A friend of the blog – and fellow Saint Paul resident – emails:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our Councilperson, Mitra Jalali, recently tweeted about how wonderful it would be to permanently close Snelling to make it pedestrian\/transitway only. Someone sane asked the question about where traffic would be re-routed. Someone who apparently has been blind to what the construction of the light rail on University has done to local businesses responded that “traffic will tend to disappear because non-locals won’t pass through and locals will walk more places.” Well, actually that person is partially correct and partially paying attention- traffic disappears because everyone will find a new place to be. But, where the person is oblivious is locals won’t walk more places because those places will disappear as they did on University Avenue.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Anyway, Little Africa Fest happened this weekend and a portion of Snelling was actually closed off to cars and was pedestrian only. I like the local African restaurants, so I checked it out, hoping to get some good food. It was 6pm in the evening. The event started around 11am, I believe, and was supposed to go on until 10pm. There was quite a lot of activity happening at Hamline Park and it was very crowded there. That is good. Those businesses deserve attention and it was a community festival with the local businesses setting up booths. But, as anticipated, nothing happening on the closed part of Snelling Avenue. No real apparent reason to close off Snelling Avenue. In fact, if we permanently closed off Snelling Avenue, this is how it would look 24 hours a day. No one walking, no real activity happening. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n#vibrant!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
The close the streets people say that closing some streets to cars, or “building streets for people” would actually make neighborhoods safer. I must say I didn’t hear any sirens going on during the festival- but perhaps that might have been due to the heavy visible police presence in the neighborhood for the festival…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
On the one hand, a street that is genuinely closed probably makes a bad getaway route.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the other hand, if there is no business, and thus no potential victims on the hoof \u2013 that\u2019s a little like destroying the village to save it, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A friend of the blog – and fellow Saint Paul resident – emails: Our Councilperson, Mitra Jalali, recently tweeted about how wonderful it would be to permanently close Snelling to make it pedestrian\/transitway only. Someone sane asked the question about where traffic would be re-routed. Someone who apparently has been blind to what the construction […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83040"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83043,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83040\/revisions\/83043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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