Star Tribune
If Uber and Lyft let Minnesota down, maybe Metro Transit will pick us up
Faced with threats from Uber and Lyft to exit — Ubxit? — the city on May 1, the Minneapolis City Council plans to wait until summer before it requires rideshare companies to pay drivers a minimum wage.
This buys Minnesotans more time to figure out who will pick us up when Uber and Lyft let us down.
A whole crop of startups have approached city officials, mounting challenges to established ride shares and the dictionary. MOOV. Hich. Pikapp. Wridz.
But maybe Minneapolis’ hottest new rideshare is its oldest: Get ready to ride the Büs.
Metro Transit has everything. Wheels. An app. Drivers who earn a living wage.
Braced for Ubxit, I hopped on a bus this morning, headed for downtown Minneapolis.
When I lived in south Minneapolis, I took light rail or biked to work almost every day. When I lived downtown, I walked to work. But now there’s a river between downtown Minneapolis and me — and figuring out which of the eight bus stops within two blocks of my house would get me across the Mississippi seemed like a hassle.
Readers, I am here to report that the commute was not, in fact, a hassle. I plugged my address and my destination into the Metro Transit trip planner. It told me where to go, when the next bus would arrive and how long the whole trip should take. The bus was quiet and friendly and the driver was patient while I waved my phone at every surface except the ticket reader.
I’ve heard nothing good about the light rail since the pandemic, so I half expected the Blue Line to be actively on fire when I hopped aboard.
Readers, it was noisy but it was fine. Nobody was shooting up. Nobody was pooping on the seats. Online comment sections may have left me with unrealistic light-rail expectations. I settled back for the thrill of speeding past all the cars waiting at all the red lights on Hiawatha Avenue. Gridlock is for people who don’t ride the rails.
The midmorning trip downtown cost two bucks and involved one transfer to the Blue Line. It took about 40 minutes — 15 of which were spent waiting for the train on a sunny bench.
I could have driven downtown and parked in half the time, at five times the cost.
If I hailed an Uber, it would have run me somewhere between $15 and $27 at that time of day. But I don’t think I’ll be using Uber anytime soon. Companies that pay their CEOs $24 million don’t get to whine about minimum wages for drivers.
Is the bus perfect? Nah. The fact that Uber and Lyft were able to tie the entire state in knots exposes huge gaps in our transportation infrastructure. It would be nice if there were more routes, more buses, more trains, more taxis, more bike paths, more rideshares and more car-shares to get us where we’re going.
But come July 2, the bus will be there for us. Even if Uber and Lyft are nowhere to be found.
You hear a lot of women saying they’d rather be alone in the woods with a bear, not a man, because they considered the man to be more dangerous.
I always chose the man, because my interactions with men have generally been positive, and a man wandering through the woods seemed likely to be a hunter or a naturalist or just someone out enjoying nature. Someone reasonable. Someone more likely to harbor a save-the-maiden fantasy than a desire to harm. Bears, on the other hand, if they have it in their head to attack, there is little you could do but try to survive.
A recent visit to Ely’s North American Bear Center changed my mind. Not that I think less of men, but that I think more of bears. Black bears, at least.
The Bear Center provides refuge to three black bears, at least one of whom would have been otherwise euthanized. There’s Lucky, abandoned or orphaned as a cub, who was begging for food near Madison, Wis., and who came within an hour of being put down before a rescuer whisked him off to Ely. There’s Tasha, fat, sleek, and gorgeous, discovered in 2015 in Kentucky trying to nurse on her dead mother, who was believed to have been hit by a vehicle. And Holly, separated from her mother during an Arkansas fire, and who had slipped off to hibernate before our visit.
The bears were fascinating, delicately lipping up cranberries and shelling out nuts with their back teeth during our visit. We learned that their sense of smell is seven times stronger than that of a bloodhound, and that they can smell through an organ on the roof of their mouths.
In fact, sometimes they’ll stand erect and open their mouths – which looks threatening, but it’s really just to get a better sense of their surroundings, said Spencer Peter, assistant director and biologist at the center.
Hollywood trains them to stand like that for movies, he said. “But they’ll dub in the sound.”
ST. PETER, MINN. – Moments before Erica Schwartz approached a house on a door-knocking campaign in this key swing district, a campaign staffer read from an app on his phone that provided the political loyalties of the people inside. In this home lived two soft Democrats in their 50s, the app said. In the next, a soft Republican in her 80s. In several homes, Republicans and Democrats lived under the same roof.
Schwartz, a Republican from Nicollet, is running for the purple District 18A in the Minnesota House of Representatives against DFLer Rep. Jeff Brand of St. Peter.
Brand won the district in 2018 before losing to Republican Susan Akland in 2020, and then winning again in 2022. Control over the seat could determine the fate of the Democratic trifecta — the governor’s office, Senate and House — that since 2023 has allowed the party to pass a raft of bills, including for free school lunches and paid family and medical leave.
Both candidates said they believe they have the secret to talking to voters in this purple district, which includes North Mankato and St. Peter, Gustavus Adolphus College and numerous rural townships.
Brand said he started knocking on doors in January. The Democrat from St. Peter said he emphasizes his experience when talking to voters. He’s served two terms in the House, where he’s passed 40 bills, after seven years on the St. Peter City Council. People aren’t as tribal about their political affiliations in 18A as they might be elsewhere, he said.
“There’s a lot less conversation about the political culture war stuff, and more conversation about, ‘What are you going to do for us?’” Brand said in a recent interview.
Schwartz, too, said knocking on doors has been a focus of her campaign. The Republican from Nicollet said that many of the people who talk to her already know how they’re going to vote in the presidential contest.
But while door-knocking, Schwartz said she tries to talk less about national politics and more about kitchen-table issues such as inflation. She and her husband run the Nicollet Mart, a gas station and convenience store, and she said people have been struggling to pay for food. “What they’re concerned about is cost, the increase of gas prices, groceries and taxes,” Schwartz said in a short interview in early September.
The University of Minnesota has postponed a scheduled Tuesday night lecture from infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci after pro-Palestinian protests that included some protesters barricading Morrill Hall the day before.
On Monday night, several hundred pro-Palestinian protesters gathered at the building, which houses the Minneapolis campus’ administrative offices, as Students for a Democratic Society used tied-up patio furniture to form giant barricades blocking the building’s large front windows and its entrances. The protesters demanded the U divest from companies with ties to Israel. At least 11 of the protesters were arrested.
The university decided to postpone Fauci’s lecture set for Tuesday night because of “unexpected and complicated incidents” over the past day, university spokesman Jake Rickersaid in an email.
“Given the importance of this lecture and the unexpected and complicated incidents that occurred on campus in the past 24 hours, University officials determined it best to reschedule to ensure a great experience for attendees and our University community,” Ricker said.
All tickets for the lecture will be voided and information about the rescheduled date will be posted later, the university said in an online post about the postponement. Pre-paid parking will be automatically refunded, the university added.
Additional pro-Palestinian protests took place Tuesday afternoon at the university in front of Coffman Memorial Union. The protests prompted university officials to temporarily close down at least a dozen buildings in a Tuesday alert. Those included: Coffman Union, Weisman Museum, Hasselmo Hall, Ford Hall, Vincent Murphy Hall, Tate Lab, Morrill Hall, Northrop Auditorium, Johnston Hall, Walter Library, Smith Hall, and Kolthoff Hall. All other East Bank campus buildings were switched to keycard access only, according to the alert.
An anti-Fauci rally had also been planned by conservative group Action 4 Liberty to coincide with the lecture at the university, but that was moved after the lecture was canceled.
