The winner of the crash trap award and the most agonizing drive goes to southbound I-35W from Blaine to downtown Minneapolis.

A trio of mishaps starting with a pick up truck that became separated from the trailer it was towing started a chain of events that kept traffic bound up for most of the rush. A crash at County Road I made matters worse and a just as traffic was begining to recover came a wreck that took out the left lanes at Stinson Blvd.

At present, the Stinson Blvd. crash has traffic parked at Hwy. 280. To the north, things have thinned out quite a bit.

Southbound Hwy. 169 had a vile flow during the mid portion of the rush with nothing but tailights to be seen from 77th Avenue to Cedar Lake Road. The trip was actually worse than on southbound Hwy. 100, despite its construction and a crash at Hwy. 55.

The south metro escaped the carnage for the most part, but a late rush hour crash on westbound 494 tied up traffic from Pilot Knob Road to Cedar Avenue for about 30 minutes between 8 and 8:30 a.m.

That's it for today. I'll be back with more live blogging Thursday.