[Mpls] 50th Street Traffic

[Greg Abbott]

50th and France has some real issues that the new striping did not 
address.  The intersection is a bottleneck in all directions, which is 
causing cars to divert into residential areas to get around it.

For example, although France south of 50th is clearly designed to 
handle more traffic, when I go to Southdale from Linden Hills, I take 
Xerxes.  I'd rather go through 3 or 4 stop signs than wait at 50th and 
France.  And if I'm coming home, north on France, I'll skip the 
intersection by turning east on 51st or 52nd (traffic is often backed 
up from 50th & France this far south), and then north on Chowen.  I'm a 
good driver, and I stop for stop signs, but there's a tremendous amount 
of through traffic on 51st, 52nd, Ewing, Drew, and Chowen I suspect is 
not so well-behaved.  Plus, the problems on 54th Chris notes.

I'm a bit surprised the Fulton neighborhood isn't in more of an uproar 
about this.  At some point, hopefully sooner rather than later, the 
city, Hennepin County, Edina, and the affected neighborhoods are going 
to have sit down and figure out what to do about 50th and France.

The rest of the striping on 50th seems to be going well, including a 
long-overdue left hand turn lane at Penn Avenue, for west-bound traffic 
on 50th.  I notice that the concerns of the business districts seem to 
have been addressed, in a fashion similar to a proposal I made to this 
list when the test striping was done (was that last year, or the year 
before?  -- man, how time flies!).

Greg Abbott
Linden Hills
13th Ward


On Jul 10, 2004, at 9:07 PM, Chris Johnson wrote:

> Well, not quite.
> Try going westbound on 50th through the France Avenue intersection.  
> Due to the fact that there is now a shared left turn and through 
> traffic lane, and a dedicated right turn lane, traffic backs up there. 
>  The left turn arrow is never long enough to clear out all the west 
> bound traffic which is composed of mixed left turners and through 
> traffic.  Worse, sometimes the left turn arrow doesn't even cycle 
> first, so everybody continuing west on 50th gets stuck behind the one 
> left turn person for two cycles of the lights.  It also means traffic 
> gets stuck behind the numbskulls who think the speed limit is 23mph at 
> any point along the road.
> 50th street is also Hennepin County Road 21, an "A" arterial.  Of all 
> east-west streets west of 35W between the lakes and the city limits, 
> it is precisely where the traffic belongs.  I'd like to see the city 
> and county get the numerous cars and trucks(!) who use Diamond Lake 
> and 54th Street as a short-cut off those neighborhood, city-only 
> streets.  There's 8 stop lights and only one lane now between Lyndale 
> and Xerxes on 50th, but room enough to fake 2 lanes to pass turning 
> cars and only 2 stop lights on 54th.  Guess where the folks in a hurry 
> drive?  And because they're in a hurry, they run the stop signs.  Lord 
> help the kids crossing the street trying to go to the neighborhood 
> park.