Bridge blues: A Duluth traffic jam
Posted on June 18th, 2008 – 6:05 AMBy Roadguy
It’s hard to take a picture of a traffic jam when you’re in it, but here’s a seriously cropped attempt at capturing the scene in Duluth late Tuesday afternoon (a day before this happened):
Roadguy is accustomed to sailing along on Duluth’s freeways, so the congestion came as a bit of a surprise. But it shouldn’t have — one of the two main routes between Duluth and Superior is having some work done:
The nearest freeway bridge, the famously named Bong bridge, is a couple of miles away, so the situation isn’t quite what Winona went through. But if we want better bridges, we’re probably going to have to get used to some level of disruption: a MnDOT news release about its bridge replacement program is here, a Strib look at St. Paul’s Lafayette bridge is here, an Associated Press list of some upcoming projects is here.
And speaking of disruption, if you had read earlier reports about Hwy. 61 being damaged by high water this month, Roadguy can personally testify that the road is entirely drive-worthy from Duluth to the Canadian border. So if $4-a-gallon gas is no problem, head on up to the North Shore.
15 Responses to "Bridge blues: A Duluth traffic jam"
There’s a much bigger issue here.
What the real crime is that in the 60’s and 70’s someone - some body of people constructed an awful highway system in the Twin Cities and Greater Minnesota. A system so awful that the main bridges are deteriotated in 40 yrs, and the intersections: 35W/62 and 35W/494 and 35W/94 and 35E/694 and the Lowery tunnel and spaghetti junction were ever allowed to happen.
When MnDont attempts to correct the problem - they do it in a half-a$$ed manner. The one thing that runs through all MnDont projects is the disclaimer: “We can’t do this because…..” just fill in the blank. It’s a group decision making at it’s worst.
Who were the people in charge when all these horrible decisions were made?
I think someone should be called on the carpet, even though they may be ‘retired’.
I hope when MnDont replaces the Lafayette bridge they make the south bound accelration ramp longer than a car length.
DGB - I agree. I also doesn’t help that we have a very short term “political memory” in this country.
If my memory serves, I remember a huge surge in road construction in the 70’s as stagnation slowed the economy. It appears to be a typical but flawed response; increase the debt to dump tax dollars into new road construction to generate short term jobs, and then fail to fund regular maintenance.
And now we paid for it. I am not a transportation engineer, but it seems to me that you are going to keep building new roads and bridges, you need to plan for maintenance and repair. And if you keep spending the money set aside for such work, then the political solution will be to borrow the money instead of solving the problem.
I don’t know if MnDont is the problem or just a symptom of a larger problem in the statehouse in St. Paul.
As for me, all politician should be held financially responsible for the decisions made while in office. Using total cost accounting, if their decisions had a positive impact, they get a bonus. If not, they get a bill!
The 1960s were a low point in civil engineering. In years previous no one new exactly how much was required to hold up a bridge so they built plenty of redundancy in just to make sure. In the 1960s they knew exactly what was needed and built nothing extra. Nowdays they know exactly what’s needed and built an extra safety factor in, as well as making non-fracture critical designs.
Also they had no idea the kind of traffic demand that there would be in the future. Two parents hypercommuting in cars and driving their kids all over creation didn’t happen until later.
I-35W and I-494 actually dates from the 1950s and predates the interstate system, it was originally the junction of highways 5 and 65.
The Bong Bridge is still the best bridge-naming effort I’ve ever heard.
Mn/DOT was barely keeping up with maintenance 10 years ago, with expansion needs all across the metro. But when there’s no new money to pay for it, which do you think is going to win out politically? Especially with politicians running Mn/DOT (until recently)?
Legislators don’t get to have ribbon-cutting ceremonies and get their picture on the front page of the paper when a pothole is filled or a bridge is sandblasted and repainted. Maintenance is more likely to generate complaints, even when it’s needed, because it’s an inconvenience.
Case and point, the current work on Highway 36.
DGB, were your parents run over by a Mn/DOT truck or something? Just about every post you make on here is a polemic against the so-called crimes of “MnDont”, past and present.
The projects you mention were built (mostly) in the 1960s, using 1950’s technology and design standards (then the best available) for projected traffic levels in the 1980s (which mostly turned out to be wrong). OF COURSE they are woefully inadequate today.
If we had known then what we know now, we never would have built them that way, but we didn’t know it then. NOBODY DID. To suggest that if only Mn/DOT had not been incompetent 40 years ago we would have no issues today is completely misguided. They did the best they could with what they had to work with. Now, that work has reached the end of its effective life, and it’s time for replacement.
Our issues today stem much more from a lack of political leadership and appropriate funding for maintenance in the last 20 years than from a lack of design aptitude in the previous 20.
Pointing fingers today at people who have been out of the highway business for 30 years or more serves no purpose. Yes, we have an ineffective highway system. Let’s focus on getting some leadership at the Capitol who can prioritize effectively and secure the required funding to fix it.
Coelacanth, well said. My thoughts exactly!
For anyone interested, this report does a pretty good job of explaining the development of the Twin Cities freeway system and the number of compromises made along the way.
In addition to the closer of the Blatnik Bridge, some of the congestion in Duluth may be due to marathoners, their families, spectators and other vacationers starting to filter into the area.
For those of you who didn’t know, DGB has a very deep vendetta against MnDOT, though he has never explained why, and probably never will.
To answer Birdman: I fully agree that you need to set aside for maintenance and repair. However, when you have limited funds, a public that both demands expansion projects and has very little awareness of road maintenance, and politicians who like flashy PR events at major project completions (something you don’t exactly get at the completion of a repaving), something’s gotta give. And we’re seeing the effects of that “give”…
Coelacanth says: “Our issues today stem much more from a lack of political leadership and appropriate funding for maintenance in the last 20 years than from a lack of design aptitude in the previous 20.”
I have lived in 4 major northern cites, and I have never seen such awful highway designs.
The major design flaws I see in the Twin Cities urban freeway system:
#1. This commons area thing where you to change lanes to stay on the same road.
#2. Freeways with 90 degree turns.
#3. Insanely short entrance ramps.
#4. Cloverleafs where the cars exiting and entering have the length of the overpass to merge / exit. This is a variation on #1. How is this supposed to work: the car merging is supposed to accelerate, while the car exiting is cutting in front, and slowing?
#5. The great bottleneck creator: Freeway exits where there are lights at both ends of overpass bridge. About 200′ between stop lights!
Think about this with regards to 35W/62: Who would merge two highways, and have the vehicles need to change lanes in order to stay on the same road, while one of highways needs to make two 90 degree turns in less than 1/2 mile! That was never right, not even in 1955.
How about the 35W exit to 94W, where vehicles have about 30 seconds to merge or exit (again switch lanes, the combined enter/exit lane - sound familiar), before entering the Lowery tunnel (which also makes a 90 degree turn).
Look they are still doing it today - less than 10 yrs ago they reworked the 169/494 interchange and it’s still a mess
Our problem is bad desgin. Bad decisions made by MnWont and politial hacks.
All right…some nuggets to reply to.
#1: agreed
#2: agreed, though this is not limited to the Twin Cities. Several cities have this “90 degree turn feature”, including D.C., New Orleans, Chicago, and Memphis.
#3: agreed
#4: cloverleafs have their place, but they bog down at an exponential rate with increasing traffic flow. That said, consider that when most of the system was designed and built (in the ’50s and ’60s), they both A) had very little experience with freeway operation, and B) didn’t realize just how much traffic would ultimately be using them. This also generally applies to #3.
#5: IMO, this one has more to do with signal timing and side-road lane distribution than with the freeway. A tight-diamond interchange can function almost as well as a SPUI if you have adequate turn lanes on the side road and coordinated signal timing. Where it becomes a problem is when the signals AREN’T coordinated.
35W/62: the Highway Department originally proposed 35W cutting at a diagonal, without a commons section. The county was the one that pushed for and was successful in getting the commons section, because it allowed them to get a good chunk of the Crosstown built on the state and federal dime. Remember, the Crosstown was originally a county freeway. It should also be noted that the Highway Department had proposals for fixing the Crosstown Commons as early as 1968 (found them at the History Center). Pick your favorite reason as to why it took almost 40 years to actually fix it (I have several that come to mind).
35W to 94W: I think this was a matter of the overall understimation of just how much traffic the freeway system would eventually carry. Though at the same time, one should consider that when 35W/94 was built, there were still plans for 335 across the north side of downtown.
If you don’t like what they did with 169/494 12 years ago, I bet you’d really be howling if they had just replaced the bridges over 494. That was the reason the project existed to begin with. They had enough money to add the loops, but didn’t have enough money for a proper interchange. Nevermind that Edina and Bloomington were howling against the possibility of closing the frontage roads at 169…that plus Eden Prairie’s original opposition to a 169 freeway killed off a proper interchange just as much as the money situation.
The bridges are fine. 35W fell down because there was too much weight on it. That’s it. End of story.
This is why alternative transportation is looking very good. All of the aforementioned headaches of freeways would be alleviated by getting a few thousand car drivers into bus, bike, train, skateboard, whatever it takes.
Alternative transportation is not some tree-hugging hippie idea–if ya do the math, it’s just good business sense.
Interesting debate on the politics behind Minnesota’s freeway construction.
I think in general Minnesota’s roads are not built to last. Part of it is a culture of complacency at MnDOT, a sort of Middle-Kingdom mentality that it’s the best place in the world or something, and part of it is the severe shortage of funding due to the 20 year 1988-2008 period without any indexing of the gas tax to inflation.
My favorite example is Highway 53 on the Eveleth bypass. This is a road that was actually built pretty well with concrete originally in the 1970s. By the mid 1990s, it needed a mid-life rehab, if you will, but not full reconstruction. In a place that thought long-term, you’d have seen expansion joints repaired, and several inches of asphalt overlay on top of the existing concrete. But in MnDOT land, they just fixed the expansion joins and STRIPPED OFF about a half inch of concrete to improve the roadholding qualities of the surface, and that was it. That, of course, was cheap at a mere $4 million but it seriously weakened the previously nicely sealed and cured concrete. What would have been a good foundation for a new surface is now, after just a few years, fractured junk, and the road is in need of total reconstruction that could have been delayed many years with a proper repair like what I’ve described.
