Got this e-mail this afternoon from alert reader Rusty Trax:

Sunday’s article was really about business as usual at MnDOT. Twin Citians should be concerned that MnDOT is determined to use nearly 75% of the metro area’s stimulus funding on two expansion projects — 610 & 494/169. And I understand that MnDOT is hoping for a second stimulus package to fund completion of these two projects. How many badly needed maintenance projects aren’t being tackled? In addition, an article in the Feb. 7 Economist - Be Careful What You Wish For - noted that maintenance work creates 9% more jobs and investment in transit creates 19% more jobs than highway construction. The stimulus package is about jobs. But jobs are trumped by MnDOT’s outdated need to build all the roads it can find the money for. If Twin Cities’ drivers could vote on this, I suspect that the two expansion projects would come in a distant second after scores of maintenance projects. Have you driven 94 between Mpls. and St. Paul lately? It’s beginning to make Minneapolis streets look good.

The 494/169 interchange should have been a part of the Bloomington Ferry Bridge project. How could MnDOT engineers be stunned that the bridge was at capacity after 10 years? It happens every time. Back in the early 80s, it only took a few years for the new 6-lane Cedar Avenue Bridge to become as congested as the old 2-lane bridge. When MnDOT opened I-394 in 1992, within 2 weeks it was carrying traffic at levels forecast for the year 2000 — 8 years’ growth in two weeks. And if MnDOT succeeds in building a new Stillwater Bridge, we’ll eventually learn that every intersection and interchange between the Twin Cities and Stillwater will have to be upgraded. I suspect that if we knew the total costs of these projects up front, they’d never get built. When will we learn?

This entry was posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 at 2:56 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.