Highway 169 Construction Nears End
Despite the rain drops and gloomy skies Monday, things were actually brighter for commuters on U.S. Highway 169 in Brooklyn Park and Champlin.
The highway had been a cone zone for months. Now the massive road construction project is almost complete. For drivers in the northwest suburbs this was a “no-pain, no-gain” scenario.
“It was very much a rough summer,” said MnDOT’s Kent Barnard. “We had a lot of closures up here. We had single-lane traffic. The big problem in this area is there is only really one good way to get across the Mississippi River without traveling several miles in each direction. Several kind of being an understatement I guess.”
Most of 169 reopened last Friday with the exception of some single-lane traffic going southbound. The northbound ramp from Minnesota Highway 610 to 169 in Brooklyn Park reopened, which should ease traffic flow, especially in the rush hours.
Project Wraps in Next Few Days
MnDOT plans to wrap up work on 169 in the next few days. Unfinished work includes landscaping, striping and removing some temporary signals.
“We rebuilt the two Elm Creek bridges northbound and southbound,” Barnard said. “We realigned highway 169 just south of the river. We realigned West River Road just south of Dean to join up at an intersection. Then on the south part of the project from East Hayden Lake Road down to Highway 610, we did some major repairs down there.”
MnDOT was originally going to do the work in two phases – a north and south project. But ultimately MnDOT made the decision to do everything at once.
