You Think Traffic At the “U” Is Bad Now?
By Mitch Berg
For those of you who always wondered “what if they could just swoop in and rip Washington Avenue out of the ground and toss it into space?”
We’re gonna find out!:
The University of Minnesota Board of Regents has approved a key agreement on the Central Corridor light rail project…The project includes $11 million for a transit and pedestrian mall on Washington Ave. The costs will be included in the budget submitted to the federal government.
I expect they’ll find people sitting in traffic around the East Bank so long they’ll actually form settlements up and down Huron Avenue.
July 11th, 2008 at 6:31 am
It’s not just you righties who are mad about this one. I’m a big fan of transit, but if we’re going to do it, we need to do it right. Washington Ave should be a tunnel, and most of the rest of the line should be elevated.
July 11th, 2008 at 9:29 am
Well, the good news is that I take the light rail when I am in that area, but see your point. Yeah, our gov’t pisses away so much money, you think they could come up with a way to fund a tunnel that will be used for the next 100 years. Urban planners in 2075 will be saying “when the light rail was put in around 2012, they chose to go at street level, which has caused headaches ever since”.
July 11th, 2008 at 10:55 am
The best thing to do might be to restrict traffic on Washington Avenue east of the River to Local Traffic Only for cars and trucks.
It would be a pain for me on occasion to get on the freeway or move over to University, but there is no real need to use Washington if you are heading to Prospect Park from downtown or South Minneapolis.
But there still might be horrendous traffic jams.
In the until now King of all Traffic Jams, Halloween of 1991, I was set to get off on Cedar Avenue just as a city bus slid sideways across all lanes of the exit ramp.
It literally took me one hour to cross the Washington Avenue bridge, as the entire university was getting out at the same time during that amazing snowfall. My normal 20 minute drive took two hours that day.
Let’s hope things like that don’t happen with Light Rail on Washington.
July 11th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Tunnels don’t necessarily last 100 years. Remember the problems with the one under the Chicago River a few years back? My granddad worked on that one in the 1940s or 1950s.