urbanMSP

Speaking of, I understand the City of Minneapolis is experimenting with the radical, bizarre, exotic technique of zebra striping crosswalks. I'd thought that the official test site was Old St Anthony, but yesterday I noticed that they were striped across 35th and 36th Sts at the intersections with Pleasant Ave. Somewhat remarkable as these are square corners. Is this a sign of things to come or a neighborhood initiative?

Speaking of, I understand the City of Minneapolis is experimenting with the radical, bizarre, exotic technique of zebra striping crosswalks. I'd thought that the official test site was Old St Anthony, but yesterday I noticed that they were striped across 35th and 36th Sts at the intersections with Pleasant Ave. Somewhat remarkable as these are square corners. Is this a sign of things to come or a neighborhood initiative?

It would be great if you got a picture.

That may be part of a "safe walk to school" program leading to Lyndale Elementary -- I feel like there was some chatter about this a while back.

If anyone likes old bricked streets, check out 28th Avenue today. Makes me wonder why we can't just fix the bricks and call it good!


Brick on 28th Ave S at 42nd St by mattaudio, on Flickr

Asphalt is a job creator!

Downtown St. Paul has quite a mix of road surfaces including asphalt, concrete, patterned concrete (to look like brick), concrete pavers (in the shape of bricks and larger pieces), and real brick. In at least some places, it seems like the real brick is holding up the best, but in a lot of cases it has been dedicated to the parking lane, so it's difficult to judge it fairly.

St. Kate's in Saint Paul has a driveway that is brick. In my opinion it seems kind of bumpy, but it is very good at reducing speed.

http://nacto.org/usdg/

Some great stuff here^

Lots of streets are brick, just paved over.
Minnehaha and Franklin are last places I recal seeing brick poking thru, and intrtestingly theres long faults parallel with street forming- wondering if its a section of rail.

Just off a 35E exit there's still cobblestone, Osceola rd I think, near St. Clair

Girard in front of Walkways is pretty torn up now and the granite pavers are very visible along with the wye rails. I hope to God that any project to create The Walkway here keeps those pavers and the rails. It's a great little piece of urban heritage.

There's LED lights going up on some of the major bridges in the SW metro- Mendota, Bloomington Ferry, and I-494, and I-35W over the Minnesota for example. I talked to my contact at Mn/DOT about them, and she said that some new projects LED are specified, but what's happening on the river bridge conversions is they bought a bunch of luminaires (a different manufacturer for each bridge) so they could test how well a larger installation performs and have a larger sample size (I-494 in Woodbury is the area where they test small samples) before making decisions on going with LEDs exclusively or with converting existing installations. They picked river bridges because it's difficult to get lane closures on them for maintenance.

LED fixtures are designed with the same beam pattern and fittings as the High Pressure Sodium roadway fixtures, so if the poles and wiring are good shape they can just swap out the fixture using the existing poles and wiring. More problematic are the tower lights. The standard lights are designed with precise beam pattern, which LEDs are good at. Tower lights flood an area with light, which LEDs aren't good at. There's not a fixture that's a direct replacement for the 1000 watt tower fixtures yet.

The old Hastings Bridge is almost gone.

IMG_4348 by North Star Highways, on Flickr

IMG_4357 by North Star Highways, on Flickr

That's one ugly new bridge.

Gosh that's a sad sight. I thought it was the most beautiful bridge in the metro. Or second behind the Arcola.

I'm really not a fan of the new bridge either. I personally think they should have built a generic concrete bridge for the highway and kept the old bridge for a bicycle trail. But Mn/DOT wasn't mandated to keep the old one like they were at Stillwater, so they won't, and the city of Hastings didn't want it, so down it goes.

It's interesting they didn't try to sell the span. I remember seeing the old Wakota span on some government auction site.

It's not much to look at from the head-on angle, but neither was the old one. The upriver view is quite striking, though.

IMG_4354 by North Star Highways, on Flickr

Are people here interested in my highway photography?

Are people here interested in my highway photography?

To an extent.

Ok. I think people are aware of my Flickr account if they want to see my highway photos so I won't post them here. Now that I'm consolidating my traffic signal and highway photography onto there I'll be going back and adding my older Hastings Bridge pictures into the set over the next year).

A bit off topic, but are pavers a nuisance to maintain? I like the look, but I'm thinking about doing my driveway in concrete just for the ease of maintenance. I know the ones at the rail stations and places always look good, but there's an army of people tramping over them, and people paid to maintain them.