Dan Marshall

@danmarstp.marshallwords.com

Bikes. Kids. Saint Paul. Egg Tacos. Coffee. 1/3 of @MischiefToy.com. Sworn enemy of Summit Ave boulevard trees. Blogging about bikes @ marshallwords.com. AI & X users get unfollowed. he/him

Bicycle in front of a park bench with a lawnmower in its trailer.

A blue bike on a small bridge over Battle Creek as it flows through grasslands on its way to the Mississippi

A pic of previous encampment's location back in 2021. With a bike.

A lone googly eye stares at the sky on a sandy boat launch on Leech Lake at sunset.

Paul bunyan and babe the blue ox roadside sculpture in Bemidji. With a bike.

Me sitting on a bench in Walker Minnesota

The toy campaign book cover by John Bibee

Ghost the cat stretching our on our faux leather ottoman.

$By Leaetta Hough If St. Paul continues to push forward with the Summit Avenue Regional Trail (SART), the result won't be the green progress the city promises. It will be a historic act of civic self-destruction. SART will irreversibly disfigure Summit Avenue, an irreplaceable historic corridor, and trigger financial and environmental consequences which will be felt by every single St. Paul resident. Any superficial strides toward sustainability will be completely eclipsed by the imme-diate, permanent environmental degradation of losing our mature tree canopy. Ultimately, the taxpayers are being asked to shoulder a staggering economic burden, both in upfront costs and permanent, ongoing losses and liabilities, to fund the most expensive type of bike facility design which will serve only a tiny fraction of our population. The math on this project simply doesn't work. Summit Avenue is a national treasure, celebrated by the American Planning Association as one of America's "Great Streets" and the finest preserved avenue of Victorian architecture in the country. To construct SART, the city plans to rip up historic granite curbs, destroy the root systems of about 1,000 mature trees, and permanently disfigure this iconic urban landscape. This project represents a catastrophic failure of environmental policy, fiscal discipline, and urban planning. It is time to acknowledge those facts and stop wasting scarce tax dollars on SART. The city's environmental claims rest on a tantasy. Othcials nitially "projected" that 221 mature trees, 14% of Summit's canopy, will be lost or compromised. However, this flawed estimate was carelessly extrapolated from past road projects that didn't move most of the curbs, alter driveways, and construct an off-road trail that invades into a tree-lined boulevard. When two independent arborists actually calculated the likely impact of SART on the trees for specific sections of the project, they arrived Council, and the city's own Parks at a far grimm…$