urbanMSP

It's the part that we should do whatever we can to punish anyone that has the nerve to drive a car that makes me roll my eyes.

You say "punish." I say, "pay more of their externalized costs."

Pretty creative way to take care of potholes.

http://design-milk.com/potholes-getting-sweet-makeover/

Those pictures look like Finland or Iceland.

Chicago and Jyväskylä, Finland. Link to the artist below.

http://www.bachor.com/#!pothole-installations/cmwt

I know it's very far in the future and may never happen, but I'm still curious. Are there any early maps of where this theoretic 894 bypass might be located? I went looking and couldn't find anything.

Nobody to my knowledge has ever done any feasibility or location studies for such an outer loop.

How can we determine who requested that funding from Corridors of Commerce, and what their plan/justification/documentation was?

Honestly, it sounds like something I'd submit to troll the program.

Where could such a loop go anyways? There's no way to squeeze in a freeway west of 494 but east of Lake Minnetonka, Hwy 610 kinda takes care of the north side, and I can see no justification at all for a freeway through Lake Elmo. Maybe upgrading Co 42 from super stroad to freeway status, but that doesn't tie into I-94 anywhere. Unless the thought is along Hwy 25 from Monticello to Jordan / Belle Plain and then east to Hastings... and then on to Wisconsin... But Why?

And wouldn't that be 294?

Mattaudio: I was pretty shocked to see it there too, since Mn/DOT hasn't been talking about it for a generation. I wouldn't exactly characterize it as "trolling" but I certainly think it was submitted to make a political statement , most likely that enough capacity expansion isn't being built in the suburbs. Some of the other project submissions I saw were only two pages, so it's not like they had to pay for an EIS to submit a proposal.

Mikey: The only thing I recall about a specific location is that many years ago (probably late 1980s- early 1990s) a private company was interested in building it, but Mn/DOT didn't want to let go of the ROW they had to build MN 610. As for the number, I-294 in Chicago is fairly well known in the cities, more than I-894 in Milwaukee. Or they just liked the number.

I COULD be wrong but I don't think there's a limit to the # of times a 3-digit interstate route can be used.

Only within states. 3-digit Interstate route numbers can be reused in adjacent (or beyond) states. Examples include I-291 CT and MA, I-395 VA/DC and MD, and I-695 DC and MD. Another example: each of the (lower 48) West Coast states has an I-405.

we should do whatever we can to punish anyone that has the nerve to drive a car that makes me roll my eyes.

Yawn, eyeroll, obvious straw man. No one is saying anything like that. I reckon most of us are drivers and/or own our own cars. I personally want MORE choices that don't include driving and I want the overall system balanced out so that we're not all paying for some drivers to have the cheapest and easiest experience possible.

I couldn't think of a better thread for this question/remark...

I'm seeing more and more newer car headlights that must be LED lamps. These newer headlamps are far brighter than standard headlamps, in my judgement. I truly dislike these newer brighter-than-standard head lights. It sometimes feels like these new headlamps are nearing the brightness of standard headlamps in brights-mode.

Is there a state law regulating how bright these newfangled LED headlamps can be?

They may be HIDs or LEDs - my money's on HIDs since many high-end car makers are using those and LEDs are still less common. Both have a bluer light than halogens (which are yellower), and both cast both a brighter and a more directional beam. HIDs are harder to retrofit to cars not made for them, but they work better in retrofits than LEDs, which really don't work terribly well as headlamps in retrofit situations IMO.

The DOT rules on headlamps, I know from my motorcycle, are (or were, as of 2010, when I last had reason to care) that you can't have more than 60W/55W (high/low) from any single headlamp in highway use. I know because I bought a German headlamp that supposedly had a 100W/60W bulb, but for the US market they were substituting a DOT-legal bulb without telling me, and I couldn't complain since technically their default bulb was illegal for road use in the US and I was buying it for road use.

Anyway, wattage is a terrible way of regulating since incandescents produce substantially fewer visible lumens at a given wattage than halogens, which in turn produce fewer than HIDs or LEDs. Hopefully they'll update this soon.

BTW, most HID retrofits and almost all LED retrofits are not DOT road-legal. Of course, almost all "loud pipes save lives" exhausts are not DOT road-legal and are substantially more annoying, and yet for some reason nobody ever enforces that against them so it seems unlikely anybody will care about non-road-legal headlamps. Which I suppose points to the futility of the whole thing: nobody enforces the rules once the vehicles are sold, and so nobody follows the rules. Except, of course, the auto manufacturers themselves, who occasionally get busted for flaunting the rules, as VW just learned. But all the manufacturers sell non-road-legal accessories and often even install them onto licensed vehicles that leave the shops on public roads, without anybody getting in any legal trouble.

This is really great info, I figured someone here would have more insight than I did.

While I can't make my vehicle louder when I'm confronted with a "loud pipes" driving near me, when someone is driving at me with brights active I'll give them some mutual brights right back. We're some of the streets I drive on at night lit by street lights adequately, I think non-legal headlights would be so bad, but the really dark roads that can only be lit by headlights and driving into a super bright headlight makes driving that road tougher, and I think, less safe.

In applications where you want to precisely control the light, LED optics are far superior than an incandescent lamp and reflector. For a given amount of lumens, more is focused towards the road (and the eyes of oncoming cars), and less wasted illuminating the tops of the trees.

LED streetlights put out far less lumens for an equivalent fixture. How precise the optics can be has as much to do with the efficiency of the overall unit as does the efficiency of the emitters.

(and the eyes of oncoming cars)

BY FAR the biggest problem with them. And the reason I'm not a fan.

^Agreed. It's particularly dangerous on higher speed 2 lane roads where the combination of ultra-bright headlights and no other ambient lighting makes it hard to even see where your own lane is anymore. Maybe I'm getting old or my eyes are particularly sensitive, but I've had some serious issues down in Lakeville and Iowa recently with this. I'd also add that even in urban settings with street lights, when a car with LED lights is coming at me I have a much harder time seeing pedestrians.

My brother has a Mazda with HIDs. They have an extremely sharp cutoff for the top of the light beam. When I've ridden with him, the bright part of the beam closely matched the "beltline" (where the hood meets the main body and below the windows) of other vehicles on the road.

I'm not sure whether this is just a Mazda thing or if it's codified in rules somewhere, but that helps other drivers a lot (except in some cases like cresting hills).

My VW with HIDs is the same way. Extremely sharp cutoff that is rather noticeable when bouncing around on rough streets. I really like them for my own visibility, but I absolutely hate them when they're on cars taller than mine (virtually all vehicles sold these days, frankly).