part they end up building places that are dense enough to be walkable & bikeable (if not transitable usually).  Following the pattern of the most recent wave of suburban development set at the close of WWII, these developers throw down houses with little regard (sometimes disdain) for how they fit into the context of the surroundings, leaving municipalities to deal with the expensive, patchy mess they leave.  Most municipalities are unable or unwilling to rise to that challenge, so the suburbs of today are vast, leafy green, packed with jobs and tempting shops, and impossible to access without a car.  Many of us carless hoped that the recent recession was a cleansing fire, but I don’t think we have proof of that yet and apparently people who work at Harvard agree with me.

So the blast from the past Toll Brothers is about to shoot into Eden Prairie is unwelcome, familiarly stunning in its brazen capitalism and lack of interest in how its marks are going to actually live in the $600k paper fantasy being sold to them.  The plan is for 52 single family homes on 30-40 acres wedged into what is being sold as a conservation area.  Enormous, nearly artless houses will surround streets that follow the typical winding, stunted, disjointed suburban pattern.  There will probably be sidewalks, but people are as likely to walk on them as they are likely to drive on a freeway that doubles back on itself.  Luckily, the Toll Brothers development, called Eden Prairie Woods, isn’t such a twisted wretch that you can’t connect much of it into effective city blocks with multi-use paths, as I did using red lines in Paint:

The developers are kind enough to promise “hiking/biking trails” but as they are not depicted in the site plan, I’m assuming those are being planned only for the “conservation area.”  If trails do end up in the neighborhood itself, my guess is they’ll look something like this:

In other words, completely useless for transportation.  But is it even possible to bike and walk anywhere around here?  The site plan makes it look like these houses will be in the middle of a vast unpopulated jungle, far from the cares and worries of having neighbors or sometimes seeing homeless people.  Actually, Eden Prairie Woods is about a quarter-mile from this:

Though it’s a small island in a sea of sprawl, it’s probably big enough to warrant some neighborhood retail to which Eden Prairie Woods residents could (theoretically) also walk to.  Also potentially walkable for potential Eden Prairie Woodsians?  The Lions Tap, legendary burger joint of the Minnesota River suburbs (about a half mile away).  Woodsians could also potentially walk to an enormous church and an enormous park, which both affix to the southeast corner of the intersection of Pioneer Trail and Eden Prairie Road about a mile away.  At the upper range of walking distance are the jobs clustered around Flying Cloud Airport (1.5 mi), but if the future Woodsians are willing to climb on a bike, they could easily ride there or a bit further to classes at Hennepin Tech (2.5 mi) or a gazillion jobs and shops around Eden Prairie Center (~4 mi).

The point is not that if only they’d lay down a few strips of asphalt, the residents of Eden Prairie Woods would all sell their cars, or even their second cars.  The point is that no one is even going to try to occasionally walk or bike for transportation if there is no reasonable way to do it.  If their only options are a few curly-cue paths in the woods that don’t connect to anything, the whole family’s going to pile into their own individual cars for a trip to the Lions Tap.  But if there is a reasonably direct route, and maybe nothing good on TV that night, maybe they’ll try to walk for their burgers on occasion instead.

There is the further tragedy that at a density of around 2 units per acre, this development is weighting the area away from ever having regular route bus service.  But what really gets my goat is that even developments like these that advertise opportunities for recreational walking and biking by design dissuade residents from doing the same for transportation.  Whether out of apathy, greed, or malice, the suburbs demand that you drive, and that’s really why I hate them.