But my earlier caffeine-fueled self was probably too harsh – certainly a town doesn’t live or die based on bypasses. I still think they have some effect though, and certainly small town main streets don’t need any help dying. I agree with you, though, that zoning can mitigate some of the effect of bypasses. Unfortunately, I’m not confident that Waseca is using that particular tool, as they seem to have zoned the southwest corner of the Hwy 15 bypass’ interchange with Hwy 13 for commercial. I’ll see you in 15 years to see who was right.

And regardless of where the businesses are oriented now, they’ll orient themselves towards the freeway now that all the property fronting it is rezoned to allow strip retail.

Why would Waseca be exempt from the pattern that’s affected Belle Plaine, Brainerd, Willmar, and pretty much every town along I-90? Waseca may be hit even worse, once residents drive a little further to their new bypass strip mall, and realize it’s not much further to Owatonna or Mankato.

Which is fine for most people, because they were driving to Main Street anyway, now they’ll just drive a little further to the bypass. It’s only a problem for people who think that developing entire sectors of our city that require a car to access is unfair, unhealthy, and inefficient.

I would agree with Reuben that the TH-36 bypass of Stillwater will likely improve the walker’s experience along main street, because, like Alex said, Stillwater is a destination in itself. Redwing is somewhat similar in this sense, but the towns I mentioned in WI along the Mississippi are different. Much of their attraction is that they are waypoints along a scenic/historic route.

Waseca is enough of a destination town, both being a county seat and most of the commerce/retail being along Hwy 13, not Hwy 14, that it likely won’t see much of an economic impact from the new bypass.

I also disagree with Peter/Alex et all about how “bypasses kill businesses”. Some studies of this have been done in the Upper Midwest, most notably a Wisconsin study in 1998. As a general rule, they bypasses had little adverse effect on overall economic activity, and evidence suggests that removing through traffic (especially through trucks) assists in making such communities more accessible. Only the really small communities (less than 2,000 population) were more prone to adverse impacts. For the larger communities over the long term, average traffic levels were close to or even higher than pre-bypass, suggesting no loss and in some cases a gain in economic activity.

True, those businesses heavily dependent on vehicle traffic will lose business, but the city can also remake itself into a destination and promote businesses that aren’t heavily dependent on passing highway traffic.

Not to open a can of worms, but I think the planned TH-36 bypass of Stillwater’s Main Street can only have positive impacts on downtown Stillwater, since Stillwater’s Main Street is more or less self-sustaining. In this case, the pass-through traffic is a distraction from what the Main Street does best, which is accommodating tourists.

The reconstruction of 169 (Minnesota St) in St Peter is amazing, by the way. Traffic is about a zillion times calmer. I haven’t noticed a big uptick in pedestrian traffic, though.

Regarding the broader question of trunk highways as main streets, my intuition is that trunk highways are usually good main streets when the region itself is a destination. Ely is a case in point. Another interesting example is the river roads in the Mississippi River Valley between Redwing and LaCrosse. This section of the Mississippi is rife with natural beauty and historical interest.

US-61 on the Minnesota side of the river is much more of a thoroughfare. It is 2-lane between Redwing and Wabasha, and 4-land divided from Winona south to LaCrosse. In this stretch, it passes through the center of only 2 towns, Redwing and Lake City. Redwing is a destination in itself, and there are some fairly vibrant commercial areas just off the highway but little on it. I can think of one corner pretty close to the St. James Hotel that has seen a succession of businesses (gift shops, coffee shops, and currently a tax preparer) in the past five years. Similarly, Lake City has some businesses, but no vibrant main street commercial district to speak of.

By contrast, WI-35 is 2-lane most of the way from Redwing to LaCrosse and passes through a number of small towns, including Maiden Rock, Pepin, Nelson, Alma, and Fountain City. Many of these towns have bars and restaurants that cater to the myriad motorcyclists and motorists who pass through. They also feature small art galleries, gift shops, and the occasional museum – the types of businesses that appeal to tourists.

The other examples that come to mind are in my home state of Colorado. Many of the touristy mountain towns are bisected by highways, and many of these trunk highway main streets support thriving commercial districts. Estes Park, accessed via US-34 en route to Rocky Mountain National Park, is a ready example.

I’ve also seen a variety of trunk highway configurations on cross-country bicycle tours. There’s nothing quite like experiencing a main street as a bicyclist. One memory comes from riding US-2 from Seattle to Bemidji a few summers ago. This highway is a popular cycling route across the northern U.S., and some towns, particularly on the plains in Montana, had capitalized on this popularity. Cyclists are more likely to travel just off the highway, and this particular town had a sign posted on the city hall next to a grassy lawn that said “Cyclists welcome to camp here”.

I’m glad this plan sticks to one-way roads. This gives the most room, with no need for turn lanes, and in my opinion makes the roads easier to navigate for pedestrians and bikes – the timing of lights and turns can make it quite hard to cross a two-way road. While there are quite a few accidents currently on these streets, the ones I’ve heard about seem mostly to be from turning into the bike lane? That in turn might be the fault of left-side lanes, and that arrangement was made possible by the roads being one-way, but the actual chain of causation from one-way streets to those accidents can be broken at any point.

I like the physical separation for the bike lane, it would make that a much more enjoyable bike route. However, there is too much space allocated between the sidewalk and the bike lane. This is not a heavy commercial area, it’s mostly residential. I would anticipate this space being underutilized.

Maybe in the long-term they could even revert them back from one-way to two-way streets. As an earlier article pointed out these pre-freeway one-ways aren’t really necessary anymore since we have interstates.

http://www.metrocouncil.org/planning/transportation/FuncRdwyClass/LargeReferenceFunClassMay2011.pdf

The differences are shown here:

http://www.datafinder.org/metadata/bg/FunctionalClassRoadsPlanned.jpg

http://gettingaroundmpls.wordpress.com/2011/03/05/towards-a-dense-multipolar-metro/

To answer your question more directly, I believe that the jurisdiction of Berlin’s transit agency (BVG) corresponds with the city’s boundaries (which extend a bit beyond the urbanized area), and the land area within is 344.35 sq mi. The Met Council’s jurisdiction (not subtracting opt-out jurisdiction) is 2975.5 sq mi. I know BVG runs services to Potsdam, so maybe their jurisdiction is larger, but my guess is they just have an agreement to run it there.

http://www.minneapolismn.gov/pedestrian/pedestrian_pedestrian-masterplan-appendixa

and Minneapolis and Hennepin County have done bike network gap studies:

http://www.minneapolismn.gov/bicycles/projects/bicycles_chapter7projects

although I’d say there is a difference between the type of gap that is literally impassible (sidewalk gaps, Griddus Interruptus) and the type that is passable but requires a shift to a lower quality facility (bike network gaps, freeway gaps).

In general, I like the idea of making something connect across the tracks in Minneapolis somewhere between 15th Ave SE and MN-280 — I used to live at University Village and always felt a bit constricted since there wasn’t much to go to either north or south. But, at the same time, the concepts I’ve seen mostly seem to assume that the rail yard area will shrink. It has shrunk quite a bit over the years as rail networks got more optimized and as the grain elevators in the area dropped out of business, but I’m not sure if we can expect the rails to continue to disappear.

Oh well, that mostly just affects the scale of whatever bridge gets built. I’m sure people living in the Como neighborhood have also felt similarly constrained by industry on the north and rails on the south.

On the subject of rail crossings, there’s also a big need for more ways to get across the tracks in Saint Paul. While I-94 did do a significant amount of damage to the grid in the city, it’s actually one of the better examples in our region, and has much better connectivity across it than the rails do. It’s well over a mile between Raymond Avenue and Snelling Avenue, and there are mile-long gaps between Snelling and Lexington and Dale and Rice. I’m a bit more concerned about bike/pedestrian connections rather than additional roads, though.

I’m a bit more interested these days in the idea of small-scale connectivity. I’d really like to see a couple of existing blocks get built up densely and broken up into smaller pieces, with a focus on making a really stellar pedestrian environment. In many redevelopment efforts since WWII, block sizes have tended to grow larger and larger, but I feel there’s probably more value in breaking up blocks into smaller sizes (as long as the streets are scaled to be fairly narrow in most cases).

In an over-the-top example, the super-dense enclave of the Kowloon Walled City (which got torn down in Hong Kong in the ’90s) housed 30,000+ people plus businesses, a central courtyard, and small restaurants in an area of 7 or 8 acres, roughly the same size as a standard “long block” in Minneapolis — also about the same size as the hole in the center of the Mall of America which houses the Nickelodeon Universe amusement park (formerly Camp Snoopy). It had an extensive internal network of streets and alleys to allow people to move around, plus there were staircases and other informal connections at higher levels in the complex.

In contrast, we tend to build very monolithic structures here. For example, the Longfellow Station TOD project on Hiawatha Avenue in Minneapolis may end up with a building that is 900 feet long. Not really the best way to build transit-oriented development, if you ask me (which really should be pedestrian-oriented development that happens to be near a station).

This is why it is so disappointing that there is so very little interest, and even substantial hostility, towards technological progress in public transportation.

And while the inner city could capture more of the growth in the area (or *any* of the growth would be nice: http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentaries/149300655.html), expecting actual contraction of the suburbs is unrealistic. Would you expect outer ring suburbs to become ghost towns? The shape of our density could change, but we can’t remove the built spaces and scale that we have now.

http://www.positivelyminnesota.com/Data_Publications/Data/Research_Reports/Economic_Development_Insights/Economic_Impacts_of_the_I35W_Bridge_Collapse.pdf

“The Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) estimated rerouting alone could cost individual travelers and commercial vehicles $400,000 daily. Xie and Levinson (2009) estimated a lower, but still large,road user cost, between $71,000 and $220,000 per day.”

Our ex post estimates are available here: http://nexus.umn.edu/Projects/BRIDGE/Mn-DOT2010-21.pdf

and we estimated about $ 49,000 per day

I drove the I-94 corridor throughout the whole episode. It had no worse traffic then than it does now. Induced demand is real.

http://www.strongtowns.org/strong-towns-podcast/2010/11/10/the-emperor-has-no-clothes.html

Things worked out. The bridge never saw lots of traffic anyways, but unlike some suburban areas – there are many alternative routes to access the road beyond the bridge. From living in the neighborhood (down the road slightly), I can confirm that there has been no real noticeable change as a result of the closure.

http://www.google.com/maps?q=st+paul+mn&hl=en&ll=44.914356,-93.156649&spn=0.005151,0.011362&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=46.898798,93.076172&t=h&hnear=St+Paul,+Ramsey,+Minnesota&z=17&layer=c&cbll=44.914361,-93.156826&panoid=N6reFZOW_aKfwYtDAxyfRA&cbp=12,90.66,,0,6.46