Cross-Town Confusion

35W - Highway 62 Construction Zone

The third time this week that I found myself headed west on Crosstown, nearing 35W, I was ready: to continue heading west on Crosstown, you have to keep to the right.

Stay to the left, and you find yourself shunted onto 35W, heading north towards downtown Minneapolis (and several miles before the first exit to turn around).

Given that neither exit is marked, and that the under-construction, spaghetti junction where 35W and Highway 62 meet is especially chaotic now, and you'd guess that not a few local drivers have made the same mistake.

P.S.: another counter-intuitive exit is on 494 headed east towards the airport, where 494 and Highway 5 veer off from one another.

To pick up Highway 5 and go to the airport, you need to stay in the right lane.

Veer left, and you find yourself crossing the Minnesota River valley on the way to Eagan -- and very late for your plane.

Gridlock Recipe

"One Step Backward,
Two Steps Forward" Dept.

Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.

--Winston Churchill

Never in the history of Twin Cities road construction have so many been inconvenienced by so few for so long.

--Ross Kaplan

Take two of the Twin Cities' biggest traffic arteries (Interstate 35W and Crosstown, also known as 62).

Funnel their combined 7 lanes of traffic into . . . one.

At rush hour.

What do you get?

Predictably, (one of) the world's biggest traffic jams.

Flunking "Cost-Benefit"

I conservatively estimate that I -- along with perhaps 50,000 other Minnesotans -- lost at least a half hour this morning navigating the 35W-62 bottleneck about 6 miles south of downtown Minneapolis (OK, I recouped a little of that making cell phone calls).

Multiply that number by 2 (evening rush hour), then by $25 (a guesstimate of what the average commuter's time is worth), and you get $2.5 million. Per day.

That's a helluva a productivity wallop to the Twin Cities economy, especially when you consider the Crosstown Project has been going on for years.

Adding insult to (financial) injury: no more than 100 construction workers -- max -- were visible on the half-mile stretch of construction causing the massive backup.

Ever hear of night construction? Adding workers? (Apparently, some in the construction biz are looking for work now).

Thankfully, the project is apparently now in the home stretch -- and I don't need to traverse South Minneapolis on my (mercifully short) daily commute.