James Lileks: I-35W construction project could be a real pain

If the Legislature does not come up with enough money for I-35W reconstruction, we may face — in the startling words of Hennepin County Engineer Jim Grube — "seven years of torture."

This may be the first highway construction project banned by the Geneva Conventions. What could possibly happen if there's not enough money?

For starters, we could end up with the Zipper of Despair. This gruesome procedure, popular in the Middle Ages, had two lines of prisoners shuffling along on their hands and knees in an interminable queue, merging into one line miles down the path.

Some prisoners would run alongside the line and try to barge in where the queues knit together. This person was frequently successful in bypassing hundreds of prisoners, which just reminded the ones who followed instructions that there was no justice in this fallen world, and that the selfish were often rewarded.

This can be avoided if the Legislature appropriates enough money to have men stationed on the overpass with shoulder-fired missiles to deal with zipper flouters.

Or we'd get the Iron Maiden. Like the old torture device that imprisoned people in a cask embedded with spikes, this traps you in your car with a gassy toddler who can be placated only with CDs of children's music.

After driving half a mile in 30 minutes, your will is broken, and you shout: "Of course the wheels on the bus go round and round! The bloody bus has a dedicated lane! It's the wheels on the bleeperbleeping Subaru that don't go anywhere!"

Like, say, Iron Maiden.

No one wants seven years of torture. But the real misery, the epicenter of incomprehensible decisions, is the stretch where I-94 and 35W intertwine. The basic idea behind the road seems to be an attempt to re-create the altruism and social cohesion of the last minutes of the Titanic, when there was just one lifeboat left.

That is where the brutal truth of human nature is laid bare. "No, you will not merge in front of me. Drive me into the guardrail and back up traffic to Burnsville, for all I care. What, wait! The car ahead isn't letting me merge? What amoral sociopath is afoot in the land?"

It's as if they thought the traffic of the future would consist mostly of hobbyists who took their Auto-Carriages out on Sunday for a merry jaunt, exulting in the sensation of 20 mile-per-hour breezes against their goggles. It should have been obvious that incessant rivers of metal and plastic would stampede into the commons.

Fifty years of torture, in other words.

Note: It will be worse. And then it will be better. Rinse; repeat.