Here’s my weekly column from the paper. Check it out and comment below.

How far off the freeway are you willing to drive for a hamburger?

For Roadguy, the answer is “not very far.” So I was in for a surprise the first time I tried to find a particular fast-food outlet while driving through Wisconsin on Interstate 94.

After reading one of those blue freeway signs that list restaurants, I exited, followed an arrow near the top of the ramp and drove about a mile to another intersection, which was amid farm fields. There, another sign said the restaurant was another 2.8 miles away: due west, back in the direction of Minnesota.

I did not head back toward Minnesota. I headed back to the freeway.

Just how far from an interchange can a business be and still be listed on the blue signs? Turns out that in Wisconsin, the distance is 5 miles. (If Roadguy were dictator, he might require burger joints to be within sight of the exit, though that would be bad for small towns that aren’t right near the highway.)

And the distance limit on Minnesota’s rural freeways? Fifteen miles. That’s a ways to go if your gas gauge is on “E” or your kids need to pee, but as Kevin Gutknecht of the Minnesota Department of Transportation puts it, 15 miles at this exit is better than traveling 30 miles to the next one.

The sign at the top of the ramp in Wisconsin now warns drivers that the distance to the burger place is 4.3 miles. I’d still rather pack a sandwich or take my chances at the next exit.

CLOSED LANES ON THE DETOUR

Alert reader Jackie was not pleased last weekend:

How does it occur that on Saturday night, when 35W northbound was closed and Hwy. 100 northbound was the official detour route, that Hwy. 100 had two of three lanes closed? Miles of backed-up traffic. They were tarring the cracks in the road. Isn’t someone at MnDOT in charge of coordinating road closings?

Alert reader Mike from Brooklyn Park said it took him an hour to get through the area:

You would think someone would think, “Hey, this might not be a good time to close this road off because we’re sending all of the traffic from 35W over to 100. Let’s fill the cracks next week.”

MnDOT agrees. “This was an unfortunate but honest mistake,” said Todd Kra­mascz, metro communications director. Doing the work “was more or less a last-minute decision by a project inspector” because a crew was available, he said.

Normally there’s a lot of coordination among work crews, project engineers and traffic managers, he said, adding that “they’re working on a plan to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 10:55 am 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.