Satire sinks into farce as Minneapolis "bikelash" marchers park their cars to protest "Nazi Lanes."

Photo credit: Look at all those angry white male drivers.

I hesitate passing along this information, given the existence locally of satire-resistant automobile supremacists. They might get ideas -- then ram the ideas with their monster trucks.

But allow me to offer this prediction: If such a protest occurs in New Albany, the aggrieved won't (in many cases can't) get out of their cars to walk the parade route.

I mean, who wants to carry that bag of Rally's Archer Daniels Midland Burgers through the Nazi Lane when it can rest so very handily right there on the front seat?

How a Satirical Call for Bikelash Became a Real, Invective-Laden Protest, by Jared Goyette (CityLab)

People carried signs reading “Nazi Lanes” at the Minneapolis anti-bike lane demonstration, which several political candidates attended.

You probably haven’t heard of internet prankster Jeremy Piatt, but you may be familiar with his work. A mock GoFundme campaign to “Get Kanye out of debt” was widely covered in the press as serious, with Kanye’s camp eventually having to clarify that no, he didn’t want the money.

Piatt, a graphic designer, recently pulled off a sequel of sorts by stirring up the hornet’s nest that is the the current bike-lane debate in Minneapolis ...


 ... But some people took his invitation seriously. On Sunday, a small crowd of about 15 to 25 people showed up to protest at the designated place, the intersection of 26th and Hennepin Avenue, including two city council candidates, Joe Kovacs and David Schorn.

The protest was even more intense than Piatt had satirically called for: As Minneapolis’s ever-present political Twitter account, @WedgeLIVE, noted, people carried signs that read “Mafia Lanes,” “Suck it Lanes,” and “Nazi Lanes.” For extra effect, sign posts were painted red to look like they were dripping with blood.

A woonerf in Minneapolis: “Parking becomes a horrible but necessary land use but that will change over time."

Much more on woonerfs here.

It appears to be an improvement on the surface parking asphalt extravaganza existing there before, although a bit of the point surely was lost in translation. Have you stopped to consider that many of the urban conditions we complain about owe their existence to the necessity of accommodating our cars?

Is Minneapolis' first 'woonerf' really just a nice looking parking lot? by Peter Callaghan (MinnPost)

Minneapolis has its first woonerf. Or does it?

For those who aren’t on a planning commission or land-use groupies: A woonerf is a Dutch import that translates as “living street” (sometimes “living yard”) and is a hot topic in urban design and planning these days. It describes a mixed-use street or alleyway that is shared by cars, bicyclists and pedestrians — but without the strict delineation of traditional roads: sidewalks, bike lanes, traffic lanes, etc. — as a way to use limited space for multiple functions.

“For residents of a woonerf, the public space in front of their homes is a place to play, socialize, and, engage in the community,” noted the byDesign blog.

When it comes to Minneapolis’ first woonerf, however, it might be hard to envision such an idyllic scene. The path cuts diagonally between two new residential buildings — the affordable-housing apartment building Mill City Quarter and the market-rate senior apartments Abiitan Mill City — on South Second Street in downtown Minneapolis. And the new space is devoted, mostly, to 80 head-in parking stalls.

“Today it’s probably best characterized as a nice parking lot, a REALLY nice parking lot,” said Michael Schroeder, the assistant superintendent for planning at the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, which has signed off on the woonerf as part of the land deal governing the development.

All of which has raised the question: Is Minneapolis’ first woonerf woonerf-y enough to actually be called a woonerf?

"A first-of-its-kind co-op in the United States that pools members’ money to invest in commercial real estate."

When word of this real estate cooperative concept leaked into the board room at One Southern Indiana, Wendy Dant Chesser leaped to attention and said, "Communist? Not at River Ridge, and not on my watch."

How Neighbors Turned Unused Buildings into a Thriving Community Hub, by Christa Hillstrom (Yes! Magazine)

As rents rise and independent businesses in Minneapolis lose their leases to large national chains, a first-of-its-kind co-op found a solution.


 ... The building wasn’t held by absentee landlords or faraway developers, but by around 200 local people who owned the property collectively. They’re part of the Northeast Investment Cooperative (NEIC), a first-of-its-kind co-op in the United States that pools members’ money to invest in commercial real estate. They share profits, decision-making, and the community rewards of having, among other things, locally owned shops they want in their neighborhood.

The background:

In Minneapolis, like in many cities around the country, rising real estate demand meant independent stores were gradually replaced by bank branches, phone retailers, and upscale restaurants. From 2014 to 2016, commercial rent rose by 8 percent—more than four times the rate of inflation.

Nationwide, speculation-fueled rent increases are far outpacing the ability of small businesses to profit in sales from the growth, according to a report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), a Minneapolis-based think tank. The result is that many businesses lose their leases to large national chains, whose brands give them leverage in rent negotiations.

“Too often, what we are seeing is that local businesses and people are bringing neighborhoods back, and then the value that is created by them collectively is being siphoned off by a small number of investors who don’t live in the neighborhood,” said Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the ILSR, pointing to the “loss of control” many Americans feel over their neighborhoods’ waning affordability and increasing sense of sameness. “Owning commercial real estate is the ultimate way to guard against being at the mercy of those forces.”

Before NEIC formed, the group behind it—some of whom knew each other through the local food co-op—wanted to get a foothold in the real estate market before this happened to their neighborhood. Board member Leslie Watson, one of the cooperative’s architects, said they would bat ideas around when they ran into each other at neighborhood classes and meetings: What if they headed off rising costs by buying up houses together? Or maybe commercial real estate? And what if they did it as an official cooperative?

By late 2011, they settled on an investment model that didn't exist anywhere else in the country.

"Car-centric policy dominates our legal system and the way police conduct business. And it's not holding people truly responsible."

Lest those of us who aren't employed by the city of New Albany forget:

ON THE AVENUES: For New Albany’s Person of the Year, the timeless words of Mother Jones: “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.”

I'd accuse City Hall of forgetting about Chloe Allen, although I'd hate to intrude on the image-burnishing and self-referential promotion that fills the languid days for Mayor Gahan's minions.

Yes, I'd accuse City Hall of forgetting about Chloe Allen, but let's be fair. The minions wouldn't even know who I was referring to.

That's how completely out of touch they are.

It's not just an accident, by Nathaniel M. Hood (Strong Towns)

Car-centric policy dominates our legal system and the way police conduct business. And it's not holding people truly responsible.

Hood tells of a horrible and inexcusable "accident" that took place on a shared use path where autos are not even supposed to be.

You guessed it. No charges.

It goes beyond not investigating something that so clearly should have been investigated. More often than not, reckless drivers do not lose their license and stay on the road. And, when a collision does occur and it’s not investigated, insurance laws can make it difficult to prove damage in a civil suit without charges and the dollar amount on damages can be capped.

This is the system we've created; one that favors drivers at nearly every level. It's unfortunate that car culture dominates our system and law enforcement so much that it doesn't hold people responsible. And until it truly does, we're not going to see as much progress as we need. Changes to laws and public mindset must happen in tandem with changes to the design of our streets. We need to reorient our understanding of transportation to value the safety and rights of pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users just as much as drivers.

The top comment to this post reinforces a point we've made previously -- again and again.

With apologies to those who know that I harp on this here and elsewhere, I need to continue pointing out that part of this problem is linguistic. Law enforcement officers automaticaly assign agency to vehicles, which cannot be prosecuted, instead of drivers who can. A car did this, a truck did that. How glorious it must be to operate machines that offer such speed, power, and control, and know that your blunders, no matter how deadly, will always be attributed to the vehicle.

The media then dutifully follow suit. Reporters, who are trained to avoid passive voice, can get very huffy when you challenge them to change "A pedestrian was struck and killed by an SUV" to "A SUV driver struck and killed a pedestrian." They seem to think that active voice wording implies malicious intent or opens them up to a libel suit.

If this premature exoneration annoys you as much as it annoys me, I invite you to start calling it out with the hashtag #DriverNotCar.

"Drive-throughs are particularly dangerous in urbanizing areas, where drivers aren’t used to operating around bicyclists and walkers."

How did civilization exist before drive-throughs ... before cars?

The Case Against Drive-Throughs, by Aarian Marshall (City Lab)

Minneapolis-area lovers of quick and easy coffee, prescriptions, check-cashing, dry cleaning, and Big Macs are up in arms this week, after two city council members floated a proposal to tighten restrictions on urban drive-throughs. Drive-throughs are already banned from a number of the city’s downtown areas, as well as regions included in its “Pedestrian Oriented Overlay Districts.” By expanding those districts, the proposed ordinance would nix the construction of additional vehicle-friendly pathways in an expanded portion of the city, a “concession” to pedestrians and cyclists in an increasingly pedestrian- and cyclist-loving metropolis.

“The streets where a lot of people are walking, on our transit corridors, maybe we don’t want to have drive-throughs at all,” the council member Lisa Bender explained to the Minneapolis Star Tribune Saturday. “If we do, we may want to strengthen our controls of them and minimize their impact on people walking.”

"Minneapolis has a surprisingly simple plan to cut traffic and make housing more affordable."

It's my firm belief that business owners in downtown New Albany would benefit more from exploring territories lying outside the usual boxes, with parking policies being an excellent case in point, than continuing the traditional and largely failed pattern of trusting City Hall to do their thinking for them.

"Why free parking is bad for everyone" at NAC (June, 2014)

... To cities where he serves as a parking consultant, Shoup's recommendation is simple. "Charge the right price for on-street parking," he says. "I see this as the lowest price you can charge and still have one or two open spaces per block." This means the market sets the price — and people are paying as little as possible for parking without creating the cruising problem.

Each day, the city enforces parking ordinances outside of downtown but not in the historic business district, apparently from a misguided belief that "free" parking is necessary for independent small business advancement. It's simply poisonous to arbitrarily enforce one set of laws and not another, especially when the premise of parking as being valueless is what prefaces many of the current problems with abuse.

A second article explores reasons why parking space requirements negatively impact affordable housing.

Minneapolis has a surprisingly simple plan to cut traffic and make housing more affordable, by Joseph Stromberg (Vox)

 ... "The worst thing that many American cities have done, for low-income people, is create a world in which you need a car," retired UCLA economist Donald Shoup told me in an interview last year. "Parking pushes everything farther apart, and even if you're too poor to own a car, you have to pay for all the free parking you don't use."

Downtown housing? "People increasingly want to live by such amenities" as Specked-out complete streets.

Roger, when are you going to write about something other than transportation infrastructure?

I do, and I will, but what should be evident after all this time is that when it comes to the way a city is run on a daily basis, it's all about infrastructure. After all a mayor is not the CEO of a company producing flanges, nor an event planner, and definitely not a rock star.

Rather, he or she is charged with using the city's resources to best set the table and to lay a foundation for enhanced economic development and a bettering of our quality of life as residents. Connectivity, transparency and multimodality are fine themes to begin the coordination of infrastructure by design, as opposed to political party monetization imperatives.

When infrastructure management directly impacts economic development and quality of life, we see the scenario below, in Minneapolis, where a greenway is in part responsible for new housing, and subsequently, desired urban density -- growth where it make sense to grow.

New Albany has just such a project, designed to work in precisely the same fashion. It's called Jeff Speck's Downtown Street Network Proposals. The sooner we implement them, the faster their planned socioeconomic outcomes begin to transform downtown New Albany, with ripple effects that eventually can and will extend to the city limits.

But until we've done something, there has been nothing. Eighteen months are too long to wait to start thinking about beginning. If the incumbent mayor Jeff Gahan can't bring himself to acknowledge openly what he insists are his privately held beliefs, then he must be replaced by someone who will.

I have a person in mind, too.

Streetscapes: Midtown Greenway spurs urban development, especially in Uptown, by Thomas Fisher (Minneapolis Star Tribune)

Few places in the Twin Cities have changed as dramatically as the northern edge of Minneapolis’ Midtown Greenway, where during the past decade, developers have invested more than $200 million and constructed more than 1,200 apartment units in mostly six-story buildings that extend from Hennepin to Lyndale avenues.

Whatever you might think about the design of individual structures or the rental rates of many units, the sheer size, scale and speed of the development remains impressive, with buildings sometimes as colorful as some of the cyclists on the adjacent bike path.

That bike path, stretching 5½ miles along a former below-grade rail line, helped attract these apartment buildings, as well as others farther to the west and a few to the east. The corridor amply deserves its recent receipt of a 2014 “Great Places Award” from the Sensible Land Use Coalition, which recognized the years of work by the Midtown Greenway Coalition to make this one of the nation’s best urban bike trails. People increasingly want to live by such amenities, and the transformation of the former industrial area into one of the city’s hottest housing locations, in such a short time, testifies to the power of a place like this.

For all the appeal of what the development community has created, however, the Midtown Greenway still needs improvement ...

... Over the past 70 years, American cities have faced pressures to suburbanize, replacing the higher-density land uses before the Great Depression with lower-density, large-lot development, which led to lower tax revenues, even as aging urban infrastructure required higher maintenance and repair costs. Although caught between that rock and a hard place, cities have often continued to pursue suburban projects, however self-defeating the result. The development along the Greenway shows another way.

Compare and contrast with the Bridges Boondoggle: How the Twin Cities got transit right.

When we reserved space at an Airbnb lodging in Minneapolis for our July visit, we had no idea it was two hundred yards from a light rail station. In fact, the light rail line connecting Minneapolis and St. Paul had commenced only a short time before.

Northern Road Trip, Day 3: Twin Cities, Twins game, twin transit.

As tourists, we loved it. Here's the flip side, and the argument from economic development. I try imagining Kerry Stemler riding mass transit, and all that comes back is a view of pigs flying above the ORBP boondoggle. Couldn't his cronies have profited from the right transit project instead?

How the Twin Cities got transit right: Big projects often divide cities. But Minneapolis' light rail line is creating jobs and driving development in underserved areas, by Steve Hargreaves and Dominic V Aratari (CNN)

 ... Touting the economic and social benefits of running the line through the neighborhoods' commercial districts helped win over the local communities. Alternate plans called for the line to be built along an interstate to the south or in a freight rail corridor to the north. Travel time along these routes may well have been faster, but likely would have produced fewer overall benefits for the cities.

Another idea far better than DNA's atrocious Come To City (aren't they all?): It's New Albany as the "Wild West Bank" of Louisville.

Previously I suggested New Albany be known as the "Right Bank" ... of the Ohio, of course, but I like this one better.

We're on the west side of the metroplex, after all, and no one grasps geography any longer, anyway. The Sherman Minton is the westernmost bridge.

A Wild West non-rule of law governs unregulated chaotic streets ... wait, there it is: "New Albany: Louisville's Wild West Bank."

To explain the photo: In Minneapolis, the Green Line light rail generally runs east-west, and so as it crosses the Mississippi, there's the East Bank and West Bank stations.

Puts "More to Explore" to shame, eh?

Northern Road Trip, Day 3: Twin Cities, Twins game, twin transit.

The last time I witnessed a Minnesota Twins home game, Reggie Jackson was playing for the visiting Baltimore Orioles.

For students of baseball, this carbon-dates me; specifically, back to the age of almost 16 in 1976, when the Twins played at Metropolitan Stadium. Now, after more than two decades trapped in the mercifully demolished Metrodome (currently the spot where the new Vikings football stadium is being constructed), the team has a gleaming new park called Target Field, located in downtown Minneapolis.

It is open-air and quite nice, combining the expected retro touches with space age technology, like stations where you can fill your own overpriced mass-market beer. Fortunately, craft beer is freely available, if not free, and there are numerous contemporary food options. For adventurous sorts, there also are actual games, and ours resulted in a Twins win over the White Sox.

However, the best thing about a game at Target Field is that with adept advance planning, one needn't drive a car to reach it.

In fact, a light rail station is attached to Target Field. We drove into Minneapolis from Madison on Sunday morning, a few minutes after 11:00 a.m. and checked in with our airbnb hosts at the Bobbin House Studio. A Green Line light rail station is located three walking minutes away on University Avenue. Twenty minutes later, for a couple bucks each in round-trip tickets, we were at Target Field, prepared to forage in advance of the 1:10 p.m. game time.

After the game was over, we decided to walk to Black Sheep, a delicious coal-fired pizzeria situated in the revitalizing warehouse district just west of downtown. The walk took us past Fulton Brewery, which functions now as I belatedly wish Bank Street Brewhouse would have all along.

Back at the Bobbin House via the Green Line, a brief respite yielded to a walk through the tidy left-leaning neighborhood, which in turn led to the left bank of the Mississippi River.

And there sat the car, in the driveway throughout.

A transit friendly sports edifice? Which planet is this?

As a woebegone fan of the Oakland Athletics, I follow a blog called New A's Ballpark. In recent days, the blogger has been reporting on visits to major league ballparks around the country, and today's entry is from Minneapolis, Minnesota, where the city's new field has drawn rave reviews in this, its first season. As you read, think about Louisville's new arena ... and where you'll be parking, in the absence of thoughtfulness about transit options.

Day 11: Target Field

Target Field may be the most transit-friendly ballpark in the nation. It was designed as both a ballpark and a transit hub, with a light rail station alongside it, a commuter rail station underneath it, and weatherproof bus platforms adjacent to it. It’s an extremely clever and convenient arrangement, which paid off for me in a big way.