I recently encountered the county beaurocratic spaghetti bowl when calling County Commissioner Gail Dorfmann's office to request they consider painting solid lines along Lyndale Avenue South to reduce it to one lane in each direction NOW rather than in 2006 as is planned with the new Lyndale Boulevard project. Is what I just said really that hard to understand?
All she heard from our telephone conversation was "clearly mark the center line"... and passed me along to Jim Grube (sp?) who also only heard the words "clearly mark the center line." Anyway... I told Mr. Grube I would be writing a little article for our neighborhood paper, read back to him the main points of our phone conversation, and printed an article in our little neighborhood paper accordingly. Duh. Mr. Grube called me back after the paper came out and said I misunderstood him... so said Ms. Dorfmann, also, when I called her. Mr. Grube explained that the hazy, vaguely demarkated into "four lanes" of traffic across Lyndale Avenue was necessary for traffic flow. My point... if Lyndale Avenue South was one lane each way (which is the plan anyway for 2006)... it would function as less of a highway for drivers that don't want to take 35W. We could offer convenient park & ride service from 494 into town. If they ran the buses like the U of M no. 52 bus lines, it would be a quick ride into town... less traffic on Lyndale for residents... and less headaches with four lanes of traffic driving 10-15 miles per hour over the posted limit in a residential neighborhood lined with parks and a school and bicyclists and residents! In fact, restricted to one lane each way, we could add a bicycle lane on each side of the street to provide a straight route into town for pedal-commuters. Wendy Introwitz Pareene Lyndale Neighborhood _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:mpls@;mnforum.org Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
