University Avenue is impassable to bicycle traffic now, but when the light rail is done . . . it\u2019ll still be impassable. Parking lane gone, trains down the middle,\u00a0buses\u00a0in the right lane and all the other frustrated motorists wedged between. So where are those cars and bikes now? On the adjacent parallel streets as far North as Minnehaha.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And down to Marshall and Selby. \u00a0The traffic nightmare hasn’t ebbed; just metastasized.<\/p>\n
\u201d Organizers said an overwhelming number of respondents think that there are already too many cars, often driving too fast, on Charles Avenue and that the street is unsafe for children. Residents also worried that traffic would increase when light-rail construction is complete.\u201d<\/p>\n
Well yeah, dummy: frustrated motorist traffic has had to self-divert to side streets because the largest, longest, busiest East-West throughway in the City has been completely shut down and it\u2019s never going to reopen to normal levels. This is news to you? You\u2019re just figuring this out now? Don\u2019t urban planners ever visit the sites of their glorious triumphs? Don\u2019t they read the papers (or SITD) to see the chaos and havoc they\u2019ve created? Why didn\u2019t they plan for it up front (or did they, but had to wait for a \u201ccrisis\u201d to arise so they could \u201csolve\u201d it)?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Joe has too much faith in\u00a0Wahhabi\u00a0transit activists. \u00a0They’re a little like post-modern German artists, the type that glumly intones “Art IS destruction and ugliness” as they unveil their latest, “installation”, a dancing man clad only with a jar holding a gutted cat pickled in urine.<\/p>\n
Like the post-moderns, the chaos – to drivers, anyway – is precisely the point<\/em>. \u00a0The goal<\/em>\u00a0is to make driving, and drivers, miserable. \u00a0And to them, it’s no matter if you deal with that misery by jumping on the train, or by expressing your anger, fulfilling their prophecy that drivers are base, benighted, spoiled, arrogant and above it all.<\/p>\nThey win either way.<\/p>\n
So naturally, the same urban planning geniuses who caused the problem on Charles are springing into action to make things even worse. The City will install bike lanes, traffic circles and speed bumps to slow traffic through the neighborhood. Cars that were shoved off University to make room for the train will be shoved off Charles to make room for the bikes. That\u2019s great in the summer but have you ever tried to plow snow around traffic circles and speed bumps? There\u2019s already one traffic circle on Charles and the snow ridges around it are a nightmare.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I know that circle. \u00a0The winter before last, the intersection was like an Andean goat path. \u00a0The side streets in that neighborhood are very narrow; it’s hard to get a plow around that circle – so it never went around the circle!<\/p>\n
The bicycles will be in storage but cars still won\u2019t be able to use the street. Might as well go all the way and tear up the tar completely, sod the street and turn Charles Avenue into lawn.<\/p>\n
Hey Mitch, get ready for even more motorists up your way, all of them late and angry. Should be . . . interesting.<\/p>\n
Joe Doakes<\/p>\n
Como Park<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Way ahead of you, Joe. \u00a0Traffic on Thomas, Marshall, Minnehaha and Selby is all up. \u00a0And the city is reacting the way it always does.<\/p>\n
Writing more traffic tickets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Twin Cities urban planners seem to think that if they just make driving a car inconvenient and headache-prone enough, drivers will throw in the towel, get a job downtown, and start riding the bus. Which seems to be the main impetus behind this initiative – turning Charles Street (which runs parallel to light-rail-construction-addled University, two […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trains-and-automobiles","category-st-paul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29016"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29018,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29016\/revisions\/29018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}