urbanMSP

I guess it depends on how you define bike lanes. East of hwy 100 to France(ish), there are 2 foot shoulders/bike lanes that go right up to the curb. I wouldn't really call them functional for bikers because they are so narrow and bounded by a curb (albeit in many places the curbs are no more than an inch or so high) and traffic.

Looks like the Holiday station is not coming back? That is unfortunate.

Not sure if anyone has seen this, but KTCA did a great documentary on Hwy 100's predecessor 'Lilac Lane'.

http://video.tpt.org/video/2365042732/

Bids lower than estimate.. Behind paywall.

http://finance-commerce.com/2014/05/bid ... -estimate/

So much for skimping on the bike accommodations on the bridge to keep it in budget.

One of you folks who know more about this should write a streets post about it.

I spoke with someone from MDot this week and they told me that the tree and brush clearing between Hwy 7 and just north of Minnetonka Blvd is for the new sound wall. Also, for anyone who is curious like me, the old Holiday station at 100 and Mtka Blvd is being used by the construction crews for their office space, instead of trailers.

I thought the 70 year old trees did a much nicer job of screening the highway :/

RR bridge over Hwy. 100 to come down this weekend: http://www.startribune.com/local/blogs/282711401.html

So, does that mean freight will be re-routed on MN&S? How does that work?

What I recall is that they were putting temporary freight tracks on the Cedar Lake LRT Trail bridge while they tear down and rebuild the rail bridge. Then next summer they'll redo the trail bridge.

This is correct. The trail was shifted north ten feet in late summer

This is correct. The trail was shifted north ten feet in late summer

I road my bike over that bridge and they are doing what they did up in NE with the RR bridge over Central. They did a shift to get around the bridge and then back to the old tracks. Once the new bridge is done the shift will be taken out.

IIRC, "shoo-fly" is the proper railroading term for it.

Word is that due warm weather MNDOT will close the Minnetonka Blvd bridge after rush hour March 19, many weeks ahead of schedule.

http://www.dot.state.mn.us/metro/projects/hwy100slp/

Anyone around Hwy 100 and Minnetonka Blvd today? I just read an article on BringMeTheNews about the summer construction plans. One quote says they told local residents to expect travel to take up to 6x as long. So a 10 min drive is now 1 hour?!?!? Ouch! That's going to be painful. Too bad we aren't building the SWLRT during this major project.

There are some rather apocalyptic predictions for the TH 100 fallout. Back before 100 was given the 2-to-3 lane upsqueezing, when 100 was three lanes to the south and to the north but squeezed to two lanes from Minnetonka to the rail bridge, congestion was so bad the neighborhood streets parallel to 100 had thousands of cars racing through every day. I lived in the Brookside neighborhood then, it was a nightmare. Wooddale was just as bad on the east side of 100 through Edina. In fact the horrible cut through traffic is what inspired the Country Club neighborhood to put up stop signs all along Wooddale that survive to this day. We're clearly going to go back to those awful times for the next few years. The police could do fine camping out at those stop signs on Brookside/Alabama and Wooddale and catch drivers blowing the stop signs.

There is already some guerrilla signage going up: https://mobile.twitter.com/PaulBlume_FO ... 52/photo/1

Because the detour is horrible: http://www.dot.state.mn.us/metro/projec ... detour.pdf

http://www.startribune.com/politics/sta ... 89191.html

There are severe delays and congestion on adjacent local streets. Who knew?

Unfortunately 100 handles a lot of 'local' traffic in this corridor. People won't take a freeway-to-freeway detour when they're simply trying to get to the West End.

It *is* sort of St. Louis Park's fault that there are no non-freeway connections across the BNSF other than Louisiana.

I agree, more or less. But it has been remarkably easy for a single neighborhood of homes to shut down every proposed connecting of Dakota to Edgewood to provide connectivity. As such, the city council that has been cowards in the face of this neighborhood for decades, I feel, can suck it. They have had chance after chance to build that connection, though it has been dead for more than twenty years since it was last suggested.

But in this a lot of the anger is also for the east-west congestion with Minnetonka now out, not just the north-south on 100.