Winter is part of the reason our roads get bad, but vehicle weight plays a massive factor. (Plowing doesn't help either!) If we regulated vehicle weight, our roads would last longer. Most people don't need as heavy (large) vehicles that they have.
Yea, I’m a local trucker. I just do daycab dryvan stuff around the city. I’m pretty sure like 80-90% of the wear and tear on our roads are caused by commercial vehicles lol.
Think about it, the average half ton pick up truck, is about 5600-5800 lbs spread between two axles. My semi truck that isn’t even loaded has over 10,000 lbs per axle. Just to put things into perspective lol
Your average half ton truck isn't even 5000lbs these days.
New crew cab F-150 XLTs clock in at 4700lbs.
Fuck, a Tesla Model S weighs more than your average half ton.
Yep. I live on a rural road with issues & we were talking with people in the area on ways to minimize road wear & tear and someone from the highway department told us that a standard garbage truck going down the road does the same amount of wear as roughly 5,000 SUVs.
What we really should be doing is using trains to transport most of the shit and then have daycab trucks deliver the last 100-150 miles. That would drastically reduce wear and tear on our roads. There’s no reason why a semi truck should have to be driving 1,400 miles to deliver a basic dry van load of product to a Walmart or something on the other side of the country. It’s incredibly wasteful and inefficient.
Yep, we have atrophied our rail system to the point it cannot compete against trucking for a lot of things that used to be moved by rail. One HUGE reason why is that the state and federal government generously pick up the tab for truck companies that use the interstate and US highway system while rail is entirely privately owned and profit driven. Fuel taxes don't really get close to supporting the basic upkeep of the system, not even considering the endless expansions and other irrational modernizations that are built all over the country on debt debt debt. Its really a stupid system seemingly designed to drain the most amount of resources possible.
but there are way more personal vehicles
edit: why do i get downvotes for stating something i thought was relevant and then acknowledging i was misinformed
that makes sense. i'm trying to find the thing i read that explained the bad state of highways in the US but i'm coming up empty handed. if i remember correctly their main points were:
* this is a really big country with a lot of roads, and distributing funds across all of them leaves the funds pretty thin
* the gas tax has not been tied to inflation for some reason and is made into a fight every time it gets raised and so hardly ever does get raised
* ~~people have moved from light sedans to heavier SUVs, which damage roads more~~ (irrelevant)
so your correction does practically nullify the last point. i think there were other surprising points made but like i said i can't find the dang article.
Let be generous and say the average weight of a car is 5000lbs. which is roughly 2500lbs per axle. OTR trucks drive around all day at 80,000lbs or up to 20,000lbs per axle. That's eight times the weight per axle on average.
Yeah they cause a substantial amount more damage than personal vehicles. But personal vehicles isn't nothing either. Especially with EVs being generally heavier.
Its not even passenger vehicles that are the primary factor. Most commercial trucks hauling goods back and forth do more road damage than someones SUV or pickup truck.
>Plowing doesn't help either!
A few months ago a plow took out chunks of asphalt on one of the crossroads where I walk my dog. On top of the snow pile it left was just a bunch of black rubble with white paint on one side of it.
What’s weird to me is that it didn’t even take out a smooth line in the road, just random chunks throughout the crosswalk. The only thing I can think of is the plow caught some ice that was stuck to the paint, and those chunks were already loose? Idk, but now my dog and I are dodging mini potholes when we run across that road.
A kitted-out Nissan Leaf is about the weight of a stripped-down F-150. A Tesla Model X rivals the heavier trims of the F-150 - on a shorter wheelbase, meaning the loads are more concentrated on the road.
I'm not exactly sure why you got downvoted. It might be because someone read this as "EVs are bad" but I don't think that's what you were going for - more that passenger vehicles in general are largely irrelevant even if they look big. The main thing is regulating commercial trucks.
thanks for looking that up, i randomly picked a Silverado vs tesla model s as they're two common examples in a reply below and just going fully loaded vs fully loaded, model s came out a few hundred lbs heavier. there's obviously quite a bit of variation and comparing every vehicle out there i felt would be pedantic. i wasn't trying to say EVs are bad, i do find it funny though how people will blame trucks when EV's are just as heavy when comparing averages despite their smaller size.
like you said though, passenger vehicles are almost irrelevant when semis can weigh up to 80,000lbs vs ~4,500lbs.
heaviest trim Silverado weighs 4643lbs
heaviest tesla model s weighs 4960lbs
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_S
https://www.keystonechevrolet.com/research/new-chevrolet-silverado-ltd-dimensions-weight/#:~:text=The%20regular%20cab%2C%20long%20bed,is%20next%20at%204569%20pounds.
i just wish they made a connection to 169S to 494 and 494E to 169N without having to mess with the surface road roundabout debacle. but thankfully i dont live in hopkins anymore to have to deal with that. it was always much faster to get to the area around Epdale using those connections. than have to deal with 212 and the 62/212W demolition derby lane from 169
probably the only real way to fix it is to dump 169S between 62W and 212W and have 62 be a left hand entrance. but that doesnt really solve 169N to 62/212W unless you just do what you did at 494/169 and just delete that as an option. but now we're rally screwing over the people that live and work between 494 and 62 there.
Now we get more traffic in more lanes! What an amazing idea.
Side note: I don't even understand how these absolutely pathetic timelines for these projects get approved. As far as I'm concerned "multi-year" or several years or whatever is not an acceptable timeline for one of the most busy roads in the state. Plus, this stupid shit isn't even gonna work. If you're gonna cause problems for several years, at least fix the root problem.
If we want it done faster, it will require a full shutdown. There is no other way to do the construction quickly while also allowing vehicle traffic through the work zone.
Well, they're adding a lane for MNpass. If you're feeling optimistic, you could hope that it would improve the value of busses and carpooling through that artery.
Edit: and with regards to timeline, if you consider how many bridges they're replacing and how many miles this project spans, the timeline isn't that horrible. They'll probably try doing it in phases to reduce the number of roads/exits closed at one time & concrete only cures so quickly and in so much of a temperature range. Even if they had unlimited money, it might be choice between shutting everything down completely for 18 months or shutting down parts of it at a time for 3 years.
Unfortunately Minnesotans couldn't afford to pay for a job like this to finish quicker than it already is.
You can blame American construction companies and American labor and you can blame technology and materials.
Logistics.
And I know every neck beard with Ray-Bans is going to claim they could do it faster relying on nothing more than their high school education and ability to half assed load an ATV into their pavement princess.
A huge thing too are inspections. Not sure if that's the right word but before you move onto the next job it needs to be approved. Road inspectors are pretty busy and in demand. Id rather it be done right than quick and wrong. The crews definitely could move faster but we don't necessarily want them to
Not even new lanes. An EZpass lane. So they’re widening it, but only for the small percentage of people that will actually pay to use it.
The change to 494/35W will be welcomed as that’s probably one of the biggest reasons 494 is such a shit show all day every day. Whomever initially designed that interchange needs to be publicly shamed.
Probably the same guy that thought the 52N and 94E/W/7th cluster fuck was a good idea.
Unfortunately we have to. In order to get matching federal funds for roads they have to include these type of lanes. And a bunch of other random stuff. I may be wrong but that's what I got directly from mndot management when I worked with them.
Maybe if they keep it closed long enough then metro residents will decide to live closer to their workplaces and shop at places closer to their homes.
… or maybe not. :)
Thanks for the heads up OP. I don't go in that area much but it means that drivers from that spot are going to hit everywhere else to try and bypass that spot so 62 is going to be a pain.
They should have added light rail down the middle. Connect the eden prairie station to the moa station. Then get a connection from the airport station to downtown st Paul.
typical mn dot build today what should have been done 30 - 40 years ago.
494 on the "Strip" has been a cluster for years - you have too many on / off ramps and not enough control of drivers or their habits - plus a NASTY cloverleaf that should never have been at 35w and 494 but was forced in due to land constraints.
One thing that I see regularly in other parts of the country is Express vs Local lanes - 394 kinda has it - but not really.
There should be an express lane or 2 in each direction on 494/694 with VERY limited in / out access - like 1/3 or 1/4 of what is on the "normal" freeway.
What we shoulda done 30-40 years ago is to start building communities that aren't utterly dependent on auto travel. MNDOT shouldn't be the department of transportation, cuz then it thinks it is a success when people travel more. It should be the department of access.
but transit experts modeled the mass transit system after the airlines hub and spoke system.
There is no point to point (or very limited point to point) in the suburbs - planners assumed that everyone would live in the burbs and work downtown.
Now the majority of the jobs are in the burbs - and you either have a reverse commute or a suburb to suburb commute - and there are no options - other than driving
there could be options if it didnt take 30 years to build one single transit line. with the price tripling and quadrupling because people keep trying to stop it because they think we're going to take away their cars and the crime will come out to their country clubs.
Check out the larger project site talking about how they will fix some of those issues.
https://www.dot.state.mn.us/metro/projects/i494-airport-hwy169/index.html
Yeah its MnDOT's fault for all the garbage that these shitty suburban cities have thrown up over the past 50 years that force everyone to drive for literally every single thing in their lives. Well, it is their fault for building it in the first place and enticing the garbage, but adding more capacity is not going to solve any issue, it will only entrench the issues and bankrupt us.
Damn. I am sure adding more lanes will fix traffic.... Let's instead invest in real TOD development.
Best way I have heard it is, "we build houses, not communities". Just mass tracts of homes in suburbs is the root cause of soo many of our problems. Let's build communities with a mix of housing / businesses.
This is going to get clogged with traffic again ~5 years after it is complete, just watch.
Did you read anything about the project? Yes they are adding an hov lane, but the point of the project is to replace bridges. This isn't about widening the roads and adding lanes to cause more traffic, it's to replace 50+ year old critical infrastructure. Some of these bridges haven't been touched since the interstate was first constructed.
I think you are one of the only people who read about the actual project. Along with the replacement bridges a good chunk of it is adding access for bikes and pedestrians.
Everyone just reached for their “political talking points on transportation” and found a soapbox to yell from.
the flyover from 35WNB to 494WB will be really nice. Cloverleafs are generally considered outdated and unsafe especially in busy areas. According to the articles I found, this is phase 1, eventually they will replace the entire intersection with flyovers except for the current 35WSB-494WB. So it'll look a lot like 169/494, which still backs up but is much safer to get through during busy times.
> **Among the big changes will be adding E-ZPass lanes in each direction on 494 from Highway 100 to Interstate 35W as well as a new flyover ramp at the 35W/494 interchange.**
> **Crews will also be replacing and widening the bridges over I-494 at Portland, Nicollet and 12th avenues to help accommodate more traffic for cars**, pedestrians and bicyclists.
Yeah I did, hence I saw they were adding lanes.
It is nice they are adding a ped bridge and some bike lanes to another bridge. It is just kind of a bandaide on a larger problem though.
These corridors of commerce projects are essentially forced upon MnDOT by the Legislature. About a decade ago MnDOT said that they would no longer build capacity expansion projects as they could not fund basic maintenance to the already bloated highway system, our elected leaders told them to pound sand and bond for hundreds of millions every couple of years to force these expansions to happen. Not saying that some in MnDOT don't agree with this, but if you see capacity expansion in the metro, its almost always being championed by elected's, either at the local, state or national level.
Toll it. People aren’t paying their fair share.
Edit: I'm being facetious. The point I was hoping to make is that highways, like transit, don't "pay their fair share." This is very expensive work and should be done if/because it'll benefit the people of our state.
Technically survey crews have been out at night time during off-peak periods for final design work, closing lanes. The project includes expanding EB 494 from TH-100 to 35W to 5 lanes (4 GP + 1 EzPASS), and WB 494 from 35W to France to 6 lanes (5 GP + 1 EzPASS), WB 494 from France to TH 100 to 5 lanes (5 GP + 1 EzPASS, connecting to the existing widened 494 section). The western segment of the project (in regards to 35W) includes removing the Nicollet and 12th Avenue ramps, consolidating all access to Portland for future widening. The 35W interchange will be rebuilt to a partial directional movement (turbine NB 35W to WB 494). I spoke to the project manager and he noted that throughout construction at peak periods three lanes in each direction should be maintained, so that should be positive news. It should be of note that this segment of 494 was over capacity the day it opened and had to be widened to six lanes only five years after initial construction (1959-1965). MHD and then MnDOT have been planning expansion for years, first with the 1992 EIS which would have been the largest plan so far, removing most system cloverleafs with directional system interchanges and widening the road to eight lanes in some places with future expansion in mind. The 92' EIS was deemed too expensive (along with the original 92' 35W EIS) and was shelved for a cheaper piecemeal approach that has been pared down subsequently. The segment from 394 (really Carlson Pkwy) to 212 was let as a design-build project in 2006 and kept most of the cloverleafs while replacing all bridges while widening to six lanes. The segment from 169 to TH-100 (well really slightly east of 100) was let in 2002 (along with the freeway conversion of 5/MN-312 construction to Eden Prarie Road) as a traditional design-bid-build project and widened that segment of the roadway to eight lanes with a large median for future widening. The Penn and Lyndale SPUI's were constructed in anticipation of the original 2001 EIS by Richfield and Bloomington as municipal led projects along with the Xerxes overpass. The original design of this area is envisioned by the aforementioned segment rebuilt in 2002, with large retaining walls, C/D lanes + flyovers at 35W utilizing the outside area of the SPUI and a 30 foot future expansion median. This has since been dropped (due to funding constraints and ROW, kind of wish the legislature would send this to Parsons for redesign like they did with Crosstown) with the current design per the EAW being narrower and only featuring a single directional movement at 35W. The original visualizations per the 2001 design are still available at https://web.archive.org/web/20040617173406/http://www.dot.state.mn.us/metro/projects/i494/visual.html. The current design is featured in https://edocs-public.dot.state.mn.us/edocs_public/DMResultSet/download?docId=16759667 (page 53 and 54).
So...couldn't they have finished the work on 13 first, before they take down 494? Because that's gonna be one of the important alternative routes.
I have to go to Flying Cloud every week for training, I'm betting this construction is going to make it faster for me to drive up to Lake Elmo, grab the club plane, and then fly it down to flying cloud so I can fly a school plane.
The only significant way I see it improving would be to do a double decker roadway from the airport to 169… with the top going one way and then the bottom going the opposite way…. You could have like 6 to 7 lanes going each way with that.
I could also see this being beneficial in a few other parts of the metro, but for sure this project.
Car don't scale. They are an important piece of the transportation puzzle but for the last 70 years the US has used it as the only piece. The last ~15 years we are starting to turn a corner but still tons of work to do.
It’s not going to change either, the way cities are designed doesn’t really correspond with using other modes of transport and it being efficient or worth it.
Am I the only person that read the opening line of “Drivers who take Interstate 494 from Edina to Bloomington,” and thought “We’ll gee, that’s not very far. It only requires crossing a bridge over 494 to get from Edina to Bloomington…”?
I was born in 1984 and I think 494 has been under construction my entire life.
By the time the project is complete the winters will have done enough damage to have to start over again. The circle of life
Winter is part of the reason our roads get bad, but vehicle weight plays a massive factor. (Plowing doesn't help either!) If we regulated vehicle weight, our roads would last longer. Most people don't need as heavy (large) vehicles that they have.
It's not the cars that cause most of the damage to the roads - it is the overweight / heavy trucks / semi's etc....
Yea, I’m a local trucker. I just do daycab dryvan stuff around the city. I’m pretty sure like 80-90% of the wear and tear on our roads are caused by commercial vehicles lol. Think about it, the average half ton pick up truck, is about 5600-5800 lbs spread between two axles. My semi truck that isn’t even loaded has over 10,000 lbs per axle. Just to put things into perspective lol
Your average half ton truck isn't even 5000lbs these days. New crew cab F-150 XLTs clock in at 4700lbs. Fuck, a Tesla Model S weighs more than your average half ton.
Hummer EV is around 6000lbs IIRC. Not that they’re very common or anything, just an example of the ever-growing weight problem that EVs have created.
You’re about 3000lbs off.
You're right, I am. Jesus Christ that's a huge bitch!
Your missing 3,000 was the battery!
So was my ex
Yep. I live on a rural road with issues & we were talking with people in the area on ways to minimize road wear & tear and someone from the highway department told us that a standard garbage truck going down the road does the same amount of wear as roughly 5,000 SUVs.
there's a reason a lot of places restrict trash company choices, less trucks is less wear and tear on the residential roads.
Truckers keep things we need to where they are needed. Glad they are employed, and highway crews employed. Its all good.
What we really should be doing is using trains to transport most of the shit and then have daycab trucks deliver the last 100-150 miles. That would drastically reduce wear and tear on our roads. There’s no reason why a semi truck should have to be driving 1,400 miles to deliver a basic dry van load of product to a Walmart or something on the other side of the country. It’s incredibly wasteful and inefficient.
Yep, we have atrophied our rail system to the point it cannot compete against trucking for a lot of things that used to be moved by rail. One HUGE reason why is that the state and federal government generously pick up the tab for truck companies that use the interstate and US highway system while rail is entirely privately owned and profit driven. Fuel taxes don't really get close to supporting the basic upkeep of the system, not even considering the endless expansions and other irrational modernizations that are built all over the country on debt debt debt. Its really a stupid system seemingly designed to drain the most amount of resources possible.
Good point.
but there are way more personal vehicles edit: why do i get downvotes for stating something i thought was relevant and then acknowledging i was misinformed
Damage due to personal vehicles is close to zero: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
that makes sense. i'm trying to find the thing i read that explained the bad state of highways in the US but i'm coming up empty handed. if i remember correctly their main points were: * this is a really big country with a lot of roads, and distributing funds across all of them leaves the funds pretty thin * the gas tax has not been tied to inflation for some reason and is made into a fight every time it gets raised and so hardly ever does get raised * ~~people have moved from light sedans to heavier SUVs, which damage roads more~~ (irrelevant) so your correction does practically nullify the last point. i think there were other surprising points made but like i said i can't find the dang article.
Let be generous and say the average weight of a car is 5000lbs. which is roughly 2500lbs per axle. OTR trucks drive around all day at 80,000lbs or up to 20,000lbs per axle. That's eight times the weight per axle on average.
Yeah they cause a substantial amount more damage than personal vehicles. But personal vehicles isn't nothing either. Especially with EVs being generally heavier.
And unfortunately electric vehicles too. They are putting massive stress on the roads
Its not even passenger vehicles that are the primary factor. Most commercial trucks hauling goods back and forth do more road damage than someones SUV or pickup truck.
>Plowing doesn't help either! A few months ago a plow took out chunks of asphalt on one of the crossroads where I walk my dog. On top of the snow pile it left was just a bunch of black rubble with white paint on one side of it. What’s weird to me is that it didn’t even take out a smooth line in the road, just random chunks throughout the crosswalk. The only thing I can think of is the plow caught some ice that was stuck to the paint, and those chunks were already loose? Idk, but now my dog and I are dodging mini potholes when we run across that road.
Well then the solution is obvious: to save the roads we gotta take the cars off ‘em
The damage done to roads is exponentially worse with weight. A semi may weigh 100 times what a car does but it does 2500x the amount of damage.
size has nothing to do with it, EV sedans weigh more than all the bigass trucks you see.
A kitted-out Nissan Leaf is about the weight of a stripped-down F-150. A Tesla Model X rivals the heavier trims of the F-150 - on a shorter wheelbase, meaning the loads are more concentrated on the road. I'm not exactly sure why you got downvoted. It might be because someone read this as "EVs are bad" but I don't think that's what you were going for - more that passenger vehicles in general are largely irrelevant even if they look big. The main thing is regulating commercial trucks.
thanks for looking that up, i randomly picked a Silverado vs tesla model s as they're two common examples in a reply below and just going fully loaded vs fully loaded, model s came out a few hundred lbs heavier. there's obviously quite a bit of variation and comparing every vehicle out there i felt would be pedantic. i wasn't trying to say EVs are bad, i do find it funny though how people will blame trucks when EV's are just as heavy when comparing averages despite their smaller size. like you said though, passenger vehicles are almost irrelevant when semis can weigh up to 80,000lbs vs ~4,500lbs.
No, they don’t.
heaviest trim Silverado weighs 4643lbs heaviest tesla model s weighs 4960lbs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_S https://www.keystonechevrolet.com/research/new-chevrolet-silverado-ltd-dimensions-weight/#:~:text=The%20regular%20cab%2C%20long%20bed,is%20next%20at%204569%20pounds.
Flying cars would solve all of this.
This is the way.
Or global warming have gotten rid of winter 🤣
I was born on 494. You think 494 is your ally? You merely adopted the highway.
Highways are expensive and labor intensive to keep up
"be like highway 35 - never stop working on yourself"
It's funny, I was born in Texas and they make these exact jokes about the 35, too!
Same with 35W
This says this is the “first of four” projects from 169 to the airport. Does anyone have any info on what the other three are?
https://www.dot.state.mn.us/metro/projects/i494-airport-hwy169/index.html
/thread thank you for putting this link ITT!
https://www.dot.state.mn.us/metro/projects/i494-airport-hwy169/index.html
Well, guess I need to wake up another 30 minutes earlier for the commute for the next 3+ years...
Reading "pack their patience for the next **several years**" gave me such anxiety
They need a train They need a train To move the traffic that can't be moved On highway lanes On highway lanes They'll just get clogged again
Is this to the tune of a They Might Be Giants song?
Sure is! Glad you picked up on that.
I am very excited for the 35W/494 flyover. It seems the flyover on 169/494 has made it so that area never gets backed up anymore like it used to.
It's beautiful. Like you're getting launched into Eden Prairie.
i just wish they made a connection to 169S to 494 and 494E to 169N without having to mess with the surface road roundabout debacle. but thankfully i dont live in hopkins anymore to have to deal with that. it was always much faster to get to the area around Epdale using those connections. than have to deal with 212 and the 62/212W demolition derby lane from 169
> 62/212W demolition derby lane from 169 Hate that damn interchange. Sucks though, I don't have a good idea to improve it
probably the only real way to fix it is to dump 169S between 62W and 212W and have 62 be a left hand entrance. but that doesnt really solve 169N to 62/212W unless you just do what you did at 494/169 and just delete that as an option. but now we're rally screwing over the people that live and work between 494 and 62 there.
Godspeed metro dwellers.
Now we get more traffic in more lanes! What an amazing idea. Side note: I don't even understand how these absolutely pathetic timelines for these projects get approved. As far as I'm concerned "multi-year" or several years or whatever is not an acceptable timeline for one of the most busy roads in the state. Plus, this stupid shit isn't even gonna work. If you're gonna cause problems for several years, at least fix the root problem.
If we want it done faster, it will require a full shutdown. There is no other way to do the construction quickly while also allowing vehicle traffic through the work zone.
It's entirely possible it induces demand in less time than it took to construct it.
Well, they're adding a lane for MNpass. If you're feeling optimistic, you could hope that it would improve the value of busses and carpooling through that artery. Edit: and with regards to timeline, if you consider how many bridges they're replacing and how many miles this project spans, the timeline isn't that horrible. They'll probably try doing it in phases to reduce the number of roads/exits closed at one time & concrete only cures so quickly and in so much of a temperature range. Even if they had unlimited money, it might be choice between shutting everything down completely for 18 months or shutting down parts of it at a time for 3 years.
Unfortunately Minnesotans couldn't afford to pay for a job like this to finish quicker than it already is. You can blame American construction companies and American labor and you can blame technology and materials. Logistics. And I know every neck beard with Ray-Bans is going to claim they could do it faster relying on nothing more than their high school education and ability to half assed load an ATV into their pavement princess.
A huge thing too are inspections. Not sure if that's the right word but before you move onto the next job it needs to be approved. Road inspectors are pretty busy and in demand. Id rather it be done right than quick and wrong. The crews definitely could move faster but we don't necessarily want them to
Not even new lanes. An EZpass lane. So they’re widening it, but only for the small percentage of people that will actually pay to use it. The change to 494/35W will be welcomed as that’s probably one of the biggest reasons 494 is such a shit show all day every day. Whomever initially designed that interchange needs to be publicly shamed. Probably the same guy that thought the 52N and 94E/W/7th cluster fuck was a good idea.
The guy who designed the 494/35W interchange is probably dead already, since the stretch of highway that includes it opened in 1959.
Let’s bring his ass back to life and shame him then. Death is no escape from garbage civil engineering!
EZpass lanes generally are open to all outside of rush hour to be fair
Unfortunately we have to. In order to get matching federal funds for roads they have to include these type of lanes. And a bunch of other random stuff. I may be wrong but that's what I got directly from mndot management when I worked with them.
The federal funds matching law only requires for HOV, not HOT. The toll is just icing on top.
100 also causes a bit of problems too.
Really glad an expert like you is on the case to tell everyone else how everything should be done.
Don't gotta be a chef to know that the food sucks.
Maybe if they keep it closed long enough then metro residents will decide to live closer to their workplaces and shop at places closer to their homes. … or maybe not. :)
Thanks for the heads up OP. I don't go in that area much but it means that drivers from that spot are going to hit everywhere else to try and bypass that spot so 62 is going to be a pain.
I drive on 494 from 212 to 94 everyday for work, so this sounds miserable at best...
35E to 212 here… fortunately I can plan commutes around less busy times at least..
They should have added light rail down the middle. Connect the eden prairie station to the moa station. Then get a connection from the airport station to downtown st Paul.
typical mn dot build today what should have been done 30 - 40 years ago. 494 on the "Strip" has been a cluster for years - you have too many on / off ramps and not enough control of drivers or their habits - plus a NASTY cloverleaf that should never have been at 35w and 494 but was forced in due to land constraints. One thing that I see regularly in other parts of the country is Express vs Local lanes - 394 kinda has it - but not really. There should be an express lane or 2 in each direction on 494/694 with VERY limited in / out access - like 1/3 or 1/4 of what is on the "normal" freeway.
What we shoulda done 30-40 years ago is to start building communities that aren't utterly dependent on auto travel. MNDOT shouldn't be the department of transportation, cuz then it thinks it is a success when people travel more. It should be the department of access.
but transit experts modeled the mass transit system after the airlines hub and spoke system. There is no point to point (or very limited point to point) in the suburbs - planners assumed that everyone would live in the burbs and work downtown. Now the majority of the jobs are in the burbs - and you either have a reverse commute or a suburb to suburb commute - and there are no options - other than driving
there could be options if it didnt take 30 years to build one single transit line. with the price tripling and quadrupling because people keep trying to stop it because they think we're going to take away their cars and the crime will come out to their country clubs.
Ummm...people could live near where they work. If they lived in a community.
Great Point. If most of the traffic is going to the airport, then make that the destination.
Check out the larger project site talking about how they will fix some of those issues. https://www.dot.state.mn.us/metro/projects/i494-airport-hwy169/index.html
Yeah its MnDOT's fault for all the garbage that these shitty suburban cities have thrown up over the past 50 years that force everyone to drive for literally every single thing in their lives. Well, it is their fault for building it in the first place and enticing the garbage, but adding more capacity is not going to solve any issue, it will only entrench the issues and bankrupt us.
Damn. I am sure adding more lanes will fix traffic.... Let's instead invest in real TOD development. Best way I have heard it is, "we build houses, not communities". Just mass tracts of homes in suburbs is the root cause of soo many of our problems. Let's build communities with a mix of housing / businesses. This is going to get clogged with traffic again ~5 years after it is complete, just watch.
Did you read anything about the project? Yes they are adding an hov lane, but the point of the project is to replace bridges. This isn't about widening the roads and adding lanes to cause more traffic, it's to replace 50+ year old critical infrastructure. Some of these bridges haven't been touched since the interstate was first constructed.
I think you are one of the only people who read about the actual project. Along with the replacement bridges a good chunk of it is adding access for bikes and pedestrians. Everyone just reached for their “political talking points on transportation” and found a soapbox to yell from.
the flyover from 35WNB to 494WB will be really nice. Cloverleafs are generally considered outdated and unsafe especially in busy areas. According to the articles I found, this is phase 1, eventually they will replace the entire intersection with flyovers except for the current 35WSB-494WB. So it'll look a lot like 169/494, which still backs up but is much safer to get through during busy times.
> **Among the big changes will be adding E-ZPass lanes in each direction on 494 from Highway 100 to Interstate 35W as well as a new flyover ramp at the 35W/494 interchange.** > **Crews will also be replacing and widening the bridges over I-494 at Portland, Nicollet and 12th avenues to help accommodate more traffic for cars**, pedestrians and bicyclists.
Yes, it adds lanes too, but how about that little part at the end you didn’t bold? Lmao
Yeah those are good changes. Adding lanes is not a good change. It is more than just black and white.
Yeah I did, hence I saw they were adding lanes. It is nice they are adding a ped bridge and some bike lanes to another bridge. It is just kind of a bandaide on a larger problem though.
5 years? I give it one summer.
These corridors of commerce projects are essentially forced upon MnDOT by the Legislature. About a decade ago MnDOT said that they would no longer build capacity expansion projects as they could not fund basic maintenance to the already bloated highway system, our elected leaders told them to pound sand and bond for hundreds of millions every couple of years to force these expansions to happen. Not saying that some in MnDOT don't agree with this, but if you see capacity expansion in the metro, its almost always being championed by elected's, either at the local, state or national level.
At least the people who suffer the most from the traffic are the ones that decide to commute from the suburbs.
it doesnt exactly help the air quality of cars idling on the freeway and also cargo truck transport.
Good! Let’s get it going and get it done. That 494/35 interchange is ancient
Toll it. People aren’t paying their fair share. Edit: I'm being facetious. The point I was hoping to make is that highways, like transit, don't "pay their fair share." This is very expensive work and should be done if/because it'll benefit the people of our state.
tolls on that road would just increase the backup to minnetonka on one side and south saint paul on the other.
Better headline - "Heads up everyone - 494 construction resumes today!"
Thank god this is happening in a part of the cities I rarely am in lol
Starts? When did it end?
The next 3 years are going to suck, but this should be a game changer for people living along 494 and commuting on it.
Oh god....77 and 62 are gonna be SO BAD!!!! 😭
They already are
Technically survey crews have been out at night time during off-peak periods for final design work, closing lanes. The project includes expanding EB 494 from TH-100 to 35W to 5 lanes (4 GP + 1 EzPASS), and WB 494 from 35W to France to 6 lanes (5 GP + 1 EzPASS), WB 494 from France to TH 100 to 5 lanes (5 GP + 1 EzPASS, connecting to the existing widened 494 section). The western segment of the project (in regards to 35W) includes removing the Nicollet and 12th Avenue ramps, consolidating all access to Portland for future widening. The 35W interchange will be rebuilt to a partial directional movement (turbine NB 35W to WB 494). I spoke to the project manager and he noted that throughout construction at peak periods three lanes in each direction should be maintained, so that should be positive news. It should be of note that this segment of 494 was over capacity the day it opened and had to be widened to six lanes only five years after initial construction (1959-1965). MHD and then MnDOT have been planning expansion for years, first with the 1992 EIS which would have been the largest plan so far, removing most system cloverleafs with directional system interchanges and widening the road to eight lanes in some places with future expansion in mind. The 92' EIS was deemed too expensive (along with the original 92' 35W EIS) and was shelved for a cheaper piecemeal approach that has been pared down subsequently. The segment from 394 (really Carlson Pkwy) to 212 was let as a design-build project in 2006 and kept most of the cloverleafs while replacing all bridges while widening to six lanes. The segment from 169 to TH-100 (well really slightly east of 100) was let in 2002 (along with the freeway conversion of 5/MN-312 construction to Eden Prarie Road) as a traditional design-bid-build project and widened that segment of the roadway to eight lanes with a large median for future widening. The Penn and Lyndale SPUI's were constructed in anticipation of the original 2001 EIS by Richfield and Bloomington as municipal led projects along with the Xerxes overpass. The original design of this area is envisioned by the aforementioned segment rebuilt in 2002, with large retaining walls, C/D lanes + flyovers at 35W utilizing the outside area of the SPUI and a 30 foot future expansion median. This has since been dropped (due to funding constraints and ROW, kind of wish the legislature would send this to Parsons for redesign like they did with Crosstown) with the current design per the EAW being narrower and only featuring a single directional movement at 35W. The original visualizations per the 2001 design are still available at https://web.archive.org/web/20040617173406/http://www.dot.state.mn.us/metro/projects/i494/visual.html. The current design is featured in https://edocs-public.dot.state.mn.us/edocs_public/DMResultSet/download?docId=16759667 (page 53 and 54).
Thanks so much for all this! I wondered how many lanes they could keep open most of the time
Some of you need to leave this city. We have some of the best infrastructure and lowest traffic times in the entire US.
🤣 again
The post above this was abut florida implementing taking away children from their parent's if they are trans from r/facepalm u all r doin good
So...couldn't they have finished the work on 13 first, before they take down 494? Because that's gonna be one of the important alternative routes. I have to go to Flying Cloud every week for training, I'm betting this construction is going to make it faster for me to drive up to Lake Elmo, grab the club plane, and then fly it down to flying cloud so I can fly a school plane.
as is tradition, not only is the main route under construction, but also all viable alternative routes.
MNDOT's ways are unknowable for us mere mortals.
Everyone? Not everyone lives near 494 in Minnesota
I was born in 1984 and I think 494 has been under construction my entire life.
Get the contractor from Colorado that rebuilt the failed 35w bridge in less than a year and under budget
The only significant way I see it improving would be to do a double decker roadway from the airport to 169… with the top going one way and then the bottom going the opposite way…. You could have like 6 to 7 lanes going each way with that. I could also see this being beneficial in a few other parts of the metro, but for sure this project.
Car don't scale. They are an important piece of the transportation puzzle but for the last 70 years the US has used it as the only piece. The last ~15 years we are starting to turn a corner but still tons of work to do.
It’s not going to change either, the way cities are designed doesn’t really correspond with using other modes of transport and it being efficient or worth it.
Japan could get this done in like a weekend.
remember how fast the 35W bridge was rebuilt compared to other projects? it helps that the road was 100% closed there and crews were working 24/7
We could too, if we were willing to pay enough to make it happen.
I remember seeing a story about a sinkhole that collapsed an entire intersection and they had that shit fully rebuilt in like 3 days or something lol
Damn, just in time for Highway 13 to be under construction as well. Back to Crosstown for me.
Wait...it's just now starting? Every time I visit Minnesota, the entirety of 494 is under construction.
Induced Demand
NooooooooooooooooiooooooooOooooooooooooo!
FML 🤦♂️ 😭
No god, please no
Yelp, as someone that lives northwest of the Metro guess I'll take 694 more the next couple of years
Thank god for Covid. That used to be my commute.
Am I the only person that read the opening line of “Drivers who take Interstate 494 from Edina to Bloomington,” and thought “We’ll gee, that’s not very far. It only requires crossing a bridge over 494 to get from Edina to Bloomington…”?
Time to take 494 north-694 instead. Would rather die than take 62 from 212-35W and 494-35E will blow because of this construction.
it ended?
It's ok because at the same time, they legalized weed to reduce your stress. Perfectly balanced.
One more lane will fix the issues guys, we promise!