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

CAN YOU SEE THE RIVER? PERHAPS A BIT TOO WELL

The railings on the new Interstate 35W bridge provide dramatic views of the Mississippi River, but alert reader Paul has been casting a wary eye at their see-through design:

I went across and noticed that in the center, the barrier was high, but on the outside of the bridge, it was very low. It doesn’t seem safe. Is it just me (and my friend) that think this? Is it to code?

Roadguy hears this a lot. “That’s not a railing, that’s lawn edging,” one colleague quipped, and, after a recent commute, alert reader Suz expressed similar alarm:

I was on the northbound side of the bridge. There was an SUV ahead of me that spun out on the ice. It did a 180 and hit the railing. The plows have packed a lot of snow along the rails. When the SUV hit the railing, the snow acted like a ramp. … I thought that SUV was going to be launched right over the edge.

Members of the public who took part in the design process chose the see-through railing in part because users of the old bridge frequently said they didn’t even know they were going over a bridge. Everybody certainly knows now.

The steel railings on the outside shoulders are 2 feet, 10 inches tall, says Kevin Gutknecht, a Minnesota Department of Transportation spokesman. That’s 2 inches taller than called for in national guidelines, as well as 2 inches taller than the solid concrete rails on the old bridge. (It’s also 2 inches shorter than Roadguy’s inseam, which is probably why he finds it unnerving to stand next to such railings.)

The inside rails, which are solid concrete, are indeed taller — 4 foot, 8 inches, according to Gutknecht. The main reason is to reduce the glare from oncoming headlights, he said.

As for the spinout, state officials believe the SUV was able to get itself out of there without assistance. Gutknecht said that any “ramping” issue caused by the snow wouldn’t be related to the type of railing and that snow is temporarily stored on the shoulders because it can’t be plowed over the edge. “We also have to remember that people need to drive according to the conditions,” he said.

FIXING A ‘DISASTER’

Sometimes new highways solve problems, and sometimes they create new ones. Alert reader Paula is among the motorists who have contacted Roadguy about the challenges of getting onto the new Hwy. 212 from Interstate 494 westbound.

The ramp situation is “a total disaster,” she writes, and delays were so bad one Monday afternoon that she had to abandon her weekly trip to Chanhassen.

Paula may be pleased to know that one of the proposed federal stimulus projects would reconfigure the interchange so that she and other westbound drivers would have their own lane when they arrive on 212. The million-dollar fix is one of the dozens of “shovel-ready” projects that could start soon if Congress passes the package.

Then Paula can sit in construction backups instead.

(MnDOT’s lists of potential stimulus-related projects are here.)

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 1st, 2009 at 11:24 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.