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Connecting the West side, take 2
Tonight (Tuesday, September 22, 2015), the Northfield City Council will discuss low-cost projects to improve bicycle and walking routes on the west side of the city linking neighborhoods and Saint Olaf College to downtown. Almost a year ago, the Northfield City Council voted to reject all bids received for the construction of what was called […]
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One small breath of fresh air at the DOT
Strong Towns recently highlighted this video from the Tennessee DOT which is worth 4 minutes for anyone who thinks about land use and transportation issues. In the video, Tennessee DOT Commissioner John Schroer says: “A lot of cities did a poor job of long-range planning in how they did zoning and how they approved projects […]
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Dear Mayor Graham – Bike and pedestrian safety edition
Dear Mayor Graham, I hope you’ve been thinking about joining Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx’s Mayor’s Challenge for improving safety for bicycle riders and pedestrians of all ages and abilities this year. Northfield is so well-positioned to make significant progress on this issue already that your strong leadership of the Council and city staff in this effort […]
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Bike-cation in Northfield
Bikeyface took a bike-cation somewhere near Boston, but could have been visiting Northfield instead. Doesn’t that look like MN Trunk Highway 3 through downtown Northfield? What would a bike-cation in Northfield look like? There’s a surprising amount to do on a bicycle in Northfield, but navigating through the center of town on a bicycle to reach […]
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Dear Mike Obermuller (or your favorite candidate)
Mike Obermuller is running for Congress here in CD2 looking to unseat John Kline. At a campaign event last night, an interesting exchange and opening for new conversation emerged – Dear Mike Obermuller, I enjoyed having the chance to talk to you again at the campaign event in Northfield last night and was impressed at […]
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Northfield Bikeable Community Workshop
Northfield should be the sort of city where bicycling makes a lot of sense because it’s small enough to put most destinations within a couple of miles, there are regional trail connections (existing and planned) we have multiple formal and informal cycling groups (lycra-clad road cyclists, off-road, gravel riders, seniors and cruisers) Carleton and St Olaf Colleges provide 5,000 students who are young, active, environmentally conscious people less likely […]
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Happy New Year from Finland
Hyvää Uutta Vuotta from Jyvaskyla, Finland where I’ll be spending the next 6 months or so. Jyvaskyla has about 135,000 people (like Northfield, about 25% of those are students) on about 52 sq. miles in Central Finland. For landscape, think northern Minnesota. Lots of birch and pine, many lakes, and usually much snow (but not this […]
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Next link in the TIGER trail project
The tale continues…after the City Council authorized rebidding the TIGER trail project in September, 4 bids were received. All bids exceeded projected costs and the low bid is $828,465 over. Although it took two tries to get the bids and much procedural grandstanding, let’s catch our collective breath. TIGER supporters would probably agree that Trunk Highway […]
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Taming TIGER’s critics in Northfield
See my post on streets.mn… “The elephant in the room when discussing Northfield…is always TH3. Everything I love about Northfield stands in complete opposition to TH3, which seems to only distract from the Northfield experience” commented Rueben Collins of VeloTraffic in response to Northfield on streets.mn. These days, that elephant is making a great deal of […]
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Across the pond, happily
Yes, the blog has been silent of late. I’m now writing from Cambridge, England and it took a bit of time and effort to accomplish the relocation. Worth it, though. Cambridge, like Northfield, is a city of cows and colleges but with more of both: Cambridge University has 31 colleges plus Anglia Ruskin University; the […]