Interesting look at the Minneapolis / St. Paul area from an urban planning and transit standpoint. It mostly focuses on Minneapolis and talks about the good and bad about how the city runs
Interesting look at the Minneapolis / St. Paul area from an urban planning and transit standpoint. It mostly focuses on Minneapolis and talks about the good and bad about how the city runs
This video really highlights a lot of the good that Minneapolis has with its parks and bicycle system with some good highlights of the failings in downtown Minneapolis. The points about the extra large roads without any dedicated bike lanes really hits home especially with how dead the downtown is post Covid. Moreover, the lack of people and uses on Nicollet Mall the pedestrian zone really shows how the whole downtown needs to refresh.
He didn’t touch on what I think is a huge problem which is a rapid way to get between the downtowns of Minneapolis and St. Paul. For being the twin cities there is no real method to get between the centers of both which I think is huge missed opportunity.
The whole downtown was long overdue for a refresh in the 1970s. The skyway system was a step in the right direction (see the criticism from the video!), but fundamentally downtown remained a place where rich people take a chauffeured limousine (otherwise known as a bus!) to their 9-5 job. Almost nobody lived there, and so there was no life (other than lunch time on the skyway). Because almost nobody lives downtown it is dead early.
The lightrail made a big mistake terminating downtown. Each should have become a subway under downtown, with a central station someplace (nicolet mall!) so that people could use it instead of having to transfer to a bus. The slow speed and low headways also are not helping.
There a lot of improvements but you are right that the current system does not work. The pandemic made it obvious to anyone that it was just for office works. Trying to take a bus anywhere that isn’t a commute to work really doesn’t work with buses not coming fast enough and take way to long.
We should just join both skyways with one long skyway tunnel that follows the light rail, problem solved.
That would be awesome. I would totally use that