Secrets of the City

Not quite interstate traffic-wise, but I think Minnehaha Parkway at Cedar is one of the worst. Total congestion, bikers, walkers. It’s a mess.

that’s the southeastern end of downtown Mpls, the Metrodome is just off frame in the upper-right hand corner. The building in the lower-right hand corner is where the light-rail trains are stored.

What makes this even more crazy is that it includes Highway 55 ( the lanes approaching from the lower right hand corner and disappearing into the city streets to the upper-left corner). 35W enters as the middle lanes in the lower-left hand corner and then turns up and exits in the top center. I-94 runs along the bottom of the picture.

I’ve always thought that 35E & I-94 in St Paul was worse, but looking at aerially it’s actually a lot more straight-forward than Minneapolis’ spaghetti junction.

Here:

Google map of intersection

These are the kinds of photos one tucks away until the next discussion on public tranportation. When someone says subways, light rail, buses, etc. are stupid and unnecessary cause you can “just build more roads” – lay these out on the table.

Notice you can’t go East on 94 if you’re entering the interchange on southbound 35. Whoops! Details, details.

I used to drive that that thing twice a day. Has the expansion happened yet? Is it any better?

In hindsight, the lesson we’ve learned from 35W is that if you have to choose between either razing 2 or 3 neighborhoods to make a freeway run straight or having it make big turns where it intermingles with 2 other perpendicular freeways (94 and 62), you raze the neighborhoods. end of story.

The problem with that, grote, is that then, in 30-40 years, you have to listen to some off kilter dude talk about how everyone in that neighborhood was living in a Benetton ad.

Despite being the “world’s worst intersections”, there is some wicked cool engineering going on in some of those photos. Especially the Tokyo intersection and the China spiral bridge approach.

One failure of our urban highway systems is that planners and engineers failed to build adequate growth into the systems. The Crosstown was obsolete the day it opened because what had originally been envisioned as a limited access county highway had, for all practical purposes, been absorbed into the interstate highway system. (Our house on 62nd & Oliver was one of those razed for the original Crosstown construction. The exit ramp east to Penn would’ve gone right through our living room. So I can still remember 62nd street being a city street.)

Likewise with Tokyo’s elevated expressways. When opened in 1964, portions of the Shuto expressway were already becoming parking lots. (That’s the reason why it takes 3 hours to drive to Narita airport nowadays: traffic volume; not distance.)

Notice you can’t go East on 94 if you’re entering the interchange on southbound 35. Whoops! Details, details.

That’s why we have Hwy 280. You also can’t get from westbound 94 to 35W north. The theory, I suppose, was to keep that traffic out of the big interchange by diverting it all to 280. Not a bad idea necessarily, but in typical Minnesota let’s-build-an-interchange fashion it turned out to be one giant mess. When they get around to fixing it, the 35W/Crosstown project will look like repaving a driveway in comparison.

Ditto Minnehaha/Cedar. But the worst urban intersection, by far, is Lake/Hiawatha.

But the worst urban intersection, by far, is Lake/Hiawatha.

Whenever I approach that intersection on a yellow light, I always just gun it and hope for the best, because I have no idea where I’m supposed to stop my car and wait out a red.

My vote is for the 38th and Hiawatha, driving west. They have a stop light for the Cardinal Bar, meaning that you could make it through Hiawatha, past the Light Rail Tracks, but then have to stop immediately. I’ve had to stop on or near the tracks way too many times. It’s insane.

@noodleman, I grew up on 62nd and Humboldt. Our house is still there, but the street now ends at a dead end, instead of coming to a T.

EdKohler, I recently saw a biker get hit by a car right in front of fat lorenzos…that intersection is a nighmare for pedestrian safety…

I drove the intersection shown on that website–the Arc Di Triumph in Paris. Holy crap is that nervewracking. The craziest driving I have experienced, and I ahve driven in a lot of US cities…

I pretty much hate any of the metro-area highways that are riddle with controlled intersections (such as Hwy 65 going up to Cambridge or what Hwy 100 used to be). Their speed limits are often 65 MPH, which make timing the lights difficult for me. This is on top of the swarms of people pulling rights on the red in front of you, forcing you to slow down 20 MPH in two seconds.

I learned to drive in Minneapolis and so I’m used to city-street intersections or freeway driving, not so much the Central Ave/Hwy 65 shite.

Hwy 65 is nasty. Highways like that would be so much better if they just put up those prepare to stop when blinking lights. Take out a lot of the guess work and reduce slamming on the brakes at 65mph when a light turns yeller.

I am surprised they don’t have those lights, Kevin. Is that Mn/DOT’s onus or should Anoka-Isanti be manning up in that regard?

I can’t answer that because I can’t get by originally thinking it said “Is that Mn/DOT’s anus…”

i think it may actually be their anus. I would have said Carol Molnau, but she’s no longer with them.