Here’s my column from the Sunday paper. If you’ve already read it elsewhere, please skip on down to the comments below. Thanks.

With the holiday season in full swing, a lot of people are driving to the airport, and alert reader Dudley from Woodbury wants to talk about ground transportation:

Some years ago a friend from Dallas visited me, and upon his return to Texas he called to thank me for the nice visit and mentioned his challenge while going to the airport westbound on 494. After taking an exit off 494 toward the airport, he came to a “Y” in the road and didn’t know which leg to take — one road led to the Lindbergh terminal and one to the Humphrey terminal, but all he knew was that he was taking a Northwest flight.

Roadguy was recently in Denver (photo above), where signs on the way to the airport explain which airlines are at Terminal East or Terminal West. Why can’t we have something like that here?

Pat Hogan, spokesman for MSP, is no stranger to this question. “We are the only major airport to have two terminals located on separate roadway systems,” he said.

Our airport is surrounded by four freeways, and the stretches of highway near the terminals are too short for a series of signs, he said. State and federal rules limit the amount of wording on highway signs, he added, so there is no way to list the nearly 20 airlines using the main terminal.

Places like Denver can have such signs because they have a single access road that serves only the airport.

So you should check with your airline, check www.mspairport.com, or check your boarding pass — and warn your out-of-town visitors to do the same.

THAT VANISHING STOP SIGN

Alert reader Tyler lives in northeast Minneapolis, a block from the seasonal stop sign we discussed a few weeks ago. He has some thoughts:

When the city removes the Johnson Street stop signs, it does not provide any advance notice or let drivers on 35th Avenue know that Johnson Street no longer has a stop sign. Two years in a row, when they first take down the Johnson signs, I have nearly gotten in an accident at that intersection because I didn’t know that Johnson Street drivers didn’t need to stop anymore. …

At a minimum, they should post warning placards on the 35th Avenue stop signs that say “Cross traffic does not stop.”

City spokesman Matt Laible said the stop signs have been coming and going since the 1970s, and that’s one reason the public-works folks don’t think a “cross traffic” sign is needed.

Workers do add and remove the little signs that indicate the stop is “all way,” Laible said (though one of those was prematurely absent when I visited in mid-November). He said the intersection has good sight lines and hasn’t had a stop-sign-related crash in at least four years, adding that “cross traffic does not stop” signs actually confuse some drivers.

Roadguy has never been confused by such a sign, but then he’s never had any trouble filling in the little ovals on Election Day, either.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 30th, 2008 at 10:44 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.