Uneven pavement: How are Minnesota’s roads?
Posted on June 11th, 2007 – 6:10 AMBy Roadguy
Roadguy is about to welcome some houseguests who hail from Phoenix, and their visit is timely for a couple of reasons. One, it’s going to be fairly toasty around here this week, so the family will feel right at home. And two, today’s Strib has a big story about pavement, and people from Phoenix know about pavement. They’ve got lots of parking lots and wide streets, and Roadguy is pretty sure it was in Phoenix that someone once showed him a yard that had been completely paved over with concrete painted green to resemble a lawn. (It doesn’t get much more low-maintenance than that, but things get tricky if you’re into rugby or Jarts.)
Roadguy isn’t as interested in Arizona asphalt as he is in the stuff closer to home, of course, so he’d like to hear your thoughts: How do Minnesota’s roads seem to you? Has the pavement situation gotten better or worse? Are there particular highways that you’d give special attention to? Share your thoughts below. (And if Roadguy is misremembering and the green-concrete yard is actually in, say, Bloomington, feel free to comment on that as well.)
Also, a Roadguy reminder: A bit of westbound I-94 north of the Lowry Tunnel is down to one lane two lanes starting today. Click here for a Strib update.
25 Responses to "Uneven pavement: How are Minnesota’s roads?"
Roadguy, I’ve been meaning to email you about some uneven pavement and look! You post about it in your blog. 
Now, I live in the Lowry Hill East area and like to take Lake Street all the day down until it becomes Marshall in St. Paul. My problem? After all those months of road construction in 2006, which was actually a blessing in disguise as LESS people used Lake Street and made my commutes rather painless, what was left behind was a smooth road until you reach 21st Ave. just before the Hiawatha Light Rail. Suddenly, you hit a large ridge that is over an inch, which doesn’t seem like much, until you hit it at 30 mph. I always hope to get a RED light at this intersection so I can stop and do not need to 1. Hit this mini-ridge at 30+ mph or 2. Have the person behind me honk and wonder why I’m slowing down at a green light. I know they’ll figure it out in a second when they hit the ridge, but until then…why spend all that money to redo the road and then leave that big uneven lip behind?
It seems to me the traffic lanes are better than they used to be, either that or cars are better than they used to be. However, as a long-time motorcycle rider I have noticed more deterioration of the pavement between the lanes, particularly on the freeways. On a bike this can make it extremely hazardous to change lanes. This reminds me of another issue I have noticed. Several years ago I started noticing that the paint they use to mark lanes, crosswalks, etc is much, much more slippery than it used to be. It gets particularly bad when wet. This is another significant hazard on a bike, but even in my car I often hear my tires chirp as I am starting out across a painted line. Does anyone else notice this? I don’t think it is just my imagination.
Roads are much less expensive to maintain down south where they don’t have the salt, the snow, and the potholes.
I’m sure, when Pawlenty wanted to trim the budget, he went right to his future boss John McCain for advice. Being from a state where roads are cheap, ol’ pal McCain directed him to cut road funding and let the next Governor deal with it in a few years.
Too bad Minnesota’s roads deteriorate faster than Arizona’s, and too bad we had a chance to put some money towards it now and passed it up. Too bad Minnesotans are going to pay more for it in car repairs and more costly road mantainence later on.
Well, in Phoenix, they passed a tax increase and are actually building a bunch of new highway miles and expanding transit. Meanwhile, we just sit around here stewing in traffic.
pjm - yes! We’ve noticed that too. Even on “dry” days, our tires will slip on crosswalk paint once in a while. It’s unnerving. I can’t imagine how scary that is on a motorcycle.
Heh, the Strib article mentions MN-57, which has gotten to be very bad. I think about ten years ago they’d patched up the concrete joints with tar. I remember driving along there afterward and all that toilet paper (or whatever that paper is they use) was stretching as far as you could see. Once the paper wore off, watching all those black lines fly by caused the normally gray pavement to practically flicker on and off, almost enough to trigger an epileptic seizure.
Oh, and that worst part of Highway 57 is squarely in the district of Steve Sviggum…
Minneapolis streets seem to be deteriorating faster than they can be maintained. On my normal route, Minnehaha parkway, particularly between Cedar Ave & Minnehaha park is quite bad. 42nd street is also rough, the most noteworthy bad spot is between Chicago & Bloomington avenues.
I hope we are not going to blame the conditions of roads on a political party.
I take the bus home and we often use the shoulder of 35W south. It’s great for avoiding traffic, but I always sit on the left side of the bus, because the city doesn’t seem to pay any mind to the potholes STILL on the shoulders from winter (and it physically hurts you if sitting on the right side and going over one of those holes).
I understand fixing the road is more important overall, but if we’re so proud of our ‘shoulder system’, it doesn’t make any sense to ignore an entire piece of the road that these buses use.
Most of the drivers have to slow down a lot when a pothole or one of those frequent drains appear. But even when they do slow down, it’s still such a violent jolt experienced when going home.
I don’t blame the political parties; I blame the person. ‘Pawning Pawlenty’ is dispatching every budget problem to the next governor and they (and us, as taxpayers) will have to deal with. That is the same whether there’s a Republican, Democrat, or Independent in office. Pawlenty has left this state with a shoddy semblance of a budget for the next 2 years.
Sviggum certainly is no friend to transportation. People back in his district shouldn’t be surprised as MN-57 continues to worsen.
Sviggum is no transportation friend:
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/projects/ongoing/votetracker/legislator_view.php?id=134
As bad as that stretch of road (MN-57) might be, I’m sure it’s a much smoother ride in the back seat of a Town Car paid for by ADM–thanks for all the subsidies and support, Sviggum! We hope you continue to support rural Minnesota business while cutting funding for the roads that bring it in!
Wow. That’s all I have to say about that.
Well at least he finished up all the immediate state business and didn’t call a special session to deal with the remaining problems.
We wouldn’t want our dear governor to miss today’s chance to visit Iowa and be a talking head for the McCain campaign:
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/06/11/pawlentyiowa/
Roadguy is pretty sure it was in Phoenix that someone once showed him a yard that had been completely paved over with concrete painted green to resemble a lawn.
I used to live in the Phoenix area, and remember seing a few “lawns” like this, which was even funnier than the astroturf lawns. But the funniest day was when we saw someone actually mowing the astroturf!
Clearly, rural areas simply need to see the need for more mass transit. If you build your highway roads people will just end up using it. If they did have their road in the first place people wouldn’t be complaining about how it is falling about. People don’t create congestion, roads create congestion! Propose a bus lane on 57 and you’ll get your funding.
What’s with all the negativity today? Is the humid weather makin y’all a bit grouchy or what?
I’m not a big critic or fan of Tim P, but politics is about making trade-offs people. Would you have the state fix Hwy 57 and cut class sizes in schools, reduce state employee pay & benefits, or raise taxes even further? Hooray for Mssr’s Pawlenty & Sviggum not going that direction!!!
I’m all for voicing opinions and discussing possible solutions but I haven’t heard any of those yet. Keep in mind, we are all standing on the sidelines and criticizing those people who are in the game and trying to take action to fix the problems of this state. I don’t see TP “pawning” a P-O-S for the next governor to clean up, I think its a monumental task to find the resources to resolve every issue that exists in this state. Any governor could work at these problems for 10 full years and not resolve them all. So, we should only expect that the most pressing issues get top priority, and I, for one, think the roads in MN come in a distant 26th behind many other more important priorities.
Tri Guy,
No, it’s not about making trade-offs. That’s an attitude that comes from living in the Myth of Scarcity.
We are not a poor state! We can afford to make ALL of the things we need happen. Raising taxes is the way we do it. Taxes are the way we collectively express our values by investing in those things that are in the common good.
We can very easily solve our transportation problems. Solutions were put forth this session. The Governor and Republicans rejected them. And yes, Ed, that means the blame falls squarely on them.
And just to remind everyone of what the solution is: a 10 cent gas tax increase with provisions to index it to inflation and a 1/2 cent metro sales tax dedicated to public transit.
Anything less is a compromise. Possibly a very good political compromise, as with the 5 cent gas tax and sales tax split between roads & transit as passed the legislature this session. But a compromise solution doesn’t meet the full need.
Still, the compromise made this session was very reasonable and very fair.
Mayor Dan Ness of Alexandria had an excellent commentary on the package and the geographical cooperation it represented:
http://www.startribune.com/commentary/story/1220459.html
Eric, Mayor Ness features transit pretty prominently in his piece. Greater Minnesota officials definitely understand the need for transit. Right now six counties have ZERO transit service and most of the rest don’t have evening and weekend service. They have been screaming for funding to change this.
Humid weather doesn’t make me cranky, but Mondays sure do! So do articles about Pawlenty and roads in the Pioneer Press…
http://www.twincities.com/politics/ci_6078697
Why is it that Pawlenty now states that a gas tax increase is in ‘the menu of options’ yet he vetoed one less than a month ago?
He then goes on to say he will urge legislators to take ‘incremental steps’ towards a goal. I do not wish to be presume a negative outcome, but we’ve waited a long time and can’t afford the extra time to take these ‘incremental steps.’ What we needed was to give it our best shot and bite off as much as we could chew. The DFL transportation bill did that by and large. Much more so than this ‘lights-on’ budget we’re stuck with.
Every ‘incremental step’ we take costs us in inflation for delaying these projects, which both sides keep saying we need.
Tri Guy: I agree that a governor could work for 10 years on this issue and not resolve it. However, this governor has barely tried–as detailed by the front page article of the Twin Cities section of today’s STRIB. The way things look, Detroit may have better roads than us in a few years.
My car is old and has crummy shocks, so I probably notice potholes more than most, but I don’t ever remember the pavement being as bad as it is now. A few summers ago I blew out a rim on a pothole on 35W (near 26th Street), and the worst I see now is on 94 from the Mississippi River to Downtown… On some of them, the holes are so deep that the yellow gravel is bleeding out of them from underneath.
As for the taxes, yes government probably spends too much money, and there’s a lot of things, especially pet projects and earmarks on the national level, that need to be axed. But the state gas tax is pretty clearcut. And count me in on one that’s willing to pay more at the pump for something constructive instead of spending it on new wheels and tires and wasting it in traffic. Seems like the majority of legislators agreed.
Unless there’s corruption, everything we pay taxes for is something that, in theory, the majority of the people thought it was worth paying the tax for the benefit it brought. If a program or tax isn’t providing that return, then yes, it should be cut. But I haven’t heard many suggestions for what those programs might be, only sweeping generalizations.
Try driving around Linden Hills… Some of the roads are rippled with wrinkles… like the skin of an 80-year-old tanaholic.l
I should also add, on the subject of earmarks, that it’s often in the interest of individual politicians to hold back dedicated transportation funding. That way, road construction projects increasingly rely on special intervention by politicians to make the projects happen, and the politician can then claim personal credit for it. Case and point, the much-touted “Pawlenty-Molnau Transportation Package” of a few years ago (all on borrowed money, by the way) and the 5500+ earmarked pork-barrel projects in the last federal transportation bill, including the famous Alaska “Bridge to nowhere”. And don’t forget that each one of which required lobbying expenditures from the local governments just to get those.
In Linden Hills it’s called “traffic calming” and a civic virtue.
I’ve been hearing about the bad roads in rural MN continually since I moved here 30 years ago. Those I’m familiar with (Hwy. 52, Hwy. 371, Hwy. 10, Hwy. 6, Hwy 200, Hwy. 28, Hwy. 61, Hwy. 169, to name a few) are beautiful: smooth, well marked (including visible striping, a rare commodity in the metro), unrutted, well-drained and often with a wide, paved shoulder.
It’s been a long time since I drove Hwy. 57 but for the most part I think this business about poor rural roads in MN is just idle poor-mouthing. It’s an easy complaint because the majority of Minnesotans don’t drive any one of these roads. How can anyone really argue?
1. Having harsh winters is hard on our roads and with that in mind, our roads generally aren’t that bad. I wonder, however, if they couldn’t be better if they were built with a deeper bed. I don’t know how much more it would cost per mile but I’ve read that it pays off in the long term in that roads have a longer lifespan.
2. Speaking of uneven pavement, what happened to the recently completed section of 495 eastbound between the hwy. 5 exit and hwy 100? For a relatively new piece of road it is noticeably uneven between lanes and even in the same lane.
When I first got my license and started tooling around Shoreview, the big thing was the small chunk of Hamline Avenue, between Hwy. 96 where Snelling ended. The road had all these tire grooves, and if you got stuck in them, it was hard to get out.
Then they repaved it, but it was sort of a fun game with the grooves.
The other “uneven road” (but not quite) game I play when I go home is Snail Lake Blvd in Shoreview which has all these sewer grates (not potholes!) that can be sort of bumpy. I’ve mastered the art of weaving around said grates; its quite fun!
Truckerbiker=right! I think the roads are fine.
All this whining about the roads- what difference does it make? Everyone has 4×4’s anyway. We shouldn’t need any roads at all!
It ain’t a highway, but GOOD LORD, will someone please fix County Road B in Roseville, between Snelling and Fairview Avenues? That road has single-handedly given me and my family flat tires, poor alignment, and a massive pain in our literal and figurative necks. Sheesh.
