I was driving back to the northwest suburbs after a pleasant time at Matt’s Bar last night when I came to blows with the Lowry Hill Tunnel. If you’re planning to continue on 94, you should be in the left hand lane before entering the dark beast. Otherwise you will be slowed down by idiots trying to get on to 394 who don’t know how to take a curve.
But tonight, there was a different kind of traffic stoppage. The all-too-regular accident in the Lowry Hill Tunnel stoppage. I had just made it under the Blaisdell bridge when traffic haulted. Being the smart 94 driver, I was in the far left lane. I look up from my dashboard and see some lights I’ve never noticed before. One for each lane of traffic through the tunnel, and one for the Hennepin exit. Here is a picture of what I saw.
Oh no! I’m in a red X lane! The car must have split in half and flew to both sides of the tunnel. No matter. I find my way to a semi that leaves 3 car lengths open in front of it and am now in the second to the left lane. Yellow arrow means caution. I will be cautious.
10 minutes later, I’ve moved under the next set of warning lights. I hadn’t been able to see them because of a large SUV in front of me. But they’ve changed. They look like this now.
Swell. I’m still in a caution lane. Might as well stay the course instead of trying to get to the green lane, which is obviously clear.
Another ten minutes pass, the and red lanes are moving quickly while the arrow lanes are stopped. Finally, the big orange trucks with blinking lights telling us where to merge fly in front of the tunnel entrance and corral everyone on to the Hennepin exit. The Lowry Hill Tunnel is now closed, but the lights remain the same.
So am I seeing things, or are these lights completely useless? I was following what they said, but all they gave me was nonsense. They went against everything I learned in elementary school. Are these lights for the emergency workers? Don’t they have radios so as not to confuse the people who need to flush the Grain Belt Premium from their systems? What the hell are these lights for?
UPDATE:
Got a response from Mn/DOT on this:
There are 23 lane control signals (LCS) mounted outside of the I-94 Lowry Hill Tunnel in downtown Minneapolis. The LCS are used to alert motorists when there is an incident within the tunnel zone that is blocking a lane of traffic. There are five sets of lane control signals approaching the tunnel from the east and three lane control signals approaching the tunnel from the west.
It’s likely that the dispatcher on duty Thursday night had her hands full answering phone calls and coordinating road closure information and Mn/DOT Maintenance’s response to this incident, in addition to deploying the lane control signals and changeable message signs.
I can understand that things can get a bit mixed up with lots of things going on, but if these signals don’t work correctly in the case of a crash then there seems to be little point to them.
“Lowry Hill Tunnel Warning Lights”. Actually what happened is; there was a 3 car crash in the tunnel, 2 on the left one on the right. When the patrol arrived they moved them all over to the right lane. THEN it appeared that one was on fire so they closed the tunnel down completely and moved everyone to the ramp as the emergency vehicles were blocking all lanes in the tunnel.
I still contend that the lights were useless. During our corralling on to the right hand Hennepin exit, the signals remained the same with green and yellow arrows in the left lanes when all should have appeared to be red Xs. Surely the lights can be updated before trucks arrive to block off the lane.