A TV show about a restaurant famous for its grilled mortadella sandwiches: Bologna Burgers in the Building

Got a fun email from "Minneapolis residents" / "2025MPRBelection" instructing me to "NOT mark any second or third choices" when voting for park board commissioners — after ranking their preferred candidates first, of course.

When this happens to my gutters I find that an effective treatment is to cover the dam with a porous tube filled with salt. Long socks or pantyhose work surprisingly well! Then in the spring I harvest the resulting pickle dams! The sharp flavor distracts me while I write the check to the roofer.

The Precedents of the United States of America

Streets.mn is excited to announce that we are seeking writers, storytellers, photographers to research and write articles for a recently-awarded Minnesota Historical Society grant. Each of the 4 projects is paid $1000, to be split between the storyteller and photographer.

New research is constantly confirming variations of the same basic fact: bicycling for transportation is an incredible way to fit a little bit of low intensity exercise into your daily routine (oh, and also to save a ton of money, and reduce carbon emissions, and improve your mental health).

Cf. April 2025. I had always assumed the former Rudolph's building was *much* newer than 1948!

Election 2025: Minneapolis Mayor Race (the four contenders). My ranking: (1) DeWayne Davis (2) Omar Fateh (3) Jazz Hampton naomikritzer.com/2025/09/18/e...

Streets where separated bike lanes were installed became safer for *everyone using the street* — on bikes, on foot, *and in cars*.

In the last 15-20 years Minneapolis went from being a majority home owner city to majority renter city. The wildcard has been higher turnout among renters. Frey’s team blocking access for voter outreach in apartments is an attempt to shift power back to home owners.

This Day in Labor History: September 7, 1933. Cranberry workers on Cape Cod went on strike to protest their terrible wages and working conditions. The threat to providing taste to America's horrible Thanksgiving meal didn't last long, but is an important moment to discuss!

"Age verification" laws are actually "upload your ID or get your face scanned to access every website, ending anonymity and associating your identity with everything you do online" laws and if more people understood that they would not be down for this authoritarian nonsense

A while ago we noticed our 7yo seemed really interested in basketball. “Should we sign you up for a basketball camp so you can practice and learn more?” “Well I already know about dribbling and shooting so I don’t see why I would do that.”

I wrote an unusually strongly worded thing about the transit crisis in Pennsylvania, which is coming soon to Oregon and Illinois. humantransit.org/2025/08/the-...

I’m quoted in here but I will add that using Jan-June data means things like two very cold months (J-F ‘25) and a three week LRT shutdown (Apr ‘25) will impact the trend www.startribune.com/metro-transi...

Happy 25th birthday to Minneapolis' Midtown Greenway! I wrote about what a miracle it is. www.minnpost.com/cityscape/20...

My kid just asked me what makes the tides happen so I may be unavailable for the rest of the week

🎵…that side was made for you and me 🎵

Then and Now: Before I-94 plowed through the middle of the Minneapolis in 1968, the city once had gracious avenues with a lively mix of business and residential buildings, tied together by the nation's finest streetcar system.

the 2023 MnLeg (Hortman, Kari Dziedzic, Hornstein) saved Metro Transit and MSP from this. few other places are so lucky

I just finished Lewis Mumford’s magisterial exploration of city life. Published in 1962, it has some of the sharpest takedowns of car-centric society I’ve ever read. Mumford: “We have sold our urban birthright for a sorry mess of motor cars. As poor a bargain as Esau’s pottage.” Choice bits 🧵

Why a MnDOT request for a Cedar Ave crosswalk? Because until 1980, Cedar Ave was part of MN 36 which ran from Eagan, across the (Old) Cedar Ave Bridge, through Minneapolis, to Stillwater. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneso...

this is amazing. Using non-auto Accessibility to Friends as planning tool. Better than 95% of agency land use planning practice!

This is a very good episode covering the private encroachment of Cedar Lake, and how the Park Board has done nothing to stop it and improve access to the public land that spans all the way around the lake.

Would you rather have good access to destinations by transit or by car? In a study of real estate prices across Canada, @higgicd.bsky.social and team found that despite the ubiquity of cars, good *transit* access is a bigger driver of housing prices than good car access. 🧵 doi.org/10.1080/2469...

60's BART 🧵, as promised: My grandpa took some pretty cool (above & below ground!) construction photos of the San Francisco BART 16th St Mission station from the early 1970's. I restored the slides as best I could & I will be adding to this thread throughout the evening with more images & ALT text.

CONSIDER HAVING ALWAYS LIVED CLOSER

Working through the backlog and found this absolute banger of an interview from @theoverheadwire.com feat @transportist.net. David does an incredible job of making complex ideas digestible. Further, he adds passion to the conversation, which is so important to get folks to hear the message.

*Scaling Pedestrian Crossing Analysis to 100 Cities* For better decisions about pedestrian infrastructure, we need data that is both accurate to the block level + scaled up to entire cities. Our new pre-print, pursues this with an advanced computer-vision model arxiv.org/abs/2507.20497 (1/5)

Newer US cities tend to require pedestrians to spend more time when crossing streets.

Amazing work: an analysis of words visible in NYC streetview pudding.cool/2025/07/stre... (via @kottke.org) The top 12 most common words are all part of what I'll call a "vocabulary of restriction" ("stop", "no", "do not", "only", "limit", etc.) ("But on the back side, it didn't say nothin'!")

How I wish America’s congestion-obsessed transportation engineers understood Paul Krugman’s point here paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-limits...

Walking is really, really, really good for you. Conclusion of a new meta-analysis that reviewed 57 studies on walking & health: "Compared with 2,000 steps per day, 7,000 steps per day was associated with a 47% lower risk of all-cause mortality." www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Easily the most thorough thing you’ll ever read on the Summit Avenue reconstruction debate streets.mn/2025/07/24/s...

Also we keep hearing that congestion is terrible for the economy while finding the worst congestion in the strongest economies and lower congestion in weaker ones.

Holy-Shit-grade new whitepaper just dropped from @cplusc.bsky.social. Download this. Use this. It is so good. I do not work there, I just think it is neat!

Statistic Canada has updated spatial access measures out today. Update report cites @urbandemog.bsky.social www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/27-26...

@elindie.bsky.social do you have a link to the shopping cart article?

*picks up megaphone* *puts another megaphone in front of it* *adds a third megaphone just to make sure everyone hears* MINNEAPOLIS IS LOVELY I LIVE THERE, IN ONE OF THE SUPPOSEDLY "DANGEROUS" NEIGHBORHOODS THE KIDS ARE ALWAYS OUT PLAYING AND BIKING TO THE PARK AND IT'S SAFE AND HONESTLY IDYLLIC

We know there is no limit because we’ve already seen how it plays out with highways.

(Yakov Smirnoff voice) …In USA, surplus consumes *you*!

Texas River Song youtu.be/syQRcMjISYw

I think I’ll make some grape salad to celebrate

For folks rightly confused about directionality in the Twin Cities, it all makes complete sense if you picture yourself on a 19th century steamboat, navigating up the Mississippi as if it were a straight north-south road. Here SE Mpls is definitely SE of downtown, and West St Paul is due west.

Thanks for the warning, I suppose, but the heat warning you’re referring to starts almost 44 hours *in the future*— I think I’ll be safe (in my car!) for the next 10 minutes 🙄

David R. Hagen just solved a small mystery that I mentioned 13 years ago in the mouseover text of a comic drhagen.com/blog/the-mis...

Like the 21 before it, the B Line loses a lot of time going up the hill out of downtown Saint Paul. If only there was a solution for this...

Tomorrow's launch of the B Line aBRT is (imho) the biggest day for transit in the Twin Cities since another rainy June 14th eleven years ago when the Green Line opened. No corridor has more riders per stop and per bus than Lake Street. It's not even close. This upgrade will benefit so many people.

This was hard for me to make sense of until I realized that big green field will become the Huron interchange & bus stop. Picture taken from atop 2728 E Franklin?

Cannot emphasize enough that the people who live in the city where stuff is happening will know stuff that the NYT opinion writers do not.