And having a brother who was a civil engineer and District Chief in the MN Highway Dept, I think I'm relying on pretty good authority on what I said.
The environmentalists in MN have long wanted to pull people out of cars and into light rail. They've managed to build a short one from downtown to the airport. Except for a base of common sense outside the metro area, they'd be swimming in rail lines and debt.
You really need to get out of Kansas to see what silly things the liberals want to do. I'm amazed that you could read FreeRepublic and still believe that there isn't a lot of insanity out and around in the liberal states.
A better example of such insanity: Gov Florio in NJ raised taxes on the sale of big rig trucks in NJ, so they were thousands of dollars above the taxes in PA, or NY, etc. The entire business of selling big trucks collapsed, businesses closed, salesfolks were let go. The tax revenues were negative. Yet Gov Florio insisted that he could not remove the tax unless another tax was substituted to replace the revenue to be lost when the truck tax was removed. Since there was no revenue from the truck tax, and lost revenue from income tax, this was an insane request.
So thinking that the environmentalists who want us to give up cars (and really, do I have to find links to prove that this is true?) would engineer roads and actually encourage congestion to make that happen?
Why that's exactly what happened here in NJ. We introduced car pool lanes on a couple of highways to speed things up. But due to demographics and travel constraints (both source and destinations were diffuse), car pooling is not effective and congestion got a lot worse while the car pool lane stayed empty.
It was a long fight to get rid of the car pool lanes. Some politicians wanted to keep it to force people to change their lives so that car pooling made sense, and some wanted to keep it just for the money from tickets for single drivers in the car pool lane. Insanity and corruption.
Changing subjects on ya but along those lines, they are rebuilding I694 up around 35w. From the ground up. Regrading, new bridges, clean sweep from scratch.
I’m getting a bad feeling watching the work that they are going to end up with still only two through lanes through there. If that were the case then that decision was nothing less than economic vandalism. The incremental cost of adding a lane in a total rebuild would have been insignificant. Same with 35E and W north of 694. They tore them up and repaved from scratch. Perfect time to add a third land. But no. Same with 694 east of 35 E all the way to 94. Complete rebuild, no third land.
I hope I’m wrong about the 694 rebuild.
Changing subjects on ya but along those lines, they are rebuilding I694 up around 35w. From the ground up. Regrading, new bridges, clean sweep from scratch.
I’m getting a bad feeling watching the work that they are going to end up with still only two through lanes through there. If that were the case then that decision was nothing less than economic vandalism. The incremental cost of adding a lane in a total rebuild would have been insignificant. Same with 35E and W north of 694. They tore them up and repaved from scratch. Perfect time to add a third land. But no. Same with 694 east of 35 E all the way to 94. Complete rebuild, no third land.
I hope I’m wrong about the 694 rebuild.