Starting Thursday March 19th, Minnetonka Boulevard and all exits surrounding highway 100 will be closed through October 2015. In addition to the Minnetonka Boulevard closures, highway 100 will be closed overnight for the weekend of March 27th. After this the highway will be reduced to two lanes in each direction until October 2015. The section of highway under construction is the last section that is below safety standards south of 394. The construction and road closures are occurring sooner than expected because of the warm weather this spring.

The project is being done for a number of different reasons. The Minnetonka Boulevard bridge over highway 100 is in need of repair. The project will also work to improve the safety of the interchange between Minnetonka Boulevard and Highway 100, a common location of accidents. In addition to improving safety, the project will improve the flow of traffic by adding a third lane in what is currently a bottleneck. Noise walls will be constructed on each side of the highway in order to improve noise pollution in the surrounding neighborhoods.

The cost of the project is currently estimated at $60 million. The construction will also benefit the city of Saint Louis Park by allowing them to reconstruct their storm and sanitation systems surrounding the highway.

As many BSM students live in the west metro, these road closures will drastically change many students’ commutes to and from school every day. “Every day I come from West Lake street in Hopkins onto Minnetonka Boulevard in order to cross Highway 100 to get to school. I’m going to have to drastically reshape my commute. It’s going to be a lot farther to get to school and I’m going to have to leave earlier every morning to avoid traffic on the detours,” senior Ryan Appelhof said.

“Since I live right off of highway 5, it’s really convenient to take it almost all the way to school. It’s going to be a pain and I’m going to hit a lot of slow traffic on the detour on highway 7 on the way to school,” senior Nate Barry said.