Why Minneapolis Part 2. Bikeability: #1 in the USA

Digging deeper, it becomes more apparent that Minneapolis shares more with cities on the coasts like Portland, which has a similar number of highly walkable neighborhoods and until recently was repeatedly ranked as the #1 bike-friendly city in the USA by Bicycling Magazine. Coming from another Midwestern city that only has a tiny fraction of the cycling infrastructure that is found here, imagine how pleased I was that two new bike boulevards (low traffic, calmed streets which are shared with cars but geared towards bikes) were  being finished near my new apartment in NE. As a cyclist who had braved winter cycling for a few years it was extra nice to be able to ride as much as I have without lots of snow and ice to dissuade me for my first Minnesota “winter”.

Other large Midwestern cities fail hard in this department save for  Chicago (10th).  Appearances on the list ranged from so-so to shameful: Milwaukee (26th),  Kansas City (33rd), Columbus (34th), St. Louis (38th), Cleveland (39), Omaha (42nd),  Indianapolis (45th), and Cincinnati which somehow didn’t even place.

While Minneapolis is comparable to cities on the coast as far as walkability, it excels over most including NYC where cyclists get ticketed if they choose to not use a bike lane where they are available  (I’m sure everyone has seen that Youtube video)  and Chicago which is lagging behind and whose residents would like see the city emulate Minneapolis. Other Midwestern cities, *sigh*, they’re once again fitting the stereotype of being behind the times when it comes to delivering amenities for  quality, everyday urban living. Minneapolis currently offers a wide variety of biking infrastructure that covers a lot of ground and will hopefully work hard to stay at the forefront of making it easy to get everywhere you need to go by bike and increase the number of riders out there.

Why Minneapolis Part 1. Walkability: Minneapolis vs. The Midwest

Chicago has long been thought of as the only ¨real¨city in the Midwest: that sprawling region between the western frontier of Denver and the east coast outpost of Pittsburgh. Walkscore has its problems to be sure, but its current methods do rank NYC, San Francisco, & Chicago in the top five most walkable American cities, with Minneapolis in 9th place out of the top ten. The average urbanite probably didn’t expect any other city outside of Chicago to come close and for the most part they’d be right (Chicago alone has over 100 neighborhoods that rank as “very walkable”). After Minneapolis the next highest ranking Midwestern city is Milwaukee which trails at 15th place.

While Walkscore isn’t perfect, you can add up the number of “very walkable” urban neighborhoods (ranked anywhere from 70-100). After all, isn’t the number of walkable urban neighborhoods what people are looking for if they’re looking for urban living? From the ones listed I subtracted “city” neighborhoods that depend on dense suburban developments for a high score, particularly in cities that have annexed like crazy (see Columbus, Indianapolis, and Kansas City). Then on top of that I subtracted realtor-oriented labels which divide a single neighborhood (see Old North Columbus in Columbus, OH for a good example) into many subdivided ones which only give the illusion of more walkable neighborhoods than there actually are (in Old North Columbus’ case one walkable neighborhood’s boundaries were divided into five: Old North Columbus, North Campus, Indiana Forest,  Glen Echo, and Iuka Ravine). For some cities you have to dig up the walkability of neighborhoods since some cities themselves don’t value their neighborhoods enough to define them: Indianapolis and Omaha are the worst offenders where Walkscore had to resort to zip code boundaries and others like Columbus allow realtors to over-zealously subdivide and name areas ad nauseum, so here are total approximate numbers of walkable neighborhoods  in other similarly sized Midwestern cities with a population of at least 300,000 or higher:

• Minneapolis – 36
• Milwaukee – 25
• St. Louis – 18
• Kansas City – 18
• Columbus – 15
• Cincinnati – 11
• Cleveland – 7
• Detroit – 8
• Omaha – 5
• Indianapolis – 5

As you can see, Minneapolis is in a league of its own with Milwaukee coming in at a pretty distant, but respectable 2nd and from there you get around half the neighborhoods that offer the walkable urban amenities that Minneapolis does: if you’re lucky. It’s rather surprising that other Midwestern cities are looking to cities outside of the region, from Portland to Austin to Charlotte, when there’s a very successful model to follow right in their backyard. When one city has well over a dozen as many walkable neighborhoods than all of the others in the Midwest, and isn’t Chicago, there might be some lessons that can and should be learned in other Midwestern cities.

Branding Neighborhoods With Bike Racks

I’ve come to notice at least a couple of neighborhood/district-centric bike racks around the city.  Above is one kind found throughout Eat Street in South Minneapolis to accompany the several banners lining the lamp posts. I’ve also seen some Standish-Ericsson ones, which are useful since some neighborhood names like that one don’t exactly roll off the tongue. I’d like to see these become more common practice to help better define “place” in our many, varied neighborhoods and business districts.

Make The NE Lowry Ave Area More Fun So I Have More Places to Go. Thanks!

Northeast is a great neighborhood and I like my little corner bordering Lowry Ave. Lowry apparently had more life in it not to long ago. I had no idea the empty Little Jack’s Steakhouse had previously been bought by a Korean owner who added Korean items to the old-school steakhouse menu: except that it closed. You mean I could have had hot Korean noodle soups just a short walk away in the winter? Dammit. Unfortunately, like most of the few commercial spaces available on and near Lowry it now sits empty with no signs of a new incarnation anytime soon.

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Green=Available Spaces
Yellow=Occupied Spaces
Red=Nearby Hotspots

Other streets with a commercial presence such as 13th and Marshall have pretty much been filled up with plenty of places to eat, hangout, and shop, so now that Psycho Suzi’s has moved south leaving an empty structure , Little Jack’s having closed, the furniture place closed in the 648 building, well, you get the picture: not much doin’ here. There are a couple of dive bars (Tony Jaro’s and NE Palace), a gussied-up sports bar-restaurant (Stanley’s), a couple of liquor stores, a Greek restaurant (Marina), a salon (The Hive), and a tattoo parlor (Live Fast Die Young), but it’s still pretty dead and just a handful more places to add variety (restaurants please) would make it a more lively place worth visiting. Psycho Suzi’s old location certainly proves that you could execute a unique destination concept here, a tiki bar in this case, and attract droves of customers to an area lacking much to do. Too many customers, in fact, is why they had to move to a larger location just a little ways down south.

Just putting this out there since it seems like this part of NE is forgotten and you’ll notice that I also included hotspots within the vicinity to demonstrate the fact that Lowry Ave should not be forgotten since it’s in the company of: Psycho Suzi’s, The Sample Room, Mill City Cafe, Gasthof’s, Jax Cafe and Grumpy’s Bar all just five blocks or less away. So for any entrepreneur(s) who were so moved by my post and convinced by said post that henceforth opens a new destination, say, a Korean restaurant with a liquor license to sell soju (with a sweet happy hour discount), here is a hearty thanks in advance. Thanks!

West Calhoun’s Mistake on the Lake vs. Seattle’s Green Lake

West Calhoun has a huge missed opportunity near the lakefront of Lake Calhoun where there could be a great little downtown area taking advantage of the lakefront location. Instead, ugly strip-mall development, ironically named Calhoun Village, is the dominant commercial feature which looks like Anywhere, USA rather than a unique, charming village of any sort. In addition to that, patrons of businesses along Lake St have to cross both that and Excelsior Blvd which are heavy traffic streets that cut off easy pedestrian access to the shore.

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One good thing is that the dirt lot in the map above is now an urban residential building that rests up against the sidewalk.

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To find a nice urban setting you have to skip by this Minneapolis neighborhood on Excelsior and find it just down the road in the suburb of St Louis Park of all places.

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In Seattle’s Green Lake neighborhood, another urban neighborhood located on the periphery of a lake, the commercial buildings form a half moon shape thanks to the main road curving away from the lakefront, with a park across a much less daunting two-lane street.

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Notice below that the big parking lot for the community center is hidden away from the dense urban commercial street so that you don’t have a big eyesore and an empty gap when you’re walking by the shops, cafes, and restaurants in a pedestrian-friendly environment. There is also landscaping to help hide the community center’s parking lot from those walking by it on the pedestrian-cyclist path fronting the lake.

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Hopefully, the new residential development mentioned earlier is a sign of things to come to make this area a worthy Minneapolis destination that locals and out-of-towners can enjoy.  On the bright side, West Calhoun residents made it clear that they want pedestrians and cyclists to be prioritized in their response to the proposed light rail station to be built nearby, which may put enough pressure to raze and rebuild the ugly, car-oriented development. I also agree with them that “West Lake Station” moniker is way too vague of a name and in any case that would just lead to people assuming it’s located in Uptown, so why not just name it after the very neighborhood it’s squarely located in: West Calhoun? And just look at the picture they’re using to portray the neighborhood: it looks like a somewhat dense urban neighborhood from that perspective until you head in and just find strip-mall hell next to those dense buildings. Now that the Southwest LRT station (page 100 of a 17MB pdf) has a finalized location that is far enough away from the existing strip-mall, hopefully we don’t have to wait til the station is actually built for redevelopment to occur that is more respectful and befitting of  the choice location next to a lake.

Ride the Minneapolis Streetcar Today

There’s been talk about reintroducing a streetcar system with the first line running along Nicollet and Central. A lot of that talk has been conjecture about what benefits it might have over BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) or the existing bus lines on Nicollet. There’s a good article on development and the lack thereof along the Hiawatha Line from NewUrbanNetwork.com.

Also included are lots of graphics such as this one:

Image from Center for Transit-Oriented Development

So why I am bringing up an article on light-rail in a post about streetcars? Note the stops within Downtown Minneapolis; they are spaced much closer together than the sparsely distributed stations once outside of Downtown. While the Hiawatha Line is by and large a light-rail line, the downtown segment is all but in name a streetcar line. That explains why this stretch has attracted the most development by far such as those numerous blocks of dense residential development on 2nd St in the Warehouse District and Washington Ave in the Mill District. For block-by-block revitalization, streetcars are the way to go, as long as the development opportunities are at least a handful of blocks away or a quarter mile, which the Downtown Hiawatha Streetcar Line proves quite nicely.

While Central in my neck of the woods (NE) will benefit nicely it would be even more interesting to see what the next planned line on W Broadway would do to revitalize this most underutilized business district. That’ll be a long wait though, so in the meantime just hop on the train from Target Field to the Metrodome to see how you like riding the streetcar and be sure to walk around a bit from these downtown stations to check out the new developments that have popped up as a result, including the numerous restaurants and bars that are parts of these developments. Then think about all of the potential similarly being tapped into along other proposed future streetcar routes on Lake, Chicago, University, 4th St SE, Hennepin and N Washington, which certainly have their fair share of parking lots that could be put to better use.

A Collection of Minneapolis Neighborhoods and Streets

I’m new to Minneapolis, but I’ve already done a decent amount of exploring some neighborhoods. This blog’s objective is mainly to highlight the variety of neighborhoods and what they have to offer. If I have time to offer some suggestions and criticisms on some local urbanism related matters I’ll throw those in too.