So while the site of the Dinkytown Target Express is certainly generating more car trips than it did before the Target Express opened, in the grand scheme of things, there are many thousands fewer car trips happening because people aren’t driving to the Quarry as often.

The Dinkytown example in particular is fun, because coming to Minneapolis to go to school is a lot of Minnesotans' first experience with ~the big city~ other than going to Twins games as a kid. But, and don't tell anyone about this, aside from the bigger buildings placed closer together, a lot of people in Minneapolis still live a life pretty similar to people in Maple Grove, just with different bumper stickers—they're still driving everywhere.

And as we think about our city's future and also sort of importantly, the future of the whole world, which is greatly at risk of overwhelming calamity due to climate change, giving people that option is important. Maybe it lets them ditch the car, or maybe they don't lose the car entirely, but their household drops down to just one that they use to go to IKEA periodically.

You’ve got to keep the broader metropolitan area in mind. It's complicated and not a direct one-to-one thing, but housing that isn't built in Minneapolis does end up somewhere. The apartment buildings we've built in Minneapolis over the past five years are occupied and people are living in them. If those people weren't living in a new building in Uptown, they'd either A) displace someone in Uptown who couldn't afford the rent hike (and that person ends up somewhere) or B) move to St. Louis Park five years earlier, which is less walkable, and then someone who would have been in St. Louis Park would end up in Eden Prairie, which is even less walkable, and so on and so forth.

Letting people live in Minneapolis (or even the nearby town of St. Paul) where this type of lifestyle is possible without rebuilding the entire city has to be a piece of the strategy. Pushing your housing demand out to, eventually, Albertville or whatever, where people are literally driving 100 miles a day is...bad.

Only a fraction (something like 15 to 20 percent) of car trips are for commuting to and from work. The rest are for other things, like going to buy that loaf of bread. Building a city where it’s possible to walk a few blocks to fulfill your basic needs knocks out a whole lot of that remaining 85 percent.

This post appeared originally on Nick Magrino's personal blog.

Minneapolis has an adopted goal of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050. We won't be able to do that without reducing car trips—even electric cars aren't going to get us all the way to the goal. If we’re going to reach that goal, we’re going to need to build walkable neighborhoods.