A roasting day like today is the perfect time to check out some mail from the Sunbelt. Alert reader R., who lives in Florida, has a question:

I recently made a business trip to Bemidji, MN, after flying from Fort Lauderdale to Minneapolis, I had a 4-hour drive to Bemidji where by chance I received a speeding ticket in Brainerd by a state trooper. My question is do you know of any ticket defense agencies in Crow Wing/Brainerd area? I can’t seam to find any through Google and tried the Ticket Clinic only to find out that they have 6 offices in MN just none that cover Brainerd/Crow Wing County. Thank you in advance.

Knock on wood, Roadguy has never had need for such defense, so he’s underinformed in this area. Perhaps his speedier readers have some suggestions?

Alert reader Scott, meanwhile, writes from Texas with a different sort of query:

Roadguy: It appears that after a few years we will be moving back to Minnesota from Texas. Living in San Antonio, and knowing Dallas and Houston freeways, it will be hard to come back to a city that I remember could not even manage a 6-lane loop! Down here they at least can build 8-12 lanes and in Houston up to 20. I know the old “argument” that you cannot build out of congestion, but is there any hope? We have been gone since 2003 and I cannot bear the news that 494 is still 4 lanes — eeeck!

Roadguy is able to report that, since Scott left town, at least a bit more of 494 is now six lanes, plus MnDOT’s bottleneck program has added some capacity on roads such as I-94 in Maplewood.

But “Is there any hope?” That’s too deep a question for a simple transportation blogger to answer, so Roadguy opens the floor to the philosophers among us; add your hopeful comments below.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 6:10 am and is filed under Transportation conversations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.