twin city sidewalks

2026-11-01

Vote Tuesday for Rebecca Noecker, Ramsey County Board

[A re-post of my earlier primary endorsement; election day is Tuesday!]

[Rebecca is the right choice for Ramsey County Board.]

There aren’t many elected officials that I’ve seen up close for their entire careers, but Rebecca Noecker is one of them. I’ve known Rebecca since we both joined the St. Paul Planning Commission together in 2011. We often sat next to each other. I remember her bringing her one-year-old to the meetings, literally juggling her duties. (He’d sleep through them, which often seemed like the wisest move to me.) She rose to become St. Paul Council President, and I want to endorse her for the open* Ramsey County board seat.

(* Noecker announced her campaign before long-time incumbent Rafael Ortega announced his retirement, i.e. she basically forced him out. That's already an accomplishment given the conventional wisdom about how County Board seats are effectively unassailable.)

Since our early days on the planning commission, and after helping with her first City Council campaign, I can say three things about Rebecca as an elected official: she pays attention to detail, is a good listener, and works hard.

This last point is key; for years, Rebecca has gotten up early to answer emails before her kids wake up, way earlier than I ever do. She also knocks doors tirelessly, even in high heat or decent rain. (I’ve witnessed this!)

She follows through, replying to questions and sending thank you notes, the kind of attentive constituent service that is often seen as superfluous to the job. She actually reads memos and reports, public comments and studies, and is eager to ask questions of staff and experts to learn about policy complexities. She shows up for public engagement work, and it's not always transactional; instead, she spends time actively listening to people’s gripes or dreams.

Those are invaluable attributes in any elected official, but I think are suited to what we need at the county level. Ramsey County government is not know for being close to the people, and, to be fair, that’s largely a structural issue around Counties having less direct connections to most people. Still, it could be better...

Meanwhile, the previous County Commissioner had some weaknesses. To my mind, Ortega was neither transparent nor accessible, not someone who spent much time on outreach or engagement. Living in the district for years, I only saw him in person once: at a West Side caucus where he gave a 30-second speech before walking out of the room.

My general sense, having observed County Board members and their staff, is that there's a lot of inertia. It’s not “Gondor-level" sclerotic, but let’s just say there’s a lot of downtime. The way I interacted with Ortega was that I heard second-hand pronouncements, most of which were meant assuring people that “everything was fine” or to “trust us” on key projects under his purview: improved transit on West 7th Street and big downtown development opportunities. Many, many years have gone by, and those projects are failures.

Noecker and I don’t always agree, and to be honest, there were at least two major issues times where she voted against whatI thought was the right thing to do. (Thankfully, in both major cases — the Ayd Mill Road bike trail and Grand Avenue housing approval — she was in the minority.) Even so, I trust Rebecca to put in the work and be transparent.

I won’t say anything particularly negative about the other candidate for County Board, Maria Isa Perez-Vega. I think she is a good state representative and a good fit for the legislature. In that role, giving speeches and being a strong advocate is a key part of the job. Legislators need to claim space on a few key issues and operate through their committees, all while working in a contentious, insular political bubble.

(I worked as Minnesota House Page twenty years ago, so I’m an expert. /s)

Ramsey County board is a different job. It requires administrative chops and bureaucratic follow-through. Rebecca’s work ethic will be a welcome change. Her attention to detail and experience with budget and administration are a good fit for the County, where big development failings have really damaged the regional tax base and local economy. Her experience with the city gives her good knowledge of its limits and potential, and where the County can fit in.

If you’re still undecided about what to support in the August 11th primary, please support Rebecca Noecker.

PS. See also the indefatigable Naomi Kritzer’s analysis of the race, which comes to the same conclusion I do. Vote for Rebecca!

2026-10-05

You're Not From Here #15: St. Albans, Elizabethtown, and Knoxville this Wednesday, 10/7

I have some good news.

You're Not From Here, Are You returns to the Black Hart stage after a month break for Labor Day. The stars have aligned to feature the greater Appalachia this month, which is quite exiting. We have Merry from Elizabethtown (NC), Patrick from Knoxville (TN), and Travis from St. Albans (WV) on the docket. It should be a good time and, as always, it's free, fun, friendly and informative. I'll be leading off the night with a quick bit of visual TC resident trivia I have concocted.

Come on down to the Black Hart of St. Paul bar on Wednesday at 7pm. Meet people. Learn about other places, and about some of the winding paths that find themselves crossing here in the Twin Cities.

See you then!

2026-09-21

An Amazing Takedown of John Forester

[My personal copy which I did not pay money for.]

TL;DR: it’s about damn time someone did in-depth analysis of John Forester's retrograde, toxic, and highly effective life’s work

Sometimes I take solace in the fact that Youtube urbanism is thriving (perhaps a bit too much given the inevitable deluge of slop). If you are the kind of person who likes watching video content, there’s a lot of great stuff to be found covering pretty much every topic you can imagine.

[Not Just Bikes = Jason Slaughter.]

There’s one video that I’ve really appreciated, though. Snarky Youtuber Not Just Bikes, an urbanist named Jason based in the Netherlands, makes long-form sarcastic and didactic videos. One of them features an epic, long-overdue takedown of highly influential (and somewhat recently deceased) anti-bicycling advocate, John Forester.

I’ve written about John Forester on this blog before (Warning: 3,500 words!) as he was the inventor and chief proselyte of “vehicular cycling”, a wildly wrong approach to bicycle planning that embedded itself in public works departments across the country for decades. The first time I read Effective Cycling, Forester's most well-known book, my jaw hit my desk so many times I got a major toothache. I did so many double takes the world was increasing exponentially. It was and is the most condescending piece of text I’ve ever encountered, and it’s wild to me that people took it seriously for so long.

(The book is still in print, AFAIK, and was last “updated” in 2012, right around the time I was doing research on my dissertation on bicycle planning.)

The story of John Forester is a wild ride in and of itself, and is certainly captivating enough that his name isn’t a forgotten piece of history. That's why I wrote about him in my dissertation, and again on this blog when he died back in 2020.

Since then, scrutiny of Forester has waned along with his influence. People even seem to have become sympathetic. For example, over the last few years, I listened to two podcasts about vehicular cycling and Forester: one from the mainstream War On Cars crew and one from Well There’s Your Problem, a “dirtbag left” podcast loosely about engineering. Surprising to me, both podcasts ended up expressing quite a bit of empathy for JF's story than I think he deserves. I get the feeling that the authors there didn’t read closely enough JF’s actual books, which (to be fair) is an understandable thing given their inhuman combination of length and atrocious prose.

This is why the Not Just Bikes video it was a breath of fresh air. Again, if you’re the kind of person that can sit down for a 90 minute Youtube video rant, and likes bicycling, I highly recommend it. Slaughter make sit clear that John Forester was was a horrible person who profoundly damaged street safety in the US (and elsewhere), setting the United States (and much of the rest of the anglosphere) back one or two generations. He did so with a decided lack of empathy for others, and a privileged arrogance that’s really hard to describe unless you’ve read his work yourself.

By contrast with other looks back at vehicular cycling, the Not Just Bikes very long takedown of John Forester does him the favor of using his exact words over and over ahead, pulling the receipts and looking up the references from Forester's books.

Here are some choice excerpts:

It’s pretty easy to critique a John Forester book because all you have to do is quote it extensively, which is precisely what Slaughter does here. In addition to the ample research and epic deep digging into Forester's history, he bring a well-deserved level of scorn and opprobrium into the conversation.

Here's another example, probable the craziest one, explaining how bicyclists shoudl handle explicit conflict with drivers:

Importantly, John Forester also wrote amazingly condescending things about regular people that really have to be read to be believed. He not only infantilizes women, he also throws in the vast majority of men. The jaw-dropping offensiveness is not a simple generation gap or rhetorical disjuncture, but Forester believed he was smarter than everyone else, and thus treated most of the world like children. Also he never admitted he was wrong, or apologized for anything.

“This is an absolutely terrible book, and nobody should ever read it.” -Slaughter

Not Just Bikes also takes the (significant) time to dive into the planning literature, patiently explaining how Forester's citations and research, the footnotes that propped up his unkillable Zombie claims, painstakingly pulling receipts to debunk Forester's bullshit. He walks systematically through the pseudo-scientific approach, focusing particularly on Forester's lesser-known engineering textbook (which I've never read) and describing why it's bad.

It's tempting go say that all of this is ancient history, but if you follow bicycle advocacy at all in the US, you probably know that the fight between traffic engineering and non motorized transportation is alive and well. These books stayed in print well into the 21st century, and I’d wager to say continue to shape engineering practices in many places around the country despite being absolutely nonsense.

As Slaughter rightly point out, a good deal of John Forester's beliefs are insane in the real world. He deserves very little sympathy and it’s about time someone said so. Anyway, check out the whole video if you can stomach it. I highly recommend it.

2026-09-09

Jazz and Traffic #3: The 101 Synthesizer

Well, this is amazing. Someone tied a customizable synthesizer to an actual live traffic camera on Los Angeles' famous CA 101 freeway. It's a miraculous coming together of jazz and traffic in a way that I never thought possible. Trains have rhythm, of course, but freeways are closer to an ambient drone.

It's called "The 101 Plays Itself"," a reference to Reyner Banham, of course. Astounding stuff! Play away, freeway.