Road Systems

One thing that continually amazes me out here in Minneapolis is how well-organized the road system is. As you can see above this paragraph, I've given you a fairly good birds-eye view of the Twin Cities' highway system. Given that there are two cities within the metropolitan region, it's particularly interesting to see how planners have, over the years, decided to route traffic.

Let's start by reviewing some of the high points of the system:

• The region is ringed by a complete beltway. This means that no matter where you are in the inner-ring and middle-ring suburbs, you can count on being within ten or so minutes of interstate access. Contrast this, for example, with Richmond (VA), which last time I checked had only a 75% beltway system (quadrants 2, 3, and 4 I believe). The incomplete beltway is a hassle--if you're at one end of the beltway and you want to get to the other, you have to go all the way around (a trip three times longer than necessary!).



• Excellent secondary arterials! I've written about this one before. By secondary arterial, I mean roads with at least 35 mph speed limits and little to no traffic lights or stop signs. People often overlook these roads in evaluating the quality of a road system; they instead look to formal highways to assess how easy it is to get around. They miss, however, the fact that even though these secondary quasi-highways are slower (even 35 mph, as I said), the small number of traffic lights makes them very efficient for travel. Some examples include: Route 55, Snelling Ave., and many of the north-south avenues on the southside of Minneapolis (Portland, Nicollet, for example).



• Controlled highway access: many highway on-ramps feature gated access. If you've never seen this, here's what it looks like: a normal on-ramp, only there are traffic lights halfway down the ramp on either side. Normally, these lights stay on blinking yellow. In rush-hour, they switch to alternating red/green to allow two lanes of on-ramp traffic to take turns merging. It effectively reduces the vehicle load on the actual highway by shifting it to the ramps themselves. While it's not a total solution to under-capacity, it minimizes bumper-to-bumper slowdowns on the highways themselves.