Despite my searching over the past year or so, I've never come across theinterchange.net until just now. The Interchange is Minneapolis's planned expansion of the light rail and heavy rail train station(s) at Target Field, intended to be that city's counterpart to the Saint Paul Union Depot.
I did hear about one open house meeting on the project through the normal news media several months ago, but their website implies to me that there have been multiple meetings in the past. Nonetheless, there will be two more meetings this year related to the site's Environmental Assessment, on November 1st and December 1st. No details on time or location as of yet.
The Internet Archive hasn't crawled theinterchange.net yet, at least not in its current incarnation.
I'd like to see some level of website consolidation for all of the different infrastructure projects out there. A wiki-esque framework that gets information out to the public with a minimal amount of effort on the part of planners, designers, and other associated groups. I tend to find things on Mn/DOT's website easily enough, but I guess I get a little stymied when I need to worry about entities at the city, county, state, and federal level, plus regional rail authorities, the Metropolitan Council, and probably several other things I'm missing.
I could imagine having a site with a zoomable map on the front page that would let me find projects going on in my neighborhood, without having to figure out which level of government is responsible. I figure a good system would also help the different levels of government themselves to understand the context of their own projects in a better way.
(Not that I necessarily agree with their politics, but) Sunshine Review just gave Hennepin County a B- for their web transparency, which is actually the highest grade given for a county in MN, but which several other counties also earned:
ReplyDeletehttp://sunshinereview.org/index.php/Hennepin_County,_Minnesota
Minneapolis does a much better job posting their project documents online - the idea of having a different site for each HCRRA project is kind of cool, but it's just too hard to find within the Henn Cty website. For an organization like a county, which has such a diversity of services, organizing navigation through user types doesn't really work, in my opinion. There are 6 main departments in the county- they should have just used those in their main nav bar.
Your MSP infrastructure map is a good idea, and should be kept in mind for greatergreaterMinnesota.com or whatever.