urbanMSP

http://www.hennepin.us/residents/transp ... nity-works

This is much needed. The pictures of the current design are, um, pretty sad. West of Central Ave they propose a 4-3 conversion with much wider sidewalks (no dedicated space for bikes). East of Central they propose a 2 lane section with on-street lanes and a fairly wide sidewalk zone. The 3-lane section has some pretty wide lanes IMO (13-12-13) but they do include the gutter area. As for the bicycle lanes, it seems like this is a good opportunity to just raise them up. I know you'd have to give back a foot or two for the gutter pan to the thru-lanes on each side. And there's a lot more detail than just a general mid-block section (there's sections with parking bays, etc). But I'd take a 5' raised cycle track over a 6' on-street bike lane any day.

Overall though, a pretty good design and much needed.

When this was first proposed in the 90s, it basically involved implementing the same design from the Northside section clear-cutting the corridor. Much improved.

I will say, the commercial nodes are losing quite a lot of off-peak street parking...

I know I've said this many times here (probably), but it's actually rather unfortunate that so many of our arterials in Minneapolis are as *narrow* as they are. I think the space dedicated to cars is oftentimes too wide, but lot to lot on many somewhat major streets is 60-80'. Lowry is 60-63' wide. Even Hennepin is only 90' through to Uptown.

I think we're going to have to be more willing to lose on-street parking in some commercial strips/nodes to make meaningful improvements to bike/transit operations and/or placemaking. Outside a select few neighborhoods (St Anthony, Uptown), parking even a half block into a neighboring street is very, very easy. If each perpendicular street just added 3-4 metered spaces right as you turn onto it, you'd basically have your parking. Plus, many mid-sized developments with commercial (thinking Red20, the Opus Dinkytown one, etc) seem to be including some public parking at ground level. I dunno. I know on-street parking is important, can provide buffers for peds, etc. Just seems like there are ways to mitigate it with the benefits outweighing the costs..

Lowry Ave NE improvements: http://minneapolismn.gov/www/groups/pub ... 142548.pdf

aren't 4/3 road diets great?

Those are some real shitty-for-pedestrians corners at Lowry/Marshall and (especially) Lowry/University. They're counting on redevelopment to make up for demolishing the entire south side of the street at that intersection, but I don't know that I'd personally want to live on a corner that's just been engineered to allow semi trucks to make turns at speed.

It's the death of another corner-entrance streetcar commercial building at Lowry/Central, too.

I would love for the city to reexamine it's copious amount of inner city truck routes at some point. There's no need to funnel speeding semis through busy commercial nodes with lots of pedestrian traffic, but almost every single one is on a truck route. Why don't they funnel them all into highways from the industrial areas?

I see no reason to knock down the building at Central and Lowry. I'd much rather they just have a bit narrower sidewalk for a stretch and leave it. And I don't know how quickly they really expect it to redevelop. Once you get this far up Central, or far from the river, the redevelopment has been more limited.

I am somewhat irrationally pleased they aren't forcing out the DQ (though I somehow won't be surprised if it doesn't survive reconstruction if they manage to drag it out for long enough).

The other question - if they're bothering to put bus bays and stuff on Lowry, does this mean Metro Transit is going to improve service on the 32 so it's more frequent than every half hour?

If there's semis driving through commercial nodes (as opposed to from industrial zones to the freeways) isn't it likely those trucks are making deliveries to those commercial nodes?

Since Lowry is a CSAH, I'm guessing the county is onboard with these changes. Looking at the project website, that appears to be the case.

Yes, and they can maneuver around on streets with tighter geometries.
Over time, hopefully we'd see more last-mile delivery trucks that are scaled for the urban environment in which they are operating. Right now, we basically say "we're going to design all areas for semis with 53' trailers, so go ahead and use those in all circumstances." Which seems to me like it's socializing the costs (massive infrastructure) and privatizing the benefits (lower supply chain expenses with a one-size-fits-all-at-largest-scale fleet).

If there's semis driving through commercial nodes (as opposed to from industrial zones to the freeways) isn't it likely those trucks are making deliveries to those commercial nodes?

Some, but many more are just passing through. The area around surdyks is a nightmare of speeding semis coming across from the post office and down from northeast on university.