We begin today with a photo that, at first blush, might not seem to have a heck of a lot to do with transportation, but here it is.

Pop quiz: Where was the picture taken?

1. In the desert outside Las Vegas
2. On the moon
3. At the site of a proposed condo development in downtown Minneapolis

If you picked No. 3, not only do you have a keen sense of humor about the local real-estate market, but you’ve also answered correctly — Roadguy snapped the picture yesterday when he was walking to the riverfront.

Dusty landscapes and real-estate development both play a role in today’s mailbag item from alert reader Morg, who included a satellite photo from Google (a version is at the end of this post). Read on:

The attached photo is of the future beltway in Las Vegas. Notice how they’re building it: Since the sprawl hasn’t quite filled in and traffic flow doesn’t require it, they are not building the full freeway. Rather, they built the frontage road system and ramps first, which are used by traffic until the point in time where the mainline’s built.

The point is, they planned ahead and built wisely. Not only is the groundwork being laid early, keeping down land costs, but it is also being done as cheap as possible (something MNDOT can relate to) by only doing the frontage system first. Also, it is being built as efficiently as possible by getting the road up and running and then being able to construct the freeway as needed without disrupting traffic (something MNDOT cannot relate to).

I imagine that just like we send teams to Denver and Portland to see how things SHOULD be done, other cities send teams here to see our bottlenecks, cloverleafs at major junctions, common stretches of freeway (Crosstown, 35E/694 weave), freeways built with no foresight that turn into gridlocked surface streets (see Cedar Ave. in Apple Valley) and learn how things SHOULD NOT be done.

Roadguy poked around on the Internet a bit and found that, indeed, Nevada is building part of a beltway in much the way Morg describes. It’s an approach that reminds Roadguy of how, when Hwy. 100 was built here, it appeared to some people to be in the middle of nowhere.

So the question is: Does Minnesota look far enough ahead in terms of its freeways? (Hwy. 610, Hwy. 212, etc. come to mind.) How do we compare to more booming metro areas? Should MnDOT be building frontage roads (or transit lines) in less-developed areas while it’s cheaper? What about the needs in the urban core? Also, if you’ve ever driven in Las Vegas, is there anything you saw there that we might want to emulate here? (Aside from the total lack of ice, of course.) Add your pertinent, pithy and non-didactic thoughts in the comments below.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 9:56 am and is filed under Main, Transportation conversations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.