Looks like Minneapolis is going to introduce the public bikes we saw in Montreal ...The Friday Night Skate winds through downtown Minneapolis... For the most part we stay in a pack, stopping every few miles to re-group. The skate lets you hang out with your friends, meet some new friends, see downtown, get some exercise, but most of all... have a great time!
... The skates happen every second and fourth Friday of the month. The skates start promptly at 9:00 PM. In order to get ready we recommend that you get there by 8:30...The web site is a bit dusty, but it's got the directions. I used to do these skates several times a summer, but it's tricky to protect the time.
Twin Cities: vibrant with diversity | Twin Cities Daily Planet | Minneapolis - St. Paul
.... The cumulative effect has been dramatic. In the seven-county metro area in 2007, more than 125,000 residents were Latino, nearly 45,000 were Hmong, and an estimated 30,000 were Somali, said Barbara Ronningen, a demographer with the Minnesota State Demographic Center.
St. Paul has the largest urban Hmong concentration in the world. Minnesota has the largest Somali population in the United States, most of them in Minneapolis. More than 80 languages are spoken in the Twin Cities area...
The Associated Press: GOP's Coleman concedes, sending Franken to SenateColeman steered to the wind. When Bush was powerful he was a conservative, when Bush weakened he was a "moderate". He was never a GOP rebel like the Senators from Maine.
... Republican Norm Coleman has conceded to Democrat Al Franken in Minnesota's contested Senate race, ending a nearly eight-month recount and court fight.
Coleman conceded at a news conference in St. Paul, a few hours after a unanimous Minnesota Supreme Court ruled Tuesday the former 'Saturday Night Live' comedian and liberal commentator should be certified the winner...
...A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says the earliest Franken would be seated is next week, because the Senate is out of session for the July 4 holiday."
Welcome to Cyclopath, the geowiki for Twin Cities bicyclists. You can use Cyclopath to find routes and share information with other cyclists.Nobody knows where you can go, and what you will find when you get there, better than you, the bicycling community. Cyclopath enables bicyclists to harness this collective knowledge and build a comprehensive, up-to-date information resource by and for the communityThis is what I'd thought long ago I might do with msptrails.org, but it's always been a future project for me.
Imagine you are an active geek, and that you can live in any city on earth.
Where do you go? For that matter, where might you want to visit?
There are all kinds of metrics you might consider, but there’s a single metric that produces this particular list:
What does Minneapolis have in common with Paris?! What joins Copenhagan and, yes, Bogota?!
Think ….
Think ….
This list. These are the world’s top 10 cities for bicycling.
I’ve lived most of my life in Montreal and Minneapolis, and I’ve bicycled Munich. It know it’s hard to credit, but there is something similar about those 3. Paris is an outlier, but then there’s no accounting for Paris.
Ok, so Bogota, which people my age associate with drug wars and extreme violence, is another outlier. Until I summarized this list I’d never have considered visiting Bogota. Now I guess I have to.
If you’re a US citizen you might now be considering Portland, Seattle and (yes!) Minneapolis. I know, it’s a bit mind blowing. Now consider this list …
These are the top 3 states for health care quality in a the recent NHQR State Snapshot report (I must confess, by the way, that Wisconsin is a better bicycling state than Minnesota, it’s just that it doesn’t have much in the way of an urban life.)
I live in Minnesota’s Twin Cities (St. Paul, the sleepier sib of Minneapolis), which in addition to being the #3 bike city in the USA is also home to the world’s largest and most attractive legal dog park.
Sometimes, you just get lucky.
Update: chrismealy tells us that his Seattle hometown doesn't belong on the list, and that Portland has cyclists but not infrastructure. He writes recommends a terrific bicycle blog (http://hembrow.blogspot.com/, I just subscribed) so I'll take his word for it.
I know Munich is extreme, and Montreal is only very good, so there's clearly a big drop after #3 on the list. That moves Minneapolis even further up.
Incidentally, this update gives me an excuse to post a picture of the bicycle I bought in 1976. My Raleigh International (see Sheldon Brown's page for an original ad photo) is going for the full refurb treatment at the local racing shop in honor of a coming birthday. This is the pre-refurb shop ...
My home town paper slips onto the list next to biggies like the SF Chronicle and the LA Times ...
...St. Paul Pioneer Press – Circulation: 184,973 (3% decrease since 2007)...
Minneapolis, our sister city, has the Star Tribune. It's bankrupt of course, but for the moment it only has to outlive the Pioneer Press.
Both papers are a shadow of their former selves.
In my Canadian childhood we had record players, tape recorders, carbon paper, broadcast ad-supported television, VCRs, pay phones, pay toilets (!) and I delivered 3 different varieties of heavy newspaper by bicycle (I must have been stronger than I remember).
All anachronisms (nobody misses the pay toilets).
It's absurd to schlep newsprint from printer to doorstep. I personally won't miss the end of the newspaper.
The trick will be to kill the newspaper but, somehow, preserve the business of written news.
Minneapolis, St. Paul parks shine in national report
When it comes to ball fields, tennis courts and recreation centers, St. Paul and Minneapolis rank at or near the top in those and numerous other measures taken by a leading parkland conservation organization.
As for land dedicated to parks, 16.6 percent of Minneapolis is parkland, first among cities with similar population densities. St. Paul is second (14.7 percent) in the same category.
The nonprofit Trust for Public Land on Tuesday reported the following for the state's two largest cities:
RECREATION CENTERS per 20,000 residents: St. Paul, first nationally at 3.0; Minneapolis, second, 2.6.
TENNIS COURTS per 10,000 residents: Minneapolis, first, 4.9; St. Paul, tied for third, 3.7.
BALL DIAMONDS per 10,000 residents: St. Paul, first, 5.6; Minneapolis, second, 5.3....
PARK-RELATED SPENDING per resident: St. Paul, third, $224; Minneapolis, eighth, $151.Minneapolis and Saint Paul are really great cities.
Beaconsfield, QC, Canada to Lucien-L'Allier, Canada - Google MapsThe integration is very elegant -- you see pt-to-pt route by multiple modalities. The mobile version has transit as well.
River bike trail gains traction in Bloomington:
...Imagine being able to hop on a bike at Fort Snelling and pedal for hours on a quiet trail along the Minnesota River, winding all the way to Le Sueur, 72 miles upriver...I thought Le Sueur was downriver, but I only live by the Mississippi, I wasn't born here.
Minneapolis—the nation’s No. 2 cycling city after Portland, Ore., according to the U.S. Census Bureau—Olson is among as many as 3,000 people who commute through the cold months, according to the City of Minneapolis Bicycle Program, a division of the Public Works Department.When choosing great places to live, I'm a firm advocate of ignoring everything except the bicycle trail network. Trust me on this -- if you just look for great bike trails you won't go wrong.
Portland, Ore., Acts to Protect Cyclists - New York Times:I'm not sure how that will work -- drivers will be irritated if they can't turn right. An irritated driver is a dangerous driver. If the experiment does work I hope we adopt it in the Twin Cities.
... By allowing cyclists to wait in front of motorized traffic, the bike boxes are intended chiefly to reduce the risk of “right hook” collisions, the kind most frequently reported in Portland, in which a driver makes a right turn without seeing a cyclist who is in his path. Drivers will not be allowed to pass through the bike box to turn right on a red light, although many right hooks now occur after the light has turned green, when traffic quickly accelerates.
Right hooks were what killed the two cyclists in October, a college student and a bike racer hit by large trucks. The drivers say they did not see them...
Global warming is not a theory in Minnesota, and in the Twin Cities in particular. Last year there was almost no cross country skiing anywhere in the state, and there were only a few weeks of outdoor ice. This winter looks no better for outdoor skating. Emphases mine.
Old Man Winter getting a little wimpy
... This winter will likely be warmer-than-normal again across most of Minnesota, according to a forecast released Thursday. And if trends continue, it will be winter nights where warming could be most pronounced.
Twin Cities winter lows, averaged over the most recent 30 years, have increased 1.6 and 2.0 degrees over the official normals. It's an increase that University of Minnesota Extension climatologist and meteorologist Mark Seeley called "emphatic."
He noted that the dynamic is right in line with what most global warming science has outlined. Warming should be most obvious in northern latitudes on winter nights because heat is more effectively trapped by greenhouse gases during long sunless hours than it is during the more volatile days of summer.
Also, Seeley said, recent studies have indicated that a warmer atmosphere, which has more heat-trapping water vapor, may be generating more heat-trapping clouds.
While more moisture may also result in more snow, National Weather Service meteorologist Karen Trammell added that warmer conditions can also mean less continual snow cover, which allows the ground to absorb more radiation.
The Twin Cities, of course, ought to be getting warmer overall as heat-absorbing pavement spreads outward. But the numbers also show that winter temperatures across the entire state have been on a nearly steady and steep upward trend for about 20 years, with seasonal averages since 1998 running above anything in the 106-year record....
The nights are what make the ice rinks work -- or become puddle pools. Warmer nights means no more outdoor hockey.
Our mayor is working to put up some rinks with coolers -- we only need a 2-4 degree drop at night to get the ice to work. Life in MN without ice skating and hockey is significantly less fun.
The only bright note is we're entering La Nina season, so we might get some snow cover up north.
... It takes place every Friday night, except when it rains, and can attract as many as 20,000 skaters. Group skates have been around awhile in the United States and Europe, especially since the advent of in-line skates, which provide speed and maneuverability not possible with quad roller skates. But, in scale and longevity, nothing matches the festive Parisian skates, which began in a small way in 1994 and quickly grew to a point where, in 1997, the police decided to become involved for the safety of everyone concerned -- skaters, motorists, and onlookers. Today, the police not only block off roads and provide an escort for the skaters, but about 20 officers on skates join the rolling ranks during the weekly "rando," derived from the French word "randonée," or tour...Ok, so Paris is bigger and has lots of tourists. Still, you think we'd be able to muster a few hundred!
I live in Saint Paul, the quieter of Minnesota's "Twin Cities". Minneapolis, in contrast, is a notorious den of hedonistic excess and sinful pleasure. Alas for the injured ego of we Paulites, Minneapolis also has one of the finest bicycle and skating trail networks in North America -- we're only in the top 10.
So, really, we ought to have a local resource focusing on trail news. The trails are expanding everywhere, but also occasionally out of order -- we need something very topical. There are huge multi-lane bike trails and obscure suburban trails, packed stone trails and lovely smooth asphalt trails (inline skaters pay a lot of attention to surfaces), scenic trails and utilitarian arteries, hilly zippers and rail trails -- lots of everything. We need a Google markup map and, above all, a multi-author blog. It has to serve the needs of our major bike clubs and our inline skate club.
I haven't found anything like this so far, but I'd welcome email on the topic to jfaughnan@spamcop.net -- including mention of a similar project in another city. In my search I found a local blog with active comments on the 2007 Twin Cities Bike Map, I posted this as a comment:
Little Transport Press » Blog Archive » Twin Cities Bike Map
... I found this posting because I was looking for a blog dedicated to news and updates on twin cities inline skating and bicycle trails.
If anyone is aware of such a blog please email me ... I’d like to see a multi-author blog and I’d be willing to contribute or help administer.
Possible sponsors include our local bike clubs, the Minnesota Inline Skate Club and Little Transport Press (of course). It could, for example, be used to promote and develop Little Transport Press products. I’d also like to see it integrate with a shared Google Maps/Google Earth toolset for sketching out the trails and I could help with that too...
The key is to leverage many contributors in a structured format, an open source model that leverages our emerging toolkits of blogs, maps and wikis ...
