Here’s a comment that I received yesterday through my blog feedback mechanism:
Comment: Quick question – I’ve noticed on my drive to and from work – on a stretch of 212 from Anderson Lakes to 62 that there are a lot of City vehicles parked in the boulevards, or the medians, or in the lawns on the side of the road with their parking lights on and person inside them. What’s going on? This has been going on for over a week, it seems.
There are people inside those City vehicles. Our people. And they are counting cars. They are watching cars turn. They are noting the direction of the turning cars. In some cases, they may even be noting your speed, but not to give you a ticket.
The City is sponsoring these surveillance activities to advance our knowledge of traffic behavior around the Eden Prairie Center. It’s called a traffic study. We are doing the traffic study in connection with the a bigger land use study of the area around the Eden Prairie Center that we call the Major Center Area Study, or MCA Study for short.
We are studying the current status of the Major Center Area so that we can begin to plan for its future. The Major Center Area is bounded generally by Valley View Road on the north and Prairie Center Drive on the south, west, and east. This is the retail commercial heart of Eden Prairie. And as you’ve noticed over the past five years, it has changed enormously. The Eden Prairie Center is fantastic now. New restaurants. New housing. New retail development. New park. New transit facility.
Lots of new. Same roads. That’s one reason we’re taking a look at the traffic in the area.
Another reason we are looking at the traffic patterns in the area though is that while there is a lot of new development in the Major Center Area, we believe there is more change coming in the area in the near future. The recent entry into our local market of Best Buy may be a taste of our future where a retailer buys an existing office building in order to tear it down to build a retail store site. Retailers are clamoring to get into Eden Prairie. I want the City to be prepared to react to this urge, and to accommodate it when it seems like the right thing to do.
Ease of mobility is an important element when judging the success of a transportation system. Safety is another. We are studying and planning a road system for our Major Center Area that makes sense to drivers; serves the commercial needs of our retailers; and is affordable for our taxpayers. It’s a tall order to deliver on all three of those objectives, but I’ll bet we can do it. We’ve got our best people working on this thing.
Stay tuned.
