Yes I do. I travel I-94 both ways daily. I remember a total non-event from a traffic standpoint. People adapted rather well, as we should expect.
Getting to and from Northeast Minneapolis was a nightmare.
Yes I do. I travel I-94 both ways daily. I remember a total non-event from a traffic standpoint. People adapted rather well, as we should expect.
From where?Yes I do. I travel I-94 both ways daily. I remember a total non-event from a traffic standpoint. People adapted rather well, as we should expect.
Getting to and from Northeast Minneapolis was a nightmare.
That wasn't my recollection. Crossing the river from downtown to northeast was complete gridlock. There was no good way to get from southside (where I lived at the time) to 35W north to get out of town. The new bridge opening was complete relief....I seem to remember that when the 35W bridge was down, it was really no big deal. People just adjusted their routines and made do.
Seconded.^ well said. And that ends the discussion. Everyone go home now.
To be fair it's a complete decontextualization of the tragedy to act as though this was a green-fields opportunity to evaluate how best to address transportation needs. I know that's not what you're trying to say, but in the face of a disaster, a severed major artery right next to downtown, a profound failure of the Department of Transportation, and the attention of national media on our city as an example of America's crumbling infrastructure, none of the decision-makers were in a place to say, "hey, this bridge fell down so let's just say screw the freeway model and try something completely novel, because this bridge isn't worth what it costs". They wanted to show that they could decisively work together to solve the problem as quickly and effectively as possible, and that's exactly what they did. The new bridge is rightly a source of civic pride because it demonstrates how well the system could work when it needed to.At the very least, it seems that if all the 35W bridge did was make it easier to travel between NE and the rest of the city, the $250m would have been better spent on another river crossing, say between 11th Ave S & 6th Ave SE. Obviously that would have taken longer, though, and for some reason the replacement had to happen right away.
Yeah, which is .000085% and .000215% of the gross metro product, respectively.the lack of a 35W bridge resulted in reductions in economic output of $17 million in 2007 and $43 million in 2008.
Obviously it's not realistic to remove all the freeways. But it's exactly those redundant freeways - especially the ones with as problematic an effect on the urban fabric as I-35W has on Seven Corners - that should be considered for removal, and the transport network robustness replaced with transit alternatives.Network redundancy–the availability of alternate routes, including other bridges across the Mississippi–was a critical factor in accommodating the excess traffic produced by the bridge collapse. Mn/DOT was able to detour traffic along alternate freeway routes including I-94/Minnesota Highway 280 soon after the collapse, mitigating some of the negative effects of the event. However, Levinson and Zhu note in their research report, if the I-94 bridge had collapsed instead, the asymmetrical nature of the road network in the area would have made the I-35W bridge route much less able to absorb excess traffic.
Yes, I was alive and in MN in 2007. But I would say it shows exactly how the system doesn't work that no one in a position of power recognized how detrimental and duplicative the affected segments of 35w were and are. Frankly, the disaster of August 2007 was nothing compared to the daily disaster of our auto-addicted lifestyle. I believe in this thread we've had someone argue that the 35W bridge was important because it allowed people to stop at bars in Northeast before continuing their commute to the suburbs.To be fair it's a complete decontextualization of the tragedy to act as though this was a green-fields opportunity to evaluate how best to address transportation needs... it demonstrates how well the system could work when it needed to.
I'm sorry, that's nonsense. It's an easy and lazy thing to say in retrospect, but nobody - including nobody on the Minnescraper forum that preceded this - was saying in 2007 or 2008 that they shouldn't replace that bridge. "The daily disaster of our auto-addicted lifestyle" has nice alliterative properties - props for that - but dozens of cars on a major artery falling into the Mississippi river unexpectedly in the middle of a sunny summer day is certainly a cathartic event in a way that our auto-addicted lifestyle is not. Rabid, unchecked hyperbole makes urbanists look foolish, which actively works against our goals as a community who want to improve our urban fabric.Yes, I was alive and in MN in 2007. But I would say it shows exactly how the system doesn't work that no one in a position of power recognized how detrimental and duplicative the affected segments of 35w were and are. Frankly, the disaster of August 2007 was nothing compared to the daily disaster of our auto-addicted lifestyle. I believe in this thread we've had someone argue that the 35W bridge was important because it allowed people to stop at bars in Northeast before continuing their commute to the suburbs.
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