Top Tech City: Minneapolis, MN

The first voice I hear upon arriving is computerized. The stop announcements on the airport monorail have a British accent, as though the pilotless shuttle has been commandeered by a Bond girl. (They’re big on computerized voices in Minneapolis. Later, walking by a parking garage, I am warned in robot monotone “Caution. Vehicle. Exiting.”) My taxi driver from the airport is a very friendly Somali with an advanced degree in computer programming. I pay for the ride with a credit card, a rarity in New York’s yellow cabs and one of many small ways in which I’ll find my city to be behind the times. The cabbie thinks my surprise at card-reading taxis is hilariously yokelish. If I had been nervous about giving out my card number, I could have asked
to see his counterfeit-proof Minnesota driver’s license, featuring a 3-D hologram of a loon (the state bird) that appears to float above and below the card when it’s tilted. The novel design was invented by locally-based 3M.


Traffic is pretty heavy moving into the center of the city. The U.S. Department of Transportation gives Minneapolis top scores for its use of such “intelligent transportation solutions” as closed-loop traffic control, in which sensors placed below the pavement at intersections
collect traffic-density data on given roadways and adjust the timing of traffic lights to compensate. This belies the fact that traffic congestion in Minneapolis is increasing at a rate surpassed by only eight other cities in the country, a side effect of suburban sprawl. To ease the gridlock, the city has spent $715 million to construct a light-rail line that connects the downtown with outposts including the airport and the Mall of America. The rail is time-coordinated with the bus system, which has another advance on New York: The bus stops are kept toasty with electric heaters.




My hotel is downtown, in the forest of glass-and-steel skyscrapers that makes up the dense center of Minneapolis. The streets are clean enough to eat off, and seem curiously devoid of pedestrians—a ghost-town ambience that can be attributed to the Minneapolis Skyway system running overhead. Back in 1962, city planners gave up trying to deal with the northern winters, where temperatures have bottomed out at 34 below, and began turning the entire center of the city into a giant human Habitrail. The Skyway is a series of sealed bridges above street level that winds for mile after disorienting mile through arcades of shops and plazas, opening on vast atriums with indoor waterfalls and trees to remind the tunnel-dwellers of the outside world. It’s not a dome over the entire city, but it strikes me as being admirably close.


I enter, and all sense of time and direction are quickly lost. It could be cold enough on the street to hammer a nail with a banana, but I wander for hours in my shirtsleeves, hounded by Muzak, grabbing stray Wi-Fi signals, and drinking lattes, as hermetically sealed as an astronaut. I have to return to the freezing street and a coffee shop to regain my perspective. Dunn Bros. has free Wi-Fi and a very nice fair-trade organic, and the proprietor takes time from his roasting to opine that for all its futuristic climate-controlled benefits, the Skyway is missing the vibrant life of a real city. And what does he make of his city’s top tech ranking? “I would have guessed Silicon Valley,” he says. “But I guess I’m not that surprised. Minneapolis is a progressive place, always looking at what’s next. It’s just not in our nature to brag about it.”