Minneapolis 2020
Rybak offers bold vision of downtown in 2020
Excerpt:
Downtown Minneapolis will be teeming with year-round street life, criss-crossed by transit lines and a web of commercial and residential activity by 2020, Mayor R.T. Rybak told the city’s business leaders Wednesday.
In his last appearance at the Downtown Council’s annual meeting as mayor, Rybak outlined a bold vision of changes to sustain the goal of doubling downtown’s population.
The plan relies on installing streetcars, reimagining Nicollet Mall and Hennepin Ave., improving retail options and developing around the new Vikings stadium, Rybak said.
The most unusual idea? Using steam from the Hennepin County garbage burner to heat sidewalks and more on Nicollet Mall. “We may be able to grow palm trees on Nicollet Mall with all that wonderful steam that now goes up into the air,” Rybak said, seemingly in jest.
He also proposed better connections between the streets and skyways to improve street-level activity.Comment: Image source. Of interest to me because our plan (Summer 2015) is to move into a condo in either downtown Minneapolis or downtown Saint Paul. Hyperlinks under the city names are condos we have considered and viewed.
Streetcars....what can go wrong when you've got a lot of people drinking a lot at downtown bars, and they're trying to cross the street around 50 ton streetcars using a bearing surface (steel on steel) to stop?
ReplyDeleteAnd "reimagining" things.....they must mean like Block E, right? Hopefully the state tells Rybak a firm, emphatic "no" for the sake of the city.
Anything they do in Europe must be better than the way we do it here, ya know.
DeleteThey do subways in Europe, not streetcars, thankfully. :^)
DeleteTrue - I was thinking about that after I posted that...I'm getting my bastions of liberalness confused. :)
DeleteAnd Europe has lower corporate income taxes. They're seeing the light. :^)
DeleteMinneapolis could do a lot better job plowing their streets. Plymouth does an A++ job.
ReplyDelete