Minneapolis, MN
End of the Road: Why Uber and Lyft Are Abandoning Minneapolis Over New Driver Pay Laws – View from the Wing
End of the Road: Why Uber and Lyft Are Abandoning Minneapolis Over New Driver Pay Laws
Uber and Lyft have announced that they’re leaving Minneapolis May 1, 2024 in response to new city rules on driver pay. Uber is clear this will mean no airport pickups or drop offs. Lyft’s statement leaves open some ambiguity about the airport, although if they continue with airport service it may be only for out of towners.
The Minneapolis City Council overrode the mayor’s veto to pass new rideshare rules requiring minimum driver pay of $1.40 per mile and $0.51 per minute while transporting passengers; guaranteeing a minimum pay of $5 per ride; and requiring pass-through of at least 80% of cancel fees.
This would be pay substantially higher than the local $15.57 minimum wage. The Mayor believes that $0.89 per mile and $0.49 per minute would achieve that level of pay. The per-mile requirement is 57% higher than this.
The path to profitability for Uber and Lyft has always been about depressing wages for gig workers.
If a company can’t afford to pay their drivers a livable wage, maybe that company doesn’t deserve to exist. pic.twitter.com/x3WAASr4K2
— Lee Hepner (@LeeHepner) March 15, 2024
This is a bad take. As the Mayor put it,
Everyone wants to see Uber and Lyft drivers get paid more. But getting a raise doesn’t do a whole lot of good if you lose your job.
People choose to drive Uber/Lyft because it’s more lucrative than their next-best option (sometimes within their scheduling constraints). This critic is dangerously close to saying that if someone can’t otherwise earn a living wage, that they don’t deserve to exist. Shocking.
Uber and Lyft left Austin where I live back in 2016, after the city passed a number of rideshare regulations. Fingerprint-based background checks got most of the coverage, but rules also carved out lucrative rides for festivals and other activities only for taxis. Other services like RideAustin, Fasten, and Wingz picked up the slack after a period in which rides of any kind were difficult to get and thousands of people had been put out of work. The city largely ignored its own rideshare rules to let these services scale. They were generally more expensive and had fewer drivers than Uber and Lyft.
The state of Texas passed its own comprehensive rideshare rules, trumping local efforts, in 2017 and Uber and Lyft returned – mostly squeezing out those companies that had serviced the city while they were gone.
It’s perfectly fair to criticize companies that pretended tipping was going to increase driver wages, when it simply displaced pay from Uber/Lyft. The introduction of tipping simply shifted where driver pay was coming from, it did not increase it which is part of why tipping norms are destructive.
And it’s also fair to critique companies that light VC money on fire, only to learn they eventually have to self-fund. It’s hard to make money selling a service like transportation where there’s a limit to how much passengers will pay, and an amount drivers need to earn, while still earning a margin.
These aren’t massively profitable companies. Lyft’s operating margin has ranged from -79.26% in Q3 2022 to -34.97% in Q1 2023. Lyft famously issued a mistaken press release, overstating expected margin growth. Their adjusted profit margin as a percentage of bookings is expected to be 2.1% this year, up from 1.6% in 2023. And then there’s Uber:
Is this “exploitation” in the room with us? https://t.co/dA1dXGnkDQ pic.twitter.com/xQaVf0TVli
— Max Weber (@max_oikonomikos) March 17, 2024
But people who chose to drive for Uber and Lyft, no matter how much you criticize those companies, were better off for having done so compared to their next best alternative. Deferring to the actual decisions people make in their lives is grossly underrated. The Minneapolis city rule means consumers and drivers take an L, while cab companies win (and do not appear to be subject to these new rules).
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Walking All the Streets of Western Northeast Park
Editor’s Note: Max Hailperin is walking each of Minneapolis’ 87 neighborhoods, in alphabetical order. He chronicles his adventures at allofminneapolis.com, where the original version of this article was published July 4, 2026.
The Northeast Park neighborhood is arguably the northeasternmost in Minneapolis. Those that extend somewhat further east are nowhere near as far north, and those that are further north don’t extend as far to the east. Of course, everyone’s entitled to their own opinion. I’m not trying to pick a fight with Waite Park, for example.
What’s inarguable is that the neighborhood divides into two quite distinct areas. West of Johnson Street, there’s a nearly square portion, bounded on its other three sides by Broadway Street, Central Avenue, and 18th Avenue. (I’ll omit the direction indicator NE, which applies to all streets and avenues in this area.) This western portion was the focus for this first walk in the neighborhood. Unlike the irregularly shaped area east of Johnson, it has a grid-based layout, albeit with substantial gaps.
The main loop of my walk began and ended at the southwest corner, the intersection of Broadway and Central. The building on that corner, The Broadway, presents a low-profile facade toward Broadway, which is the uphill side of a sloping lot. The main tenant on this side is Spyhouse Coffee, which makes the most of the timber and brick interior. I chose to wait until the end of the walk to see other parts of the building.
Heading east on Broadway, the next building I passed was the National Guard armory, described more fully by the sign out front as the “Minnesota Army National Guard N.E. Minneapolis Training and Community Center.” A sprawling one-story structure built in 1992, it has none of the romance of the earlier castle-like armories or the vaulted art deco structure in downtown Minneapolis. Together with its parking lot, it occupies the entire triple-sized block from Tyler to Fillmore, with Polk and Taylor being absent in this area.
East of Fillmore, I continued in a forward-and-back spur two blocks to Buchanan, with a side spur north on Pierce. This reflects the fact that Pierce doesn’t cross the diagonal railroad tracks, one of the many ways in which the street grid of this area gives way to the realities of land use.
I rather like how commercial, residential and recreational uses are mixed together, leading to buildings of widely varying age, style, and size. Some of them have also gained a new look and new purpose over time. For example, a concrete-block building on the corner of Broadway and Pierce, which looks like it started life as an automotive business in the 1970s, now has a sharp paint job and signage announcing its repurposing as Abra Kadabra Environmental Services: “When nature creeps in, call us.”

An even more striking example lies in the first block north of Broadway on Fillmore, a house now prominently exhibiting mural art by Yuya Negishi, but upon closer examination showing signs of its origins as the Samuel Moyer Gospel Lighthouse.

Take another look again at that mural-adorned former chapel, this time with an eye toward how its form fits that of its neighbors. To its right and further to its left, there are houses with similarly pitched roofs. But this appearance of consistency is somewhat illusory. The neighbor immediately to the left (or north) only came into view as I walked a bit further.
That immediate neighbor, a flat-roofed two-story structure, was built in 1901 as an apartment building. Today its four rental units are guarded by three metal roosters.

All of these residence are directly across Fillmore from the United States Postal Service’s Vehicle Maintenance Facility, just north of the armory. At the time of my walk, its lot was packed full of Next Generation Delivery Vehicles, which I assume were being readied for their initial deployment.
I walked 13th Avenue east from Fillmore to its dead end just beyond Lincoln Street, where Interstate 35W cuts through. So far as getting anywhere goes, I was wasting my time to go that extra half block beyond Lincoln. But the whole point of this project isn’t to get anywhere, it’s to see what there is to see. And you never know when you’re going to see a giraffe in someone’s back yard.

A few roosters or a giraffe are nothing compared to the lawn ornaments on one of the Lincoln Street houses just south of 12th Avenue. The horizontal lines of flower boxes and whatnot balance out the vertical totem-pole-like collection of cartoon characters (Minnie Mouse, a pig chef, baby Yoda, a cow and I don’t know what else).

With that behind me, you’ll understand why, after wrapping around to Buchanan Street, I was unsure about the turkey resting on a loading dock. Was it like the metal roosters, the giraffe, the pig? I waited. Eventually it swiveled its head, answering my question in the negative.

The very presence of a loading dock amidst residences is not something one would see in more rigidly zoned neighborhoods. The residences vary in age, with my eye particularly drawn to one a couple blocks further north that turns out to be from 1902.

The street grid is interrupted again at 14th Avenue, this time by Northeast Athletic Field Park, the defining feature of the neighborhood. I walked a spur east along 14th Avenue as far as Johnson Street, then turned west to continue my main loop. The athletic fields themselves are just athletic fields, nothing that struck me as out of the ordinary. (I’m notably non-athletic.) But the restroom building in the block between Buchanan and Pierce is a standout for its Creatives after Curfew mural celebrating “the heart of Northeast Park.” It was painted in 2021 by Leslie Barlow, Maiya Lea Hartman, Thomasina Topbear, Maria Robinson and Claudia Valentino, sponsored by the Northeast Park Neighborhood Association.

Once I was headed back northbound on Fillmore, I detoured off to the west on the entrance driveway leading to Sociable Cider Werks. For a pedestrian, it’s actually easier to access this business from the north, but I wasn’t sure yet whether that was blocked off or not, so I took the driveway. I enjoyed a brief rest stop on their patio, consuming a Freewheeler cider and an oil-stained paper bag of seasoned french fries from the resident food trailer, Smashed Patty’s.

The All of Minneapolis project has been an on-and-off part of my life for a decade now, and though there has been change over that time, there have also been constants. One of those constants has been my struggle with how to balance the interesting and the beautiful in my choice of photo subjects.
North of the park on Fillmore, there are two quite similar buildings, each built in the late 19th century by Aaron Carlson as a duplex and then extended by him in the 1920s and subdivided. I decided to photograph the slightly older of the two (1897 versus 1899), even though I can’t count the obscuring of the original facade in the category of beauties. It simply is too interesting a glimpse into the evolution of this Minneapolis housing to be ignored. And that’s even before the name “Aaron Carlson” meant anything to me. (Later in the walk I saw the name on a smokestack and looked it up.)

As I walked by other residential properties, mostly from varying decades of the 20th century, I was frequently as interested by the flowering bushes and trees as by the buildings. Likewise, when I came around to the Johnson Street side of the park, I was as drawn to the daffodils planted around the sign as I was by the water park visible in the background.

After following 16th Avenue along the northern border of the park, I turned north on Buchanan Street and found myself walking alongside a school building for which the playground equipment already signaled that it wasn’t just any school. Yinghua Academy is a Mandarin Chinese immersion school.

Before I turned onto 17th Avenue and saw the front of the school (complete with a fitting Little Free Library), I paused to consider the white duplex at 1709 Buchanan. The horizontal lines and white color made me think of one of the less common styles of modernist architecture, loosely inspired by the Secession Building in Vienna. I don’t know whether that was intentional; the history of the building’s construction and expansion is complex.


Once I was back to 18th Avenue, I headed west from Pierce Street to Central Avenue, with southward spurs down Taylor, Polk and Tyler Streets. This is a rhododendron-enhanced residential area dead ending at the railroad-adjacent industrial zone that now contains Sociable Cider Werks and the former Industrial Machinery Company building, fancifully called “The Alamo.” I saw the front of that building once I turned onto Central Avenue.


To access the part of this industrial area that is south of the tracks, I turned east on 14th Avenue. Extending south of there on Tyler Street is the former Crown Iron Works, redeveloped by Hillcrest Development. Today it is the Crown-Arts Center, billed as a “Creative Office Campus.” Sadly, one of the tenants I visited, Bauhaus Brew Labs, has closed in the interval between my walk and completing this writeup.



Tyler Street also brought me back to The Broadway building, where I had begun my walk. Across the parking lot from it is a 2023 apartment building featuring a mural by Chuck U. The parking lot also provides a good view of the historical signage (“The Land-O-Nod Co., Bedding Manufacturers”) and is the site for a sculpture by Zoran Mojsilov.)



The parking lot also provides access to the side of the building opposite Tyler Street, where there is a sheltered area between the building itself and the retaining wall of Central Avenue, which ascends to Broadway. That area contains a stone amphitheater and a patio served by Padraigs Brewing. There I capped my walk off with an N.E. Porter and a Potter’s Pasty.



All photos by Max Hailperin
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Minneapolis, MN
Feds release key evidence in Minnesota ICE shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti
MINNESOTA (TNND) — Federal prosecutors have turned over key evidence in the fatal ICE shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti to Minnesota investigators after months of legal battles, marking a major breakthrough in the state’s effort to investigate the deaths.
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced Monday that the evidence was released by U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen’s office after a lengthy dispute over access to the materials. The transfer includes previously withheld hard drives containing witness statements, police body-camera footage and Good’s damaged SUV.
“The wonderful thing now is we have all the evidence,” Moriarty said in a video statement. “Any time the government is responsible in whatever way for taking the life of a community member, we need to have a full and thorough investigation.”
The Minneapolis immigration crackdown, dubbed “Operation Metro Surge,” ended in February after being billed as the largest immigration enforcement operation ever.
A private autopsy found that Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot three times by a federal immigration agent during a Jan. 7 traffic stop, including a fatal gunshot wound to the head.
Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, was shot and killed during a Jan. 24 protest. The medical examiner ruled he died after being struck multiple times by federal agents.
At least nine people have been killed nationwide in encounters involving ICE agents since the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign began last year. No one has been charged in connection with the deaths, and the federal government has argued that state prosecutors lack jurisdiction to investigate federal officers.
The latest development also comes as questions continue to surround other recent fatal ICE shootings. An ICE agent fatally shot a motorist in Maine on Monday, while prosecutors in Houston said federal officials are still withholding key evidence in their investigation into another deadly shooting involving an ICE officer last week.
New video of Minneapolis ICE shooting from agent’s perspective (CNN Newsource)
Minnesota officials sued the Trump administration in March, accusing federal authorities of refusing to provide evidence needed for the state investigation.
Court filings suggest the breakthrough came after federal prosecutors sought evidence gathered by state investigators in a separate case involving ICE agent Christian Castro.
Castro, 52, has been charged with assault and falsely reporting a crime in connection with the Jan. 14 nonfatal shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. Prosecutors allege Castro fired through the front door of a Minneapolis home while pursuing another man, striking Sosa-Celis in the thigh.
State and local prosecutors told federal officials they would share evidence in Castro’s case only if the federal government agreed to reciprocate in the investigations into the deaths of Good and Pretti.
“We are willing to share evidence with you if the exchange is reciprocal,” Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans wrote in a court filing.
Lawyers for Good’s family called the evidence transfer “an important and meaningful step toward justice and accountability.” The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which has taken custody of the materials, said “great strides have been made” to ensure a “thorough and complete review” of both shootings.
But an attorney for Pretti’s family said Rosen’s office still declined during a Monday meeting to confirm whether any formal cooperation agreement exists between state and federal investigators.
“No family should be required to beg federal authorities to do their job,” attorney Steve Schleicher said in a statement. “Without a public commitment by federal authorities to cooperate with the state, it is difficult—if not impossible—to pursue justice that holds the individuals accountable for Alex’s death.”
The evidence transfer marks the first significant cooperation between state and federal investigators since Minnesota filed its lawsuit, potentially allowing the long-stalled investigations into both fatal shootings to move forward.
_____
Editor’s note: The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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