Twin Cities urban planners seem to think that if they just make driving a car inconvenient and headache-prone enough, drivers will throw in the towel, get a job downtown, and start riding the bus.
Which seems to be the main impetus behind this initiative – turning Charles Street (which runs parallel to light-rail-construction-addled University, two blocks north of the construction nightmare) into a “bike boulevard”, with traffic circles, bike lanes, speed bumps, and none of those dang cars.
Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:
University Avenue is impassable to bicycle traffic now, but when the light rail is done . . . it’ll still be impassable. Parking lane gone, trains down the middle, buses in the right lane and all the other frustrated motorists wedged between. So where are those cars and bikes now? On the adjacent parallel streets as far North as Minnehaha.
And down to Marshall and Selby. The traffic nightmare hasn’t ebbed; just metastasized.
” Organizers said an overwhelming number of respondents think that there are already too many cars, often driving too fast, on Charles Avenue and that the street is unsafe for children. Residents also worried that traffic would increase when light-rail construction is complete.”
Well yeah, dummy: frustrated motorist traffic has had to self-divert to side streets because the largest, longest, busiest East-West throughway in the City has been completely shut down and it’s never going to reopen to normal levels. This is news to you? You’re just figuring this out now? Don’t urban planners ever visit the sites of their glorious triumphs? Don’t they read the papers (or SITD) to see the chaos and havoc they’ve created? Why didn’t they plan for it up front (or did they, but had to wait for a “crisis” to arise so they could “solve” it)?
Joe has too much faith in Wahhabi transit activists. They’re a little like post-modern German artists, the type that glumly intones “Art IS destruction and ugliness” as they unveil their latest, “installation”, a dancing man clad only with a jar holding a gutted cat pickled in urine.
Like the post-moderns, the chaos – to drivers, anyway – is precisely the point. The goal is to make driving, and drivers, miserable. And to them, it’s no matter if you deal with that misery by jumping on the train, or by expressing your anger, fulfilling their prophecy that drivers are base, benighted, spoiled, arrogant and above it all.
They win either way.
So naturally, the same urban planning geniuses who caused the problem on Charles are springing into action to make things even worse. The City will install bike lanes, traffic circles and speed bumps to slow traffic through the neighborhood. Cars that were shoved off University to make room for the train will be shoved off Charles to make room for the bikes. That’s great in the summer but have you ever tried to plow snow around traffic circles and speed bumps? There’s already one traffic circle on Charles and the snow ridges around it are a nightmare.
I know that circle. The winter before last, the intersection was like an Andean goat path. The side streets in that neighborhood are very narrow; it’s hard to get a plow around that circle – so it never went around the circle!
The bicycles will be in storage but cars still won’t be able to use the street. Might as well go all the way and tear up the tar completely, sod the street and turn Charles Avenue into lawn.
Hey Mitch, get ready for even more motorists up your way, all of them late and angry. Should be . . . interesting.
Joe Doakes
Como Park
Way ahead of you, Joe. Traffic on Thomas, Marshall, Minnehaha and Selby is all up. And the city is reacting the way it always does.
Writing more traffic tickets.
Can anybody or everybody tell me where we have heard about a similar debacle caused by the mass transit morons? Here’s a hint; all of the side streets parallel to Hiawatha have become parking lots. Just try to get down those after a large snowfall. And, let’s not even mention the fact that the traffic flow on Hiawatha has been permanently screwed! Even after years of tinkering, the signal light timing will never be right. To a bloated government bureaucracy like the Met Council, it is surprising that they did not conduct enough pre-construction traffic studies to prevent it!
Yet in spite of this the younger generation is rushing to live in the core cities, to use that mass transit so they can avoid the expense of auto ownership and use their meager salaries to pay off student loans, buy smart phones, pay for data plans, healthcare (when it isn’t offered by employers), save for retirement (because there are no longer defined pension plans with their jobs), etc.
http://www.startribune.com/local/minneapolis/162671826.html
Migration back to the cities supports increased spending on mass transit. You can save a lot of money if you don’t have to own a car, or if you can go from being a two-car family to a one-car family. Living in the core and using mass transit is a popular option for those struggling with today’s reduced salary/benefit packages and underemployment.
@Sanity:
Why in the world would you believe anything you read in the MSM in general, and the Red Star in particular?
I think sanity has got something right. Prosperity = suburban population growth. Impoverishment = urban population growth.
No wonder Obama is heavy into mass transit in urban cores! He’s crazy, all right. Crazy like the grandson of a Kenyan goat herder!
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The “Red Star” is simply reporting Met Council and Census numbers vis a vis migration to and from cities. Not everything is a conspiracy.
The decline of our economy started well before Obama took office. Anyone remember the housing collapse and bank failures (and bank bailout) during Bush admin? I realize Americans have extremely short term memory, but that wasn’t so long ago.
As far as being a goat herder (but, the truth is that Obama descends from tribal chiefs and nobles — the upper 1% of Kenyan society and even though it wasn’t Bain Capital, it was the upper echelon). Go back a couple generations and your ancestors were also farmers or agrarian too. There are still farmers in my extended family. Quite frankly I’m proud of that, as farming is a noble profession, and farmers might indeed have the last laugh in this economy. Land always has value. Inflated currency? Not so much.
For God’s sake, I’m agreeing with you, Sanity! Quit while your ahead!
Would you have been happier if, instead of calling Obama the “grandson of a Kenyan goat herder”, I’d called him the illegitimate son of a drunken, polygamist, wife beater?
Top 1% indeed. Go screw yourself, snob.
Come over to the Dark Side, Mitch. Here in the Burbs we have streets free of choo choo trains (except for the occasional RR crossing). You only have to take a bus if you want to, and the roads have these things called “shoulders” that bicycles find spacious and convenient. From where I sit right now there are six grocery stores within five miles, numerous eateries and all the retail you could ask for. Plus side? The idiots seem to be “rushing to live in the core cities, to use that mass transit”, so you don’t have to contend with them.
Yes, Sanity, you useful idiots are also blind to the fact that DEMOCRATS were in charge of both houses the last two years of the Bush administration. Fat boy blowhard Bowney Fwank and Chris Dodd were in charge of Fannie and Freddie. Their pressure on those banks to lend to drooling sycophants like you, and guarantee those loans with taxpayer dollars, led directly to the collapse! The Dems let it happen, because they were taking contributions from those evil banks; a true hypocrisy and blatant conflict of interest. In fact, Bush challenged the status of those entities and Frank squealed like a stuck pig, almost wetting himself that there were no problems! So, in order to actually have some credibility, you may want to learn something from better sources than the left wing ministry of propaganda outlets that you lean on to support your drivel!
” I’d called him the illegitimate son of a drunken, polygamist, wife beater?”
Well, do you have evidence for that, or is it just another slur?
“” I’d called him the illegitimate son of a drunken, polygamist, wife beater?””
Oh, and I’m pretty sure you could say the same thing about Romney . . . except that he’s the grandson of a polygamist (Mormon).
Sanity, dear fellow, you misunderstand me. I’m amused that you think that calling Obama the grandson of a kenyan goat herder is an insult to someone who is, in fact, the illegitimate son of a drunken, wife beating polygamist.
I couldn’t care less about Romney’s — or Obama’s — parents or grandparents. What makes you think that a Kenyan goat herder is less than clever, anyway?
Goat herder? That’s going to be the next occupational explosion in the Obama second term.