urbanMSP

Is there data available of traffic counts on local and county roads in Bloomington? If there is where could I find it?

https://mndot.maps.arcgis.com/apps/weba ... 1059ce63bb

On iOS, ArcGIS Explorer also has this data set available in the app.

If you want historic counts, MNDOT has pdf maps going as far back as 2000.

You can also get historic counts by clicking on a road segment, scrolling to the bottom of the window that pops up, and selecting "AADT History (Actual)".

Perfect. Thank you!

From this League of Minnesota Cities post on the changes to allow cities to make changes to speed limits...

https://www.lmc.org/page/1/fonl-speedli ... p?ssl=true

“These changes were not initiated by the League and were opposed by the City Engineers Association of Minnesota.”

Anyone have insight on why this association took this stance against residential neighborhood safety?

Changing the speed limit on such a street no longer requires a traffic study by MnDOT, nor does it require an engineering analysis by the city. Cities may simply adopt the 25 mph speed limit by council action provided the roadway meets the new definition.

Sounds like they feel like they're losing power, and they're cranky about it.

Consistency, probably.

So the first law is only for exactly 25 mph, and only on ‘residential roadways’, right? The definition seems very suburban:

“A ‘residential roadway’ is now defined to include all city streets in an area zoned exclusively for housing and are not collector or arterial streets.“

I suppose Mpls & St. Paul both have plenty of single family home neighborhoods that meet this criterion, but it would seem any street with apartments might be zoned mixed use or would likely be a collector or arterial. Curious.

The second part is allowing a city to set speed limits on any road that’s not a trunk highway or state road. Does this include Municipal State Aid Roads and such? The city just have to have standards that are applied consistently (and I’m guessing the League is getting cities to be consistent between each other, too).

Can I fantasize about 18 mph speed limits in neighborhood commercial nodes?

https://bikeportland.org/2020/04/15/the ... gon-313665

Oregon doing away with the 85% rule.

Hallelujah. Is the 85% rule enshrined in MNDOT regulations? Can cities ignore it?

Constancy would be the reason. You shouldn't have to know what city you happen to be in to know what the default speed limit is. I would not be opposed to a 25 mph residential speed limit statewide, but allowing it to be different in every city is a bad idea.

As for the 85% limit, there's a reason it exists, and that is so you can't create a safety hazard by setting a 30 mph speed limit on a road with a 50 mph design speed and have a couple of people drive the speed limit and everyone else continue to drive the design speed, and create motorist disrespect for all road signs by setting a speed limit that has no basis in reality. It's engineering 101 that if you want lower speeds you use traffic calming lower the design speed, not just the speed limit.

I mean, we have like one or two streets in the entire metro with, in my amateur opinion, a design speed that matches the posted limit and yet have had a default 30 mph surface street speed limit forever. Aside from purely residential streets (which are often also much too wider for their speed limit), I'll give you Lyndale south of 66th and 66th east of Lyndale (which is 35 but should be 30) and the Franklin Ave bridge. Anything else? Maybe Hennepin south of 31st? Admittedly, I don't get out to much of the metro much at all.

Constancy would be the reason. You shouldn't have to know what city you happen to be in to know what the default speed limit is. I would not be opposed to a 25 mph residential speed limit statewide, but allowing it to be different in every city is a bad idea.

As for the 85% limit, there's a reason it exists, and that is so you can't create a safety hazard by setting a 30 mph speed limit on a road with a 50 mph design speed and have a couple of people drive the speed limit and everyone else continue to drive the design speed, and create motorist disrespect for all road signs by setting a speed limit that has no basis in reality. It's engineering 101 that if you want lower speeds you use traffic calming lower the design speed, not just the speed limit.

I’d turn that around and say the default speed limit statewide should be 30 km/hr (18 mph), and cities, counties, & MNDOT need to come up with engineering, safety, & environmental studies to justify raising it higher than that on specific roads—and those studies should include research on how dedicated bus lanes & protected bike lanes could help keep the speed lower.

http://www.dot.state.mn.us/d4/newsrels/ ... hwy54.html

Minnesota and Grant County swap highways. Grant County takes over MN 54 in it's entirety, while MnDOT takes over Grant County 10 (to be numbered as an extension of MN 78. MN 54 is notable as a 1920 constitutional route that still has it's original number. Over the past few decades when MnDOT wants to turn back a constitutional route they use the legal fiction that it still counts if you can travel from the listed end points and to all the listed cities on trunk highways. So MN 27 and US 59 are the new "Constitutional Route 54" even if it's substantially longer.

http://www.dot.state.mn.us/d4/newsrels/ ... hwy54.html

Minnesota and Grant County swap highways. Grant County takes over MN 54 in it's entirety, while MnDOT takes over Grant County 10 (to be numbered as an extension of MN 78. MN 54 is notable as a 1920 constitutional route that still has it's original number. Over the past few decades when MnDOT wants to turn back a constitutional route they use the legal fiction that it still counts if you can travel from the listed end points and to all the listed cities on trunk highways. So MN 27 and US 59 are the new "Constitutional Route 54" even if it's substantially longer.

What makes it "legal fiction" to transfer the route to local control while keeping some state connectivity for legal purposes? Looking at a map, it seems to be reasonable enough to transfer it to local control; it's basically a local connector that doesn't even directly connect the two towns anyways (both still require use of MN 27 to complete the route.)

That said, it should lead to a larger discussion of which constitutional routes we should still keep under state control, and if it's ultimately better to move a lot of these state routes that aren't used much for inter-county traffic back to county control. CSAH funds could be used to help pay for these roads, but it seems weird that a route between two relatively small towns (at least for Minnesota as a whole,) both in the same county is defined as a constitutional route, at least in 2020.

Probably long overdue from a resources available standpoint given the relatively wide discrepancy in AADT on those roads.

The whole constitutional route thing is definitely way outdated and but probably won't ever have the political will to remove it.

So the 2016 deadline for toll road interoperability came an went in 2016. Back in 2015 I asked MnDOT about, who responded basically "We'lll be ready when the feds make us". At the time they were replacing their single channel readers with multi-channel to enable the orderly phaseout of the active Telematics transponders in favor of passive 6C sticker tags.

Now MnDOT has announced interoperability with EZPass is coming, who have shown no inclination to install multi-channel readers so they can accept sticker tags. So MnDOT is going to start issuing active EZPass tags, at substantially increased cost, to all new accounts and anone with a sticker that wants one. Florida, which uses (older) sticker tags is also doing the same thing.

I'll finally get one when they issue EZPass tags, it's becoming increasingly hard to travel the country without one and without paying usurious rates to rental car companies for electronic toll capability ($52.50 to Dollar so I could drive the Florida's Turnpike Extension from the airport to the Keys) and it will be nice to be able to not have to stop every 20 miles on trips to Chicago to throw change into a bucket.

https://www.dot.state.mn.us/mnpass/mnpassnews.html

Of note MnDOT could have reciprocity with the other states that use the same equipment just by linking computers and signing an agreement, but there's not a burning desire by Minnesotans to use Utah's HOT lanes as opposed to the EZPass network or Florida.

The Minnesota Vikings Memorial street lights of St. Paul

Is that what those random lights are for?

Not really, not a tribute to Prince either.

The manufacturer got a defective batch of LED chips where the yellow phosphor completely degrades within a couple of years, leaving the blue emitters and the red phosphors to make purple. Normally blue emitters plus yellow and red phosphors = white.