Writing
"Last-Minute Cross-Country Train Travel -- With Kids!", Lisa Nelson, streets.mn March 2025.
"On July 19, 2024, after a vacation with relatives, my family was scheduled on a Delta flight home to MSP from Seattle. If you were paying close attention to travel news last summer, you might have already guessed that we did not fly anywhere that day. Thanks to the CrowdStrike outage, we ended up taking a spontaneous cross-country train trip instead — and thanks to then-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttegieg, Delta reimbursed the cost."
Part 1: "What is St. Paul's CIB? You Don't Know, and That's the Problem", Lisa Nelson and Scott Berger, streets.mn February 2025.
Part 2: "How We Would Improve St. Paul's CIB Process", Lisa Nelson and Scott Berger, streets.mn March 2025.
"The million-dollar pool of available project funding may be a lot of money to a typical person, but for city projects it is quickly stretched thin. Potential applicants, typically laypeople from the community, would benefit from exposure to a library of examples of submitted and funded CIB projects. Key elements of these examples would include the price and scale of successful past projects. The typical St. Paul resident may not know how expensive infrastructure improvements are."
"Neighbors give thumbs down to I-94 expansion", Barb Thoman and Lisa Nelson, streets.mn November 2023
"Door-to-door outreach and lawn signs drew many of the participants to this community meeting. The target audience was residents who live in close proximity to Interstate 94 in the Union Park district, which runs about three miles from the border with Minneapolis on the west to Lexington Parkway on the east. The majority of attendees came from within the “Rethinking I-94″ project area — within a quarter-mile of the highway — and many of their yards or front doors face the highway or a tall sound wall."
"The Cold Equations of Roadway Safety", Lisa Nelson, streets.mn April 2023
"When looking at crash data, it’s easy to start seeing it all as just numbers — columns in a spreadsheet, this line going up or down, that rate per capita or per thousand vehicle miles traveled.
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"It’s easy to end up abstracting away the real people the numbers represent. And what doesn’t make it into the data is all of the close calls that make people afraid to bike or walk in their neighborhood, or all the other people — families, friends, neighbors — whose lives are changed when someone is injured or killed in a crash.
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"That said, here are some numbers: Over the course of 26 years, from 1995 to 2021, more than 2 million total car crashes were recorded in Minnesota, with almost 1 million injuries and over 13,000 deaths."
"Car-Free Goals: How to Succeed Through Failure", Lisa Nelson, streets.mn February 2023
"Since fall 2019, my family has reduced our vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by car by almost 15%, saved $400 in transportation costs and reduced our transportation-related CO2 emissions by 1,034 kilograms — the equivalent of the carbon sequestered by 1.2 acres of forest in one year. How did we do it?!
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"Step 1: Set ambitious goals for replacing car trips with bike trips and prepared to take up winter biking.
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"Step 2: Completely failed at these goals!"
"I-94 in the Union Park District: A History of Prioritizing Speed Over Community", Barb Thoman and Lisa Nelson, streets.mn December 2022
"We found that nearly 400 structures — houses, apartments, businesses and institutions — were demolished to make way for the highway. This is certainly an underestimate of the total housing units and businesses that were lost; lacking specific information about many of the buildings, we have generally counted only one structure per lot, except in the case of multiple structures on larger commercial/industrial lots. Many of the residential structures were multi-family units, including apartment buildings. Commercial buildings often held more than one business. The demolitions and the highway that replaced them changed lives, eliminated local jobs and reduced community cohesion."
"Play Streets and Block Parties: Reimagining Residential Streets as Neighborhood Resources", Lisa Nelson, streets.mn August 2022.
"More than one child in my neighborhood has started learning to tell time or learning the days of the week just so they know when to pester their parents about going outside to play in the street (a normally forbidden adventure for a child). On hot days there have been water balloon fights, freeze pops and a sprinkler set up in the street. The kids share toys and play games together; the adults share a hotdog, a drink or space on a grill. Everyone can be together in a community space, and kids can run between yards and across the street without having to worry about cars."