Here's a simple resolution about local control for speed limits. This is just one small piece of the larger picture when it comes to having more local control over urban design of our streets in Minnesota. But it's an important piece.
Just print this out and bring it to your local caucus. When it comes time to introduce resolutions, don't be shy. Simply stand up, state your name, and make the case that cities should be able to decide to set safe speeds in urban neighborhoods.
This kind of change has to come from MnDOT and the legislature. so politically speaking, DFL Caucuses are the way to go!
Please share widely.
Proposed resolution language:
WHEREAS: Lower car speeds are proven to improve safety for people of all ages walking and bicycling around their neighborhoods.
WHEREAS: Lower speed limits improve quality of life for urban neighborhoods, and help promote sustainable and active transportation.
WHEREAS: Cities currently cannot set speed limits on city streets without going through a inflexible, costly, and time-consuming state approval process.
BE IT RESOLVED: The DFL supports direct accountability to local government by allowing cities to set their own speed limits on city streets.
-->Probably the best known suburbanite to take
advantage of the new facilities was Henry Thoreau. The transcendentalist picked
a site for his mystical ruminations on nature at Walden Pond, a half hour by
train from Boston. He built his hut less than 200 yards from the railroad within
a short walk of the suburban homes of his commuting literary friends in
Concord. Thoreau might complain about modern technology, but he also wanted
proximity to Boston’s urban amenities.
The list of his guests is, frankly, astonishing. Among the thousands over the decades: Buster Keaton, Jacques Cousteau, Saul Alinsky,AllenGinsberg, Ethel Merman, Cesar Chavez, Woody Allen, Bertrand Russell,Shirley MacLaine,James Baldwin, Mahalia Jackson, Janis Joplin, Hunter S. Thompson, David Mamet, Carol Channing, Gwendolyn Brooks, Mort Sahl, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Pete Seeger and Muhammad Ali.
The old Penalty Box across from the TD Garden is gone, too. Now it’s the Causeway Restaurant & Bar. And perhaps nothing offers a more distilled view of changing Boston than the contrasting Yelp reviews.
“I came in here before the BeanPot,” a Penalty Box reviewer named Marcus D. wrote in 2011, a couple of years before the place closed. “There were about four old men in here, one sleeping loudly at the end of the bar.”
He had this huge map, and when he would get excited and talk to you, he would jump up, he used these yellow pencils with erasers, and he’d have one in his hand. He’d say, the Mosholu Parkway, which he wanted to build, which would have destroyed the character of another swath of the Bronx. But to listen to him, he’d say, “Can’t you see? The highway goes here, we can have the parks here, and then we’ll have housing here,” and you saw that this guy thought in terms of an entire—and so many of the early things he did were masterpieces, like Jones Beach.
“In other northern cities, the black community built capacity and political power. They built churches, cultural institutions, newspapers, social organizations, and they had to be dealt with. The white people may not have liked it, but they had to be dealt with. Here, to some degree African Americans are under the radar. Racism, white supremacy is a complicated thing. If there aren’t a lot of people of color around, white people tolerate them. But when they’re around they have to be dealt with."
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