Bored of works? Try this: "St. Paul launches effort to change the city's driving culture — by enforcing crosswalk laws."

This sentence bears repeating, again and again, until Jeff Gahan, Warren Nash and the rest of the politicians wearing blinders with pride decide to stick hesitant, tepid toes outside their auto-centric comfort zones and have a stab at reality.

But the crash was a classic example of the tragedy of the crosswalk, where safety and laws say one thing, but speed and the street say another.

Imagine public officials committed to changing a hazardous culture rather than burying their heads in the sand. Gracious, up there in St. Paul, it's almost like they're trying to lead.

Must be their water. Or ours.

St. Paul launches effort to change the city's driving culture — by enforcing crosswalk laws, by Bill Lindeke (Minn Post)

Shelby Kokesch was killed last week trying to cross the street, on her way from the Minnesota History Center to the other side of busy Kellogg Boulevard. As Kokesch and her mother stepped out into traffic, one car stopped to let her pass, following the technicalities of Minnesota's crosswalk law. But the second car, an SUV, did not.

I'm sure the driver feels horrible; nobody wants to drive into people. But the crash was a classic example of the tragedy of the crosswalk, where safety and laws say one thing, but speed and the street say another.

The death also marks an inauspicious beginning as safety advocates and the St. Paul Police Department launch the city’s most ambitious campaign yet aimed at changing St. Paul’s driving culture. All year long, teams of neighbors and police will conduct stings aimed at shifting the priorities of St. Paul streets, one ticket at a time.

Parking Non-Problem 2: "How to respond when someone complains 'There's no parking.'"

It's been a couple of years since Jeff G mapped New Albany's parking supply (the photo above). Mapping is one of four responses to complaints of "there's no parking," as suggested by Nathaniel Hood, a transportation planner and blogger living in St. Paul who writes for Strong Towns and Streets.MN.

In Parking Non-Problem 1, there is a link to a City Lab article introducing Hood and his photos of wide open spaces where parking shortages are alleged to exist. In the following, Hood's points are truncated, so please click through and read the entire article.

How to respond when someone complains 'There's no parking', by Nathaniel Hood (Star Tribune)

OMG! There is NO parking!" - Concerned Citizen

I wish I had a bus ticket for every time I heard someone say this. Unless you're Manhattan or San Francisco, it is fair to say you don't have a parking problem. I take that back. You do have a parking problem -- there’s too much of it.

Here is a quick how-to guide on dealing with those who claim your city or town lacks adequate parking.

Step 1. Understand perception ... The easiest and most time-effective way of convincing your opposition is to have them acknowledge that the perception of parking availability is different than the reality.

Step 2. Map parking supply ... Load up Google Maps in your favorite web browser, search for your local area, and do a screen capture. Paste the image into MS Paint or a similar program. Start highlighting the open surface parking lots and parking garage structures. I recommend downloading Google Earth for this task.

Step 3. Document unused supply ... Walk around your selected area during normal conditions and take photos. And by normal conditions, I mean you shouldn't document supply during a Rolling Stones concert, nor should you snap photos at 4 a.m. on Monday morning.

Step 4. Use yourself as a case study ... Do it yourself advocacy is as simple as parking. I recommend getting a cheap dashboard camera (or mounting your phone) and recording yourself trying to park. I did this and here are the results on YouTube. I called it a challenge. It was anything but. As expected, parking was simple.

Parking Non-Problem 1. "The Real Downtown 'Parking Problem': There's Too Much of It."

There's not enough parking in downtown NA -- just the red areas.

The topic is "the gap between parking reality and parking perception" in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the Confidentials visited in 2014. We took the Green Line from our room, walked around St. Paul for hours, and enjoyed it immensely.

In Parking Non-Problem 2, we'll learn "How to respond when someone complains 'There's no parking.'"

The Real Downtown 'Parking Problem': There's Too Much of It ... A photographic tour of spots and lots in St. Paul’s booming Lowertown district, by Eric Jaffe (City Lab)

To hear USA Today describe it, the Lowertown district in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota, is officially “up and coming.” In addition to some great restaurants and a year-round Farmers’ Market, the neighborhood is now home to Nice Ride bike-share stations and the new Green Line light rail. The St. Paul Saints, the city’s indy pro baseball club, started playing at the new CHS Field in Lowertown this spring.

But to hear the local papers describe Lowertown, the area’s emergence at a downtown destination has come with a severe parking shortage. Here are two city officials speaking to the Pioneer Press this spring:

Jack Gerten, who manages the Farmers' Market for the city, said he was trying to balance the needs of residents, potential area business patrons and the Saints.

"Lowertown's coming alive, but unfortunately, there's consequences," Gerten said.

City parking manager Gary Grabko added: "The development happening, private and public, has totally changed the parking situation ... especially in Lowertown. That's the reality of the problem.

Local transportation planner and blogger Nathaniel Hood sees things a bit differently. In several recent posts he’s pointed out that there is a parking problem in Lowertown—there’s too much of it. To help make his case, Hood took his camera to Lowertown on a recent “bustling Saturday afternoon” and photographed the shortage.

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.

Northern Road Trip, Day 5.1: Hmong House ... food and culture in North St. Paul.

This 2013 review of the Hmong House in North St. Paul, Minnesota, perfectly captures the ambience of this restaurant, event hall and community center.

Hmong House, by Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl (MSPMAG.com)

North St. Paul’s new Hmong House is finally the Hmong restaurant Minnesota has been waiting for—with appetizers, beer, and a credit card machine

Diana studied Hmong culture in graduate school, and we made it a point to learn more about the Hmong people while in St. Paul.

To oversimplify for the sake of brevity, the Hmong originated in China, and various migrations took some of them to other locales in Southeast Asia. Among these areas were mountainous regions of Laos, where the Hmong chose the losing side in two wars, first fighting with the French colonizers against the Communists, and later for the Americans during our Vietnam War era.

Consequently, many Hmong were compelled to seek an escape amid genocidal retribution from the victorious Communist authorities in Laos, who only recently have "opened up" sufficiently to invite the Hmong diaspora to return to what is one of the most economically challenged countries in the world. They're being asked to bring their wallets, and many are.

Quite a number of Hmong refugees came to the Twin Cities, where the community is estimated to number more than 100,000. This, then, is the great cause and passion of Pa See and Kay Yang, the power couple who run the Hmong House. In these photos, you'll notice an absence of customers for lunch on a Tuesday afternoon in late July. That's because the Hmong House is packed on weekends for weddings and Hmong social functions. Other paying customers are squeezed inside if there is available space.

We were allowed to order from the dinner menu, and the Yangs threw in a gratis entree (Five-Spice Sweet Braised Pork) as part of the bargain.

The reviewer quoted above describes Hmong food:

For any old hand with Asian restaurants, one of the issues with Hmong food is that you immediately try to identify what’s Thai and what’s Chinese—don’t do that. After a few years of eating Hmong, my best advice is to think about it the way you would Alsatian food. Hmong has an adjacency—some similarities and some differences—to the other southeast Asian cuisines in the same way that Alsatian food has many similarities, many overlaps, and some differences from French food.

Indeed. We had Papaya salad and a delicious Pho, personally spiced by Mr. Yang at the table.

As for my entree, how could I pass on the offer of crispy fried pig intestines ... or as you may know them, chittlins (chitterlings).

They were absolutely fabulous.

At meal's conclusion, we followed the host's directions to the Hmong Village near Lake Phalen, where a former lumber warehouse has been converted into a Hmong multi-vendor market mall, with stalls selling prepared food, bulk food items, vegetables, non-alcoholic drinks, musical CDs, Hmong DVDs, books and virtually anything else an American supermarket would provide.

The Yangs were incredibly giving of their time, and I intend to read a book called The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which Diana read in school. It describes the difficulties in assimilation faced by the Hmong people who've come to America. Mr. Yang, whose earliest memories are of a refugee camp in Thailand, told us that he hopes to be able to retire to Laos. It is my hope to keep in touch with the Yangs, and perhaps find a way to help.

A pop-up Hmong kitchen at BSB?

Northern Road Trip, Day 4: St. Paul and some really Great Waters.

The Bobbin House Studio, our airbnb base in Minneapolis, lies astride the Green Line light rail at a point roughly between Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Conceding that the population of the Twin Cities metropolitan area is 2.5 times larger than Louisville's, it's almost as though we had not one but two cities the size of The Ville to choose from, depending on whether the Green Line took us east or west.

On Monday morning, our second day without needing the car, we opted for "east" and exited the Green Line at the state capital complex above St. Paul. A short walk away is St. Paul (duh), a St. Peters-lookalike cathedral perched seemingly on the highest point in the city. Acknowledging the museums and state apparatchik offices on both sides of the grand boulevard linking the two, the scene conjured old memories of various former Eastern Europe principalities.

Trust me: When the church is on a hill higher than the royal palace's, it's time to begin worrying about the veracity if secular governance.

Just past the cathedral is Summit Avenue (simple two-way street grid with bike lanes pictured above, sans multi-million dollar medians), a mind-blowing collection of historic monied architecture extending as far as the eye can see, or aching feet can carry you. Cupola fatigue claimed us after a few blocks, and we began searching for a place to rest. We'd been told that nearby Grand Avenue was the place to go for indie ambience, but we found far too many chains (why do so many places take this gift-card-mall approach?), and so reversed field and walked all the way downtown, where the Great Waters Brewing Company welcomed us for lunch.

The server was a polite, bearded music school student who had not been on the job for long but did a good job with the beer program. He shared with us that his hometown of Le Roy, down by the Iowa border, was largely without opportunity, and that farming wasn't easy with most agricultural careers in the hands of multinational agribusiness.

We rested, rehydrated and grazed on appetizers, Rasta Wings and a tuna wrap. The brewery's cask-conditioned, session-strength ales were excellent ... and I even bought the t-shirt. The Green Line's St. Paul terminus is close by the brewpub, and we boarded there for a return trip past our residence to Minneapolis, and a stroll to the Mississippi's downtown passage.

Oddly, this scene in St. Paul will stay with me.

It's a skywalk, temporarily disconnected pending the construction of a new building. Some sweet day, there'll be (re)closure.

Another memory of St. Paul is a reminder of swill daze past.