Baxter Keeps Adding Drive-Thrus. Brainerd Just Tore Out Its Traffic Signals.

Drive Highway 210 from the Costco end in Baxter to the Mississippi River bridge in Brainerd this week and you will cross two different visions of what a road is for. On the Baxter side, survey stakes and building permits are stacking up around fast-casual concepts built entirely for cars that never put a foot on the sidewalk. A few miles east, the state just spent a summer ripping out traffic signals and pouring roundabouts, adding sidewalks, and planning a pedestrian bridge to the regional trail system. Same highway. Same construction season. Opposite bets on how people are supposed to move through this town.

Most people driving this stretch this fall have noticed one half of that story or the other. The Baxter end feels like it is getting faster and busier with food options. The Brainerd end feels like a headache of barrels and detours. What is easy to miss is that these are not two unrelated inconveniences. They are the same corridor being redesigned in opposite directions at the same time, and that split is going to shape how you route your errands, where you grab lunch, and which entrance into town you default to for the next year or more.

The Corner By Costco Keeps Getting Crowded

The stretch of Baxter around Costco and Westgate Mall has turned into the busiest small-format development zone in the Brainerd Lakes Area this year. Panera went before Baxter's Planning and Zoning Commission in November 2025 with plans for a restaurant with a drive-thru and patio seating on the lot between Highway 210 and Costco, on Elder Drive. The goal is an opening by fall of 2026, though everyone involved has acknowledged Minnesota winters have a way of pushing construction timelines.

Just up the road, a 510-square-foot 7 Brew coffee stand cleared its permit hearing in February 2026 for the small undeveloped lot in front of Westgate Mall, wedged between Mid Minnesota Federal Credit Union and First Western Bank near Fairview Road. The plans are worth sitting with for a second: 13 stacking stalls per drive-thru lane, nine parking spaces, and explicitly no walk-up pedestrian access and no indoor seating. This is not a coffee shop you park at. It is a coffee shop you never leave your car for.

Down on Dellwood Drive off Highway 371, the space that housed Blaze Pizza from the winter of 2022 through its closing in fall 2025 now has a building permit for a Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin-Robbins combination. Dunkin' already has one foothold in the market, its first Brainerd-area location opened on Washington Street in east Brainerd back in the summer of 2024, and this would be its first storefront in Baxter itself. Meanwhile Walmart's Baxter store is going through a remodel that adds a grocery pickup expansion and, tucked inside the building itself, a second Dunkin' touchpoint in Baxter in the form of an in-store coffee kiosk.

Four different projects, four different property owners, one shared instinct: build for the car that is already moving, not the person who might park and walk in.

Three Miles East, MnDOT Made The Opposite Bet

While Baxter adds lanes of stacking capacity for coffee and sandwiches, the state has spent 2026 quietly dismantling the signal-controlled intersections that used to define driving through east Brainerd. The Highway 210 and Washington Street reconstruction is a two-year MnDOT project running from Baxter Drive to Pine Shores Road, broken into five segments: west, bridge, downtown, mall and railyard, and east. MnDOT's own figures put the project cost at $45 million, though a regional radio report rounded it to $46 million, a small enough gap that it does not change what residents are actually living through this fall.

On August 20, 2026, crews opened the first two roundabouts, at Highway 210 and Mill Avenue/County Highway 3, and at C Street and Highway 25, to one-lane traffic. Those roundabouts replaced the traffic signals that used to sit at Mill Avenue and Fourth Avenue Northeast. MnDOT called it "an important step toward improving safety and travel through east Brainerd," and it marks the first visible piece of a project that will not fully wrap until 2027.

The same reconstruction includes a proposed pedestrian bridge near Lum Park that would connect directly into the Cuyuna Lakes State Trail, along with new sidewalks and an update to the Mississippi River bridge scheduled for next year. None of that is happening in Baxter. It is happening a few miles east, on the exact same highway, in the exact same construction season.

Here is the split in one view:

What This Actually Changes About Your Loop Through Town

If your regular route runs through east Brainerd, the practical picture through fall 2026 looks like this:

• Highway 210 stays one lane in each direction between Pine Shores Road and South Sixth Street through the fall.
• The segment between Highway 25 and Kingwood Street remains closed and detoured.
• A new Nelson Drive connection, built where Eighth Avenue Northeast used to run, gives access between Highway 25 and Mill Avenue for the funeral home, nearby businesses, and the education center in that stretch.
• R.L. Larson Excavating is the prime contractor running both the 2026 and 2027 construction seasons.
• MnDOT's local business and resident info line for the project is 320-204-1763, and the Drive210 campaign posts route updates for anyone trying to keep a regular business or appointment on schedule during construction.

Notch 8, the restaurant inside the historic Northern Pacific Center led by executive chef Matt Annand, has already started telling its own guests to route through Highway 371 to 210 from Baxter or Gull Lake to avoid the worst of the detours. That is a small but telling sign of how established Brainerd businesses are adjusting their own guidance in real time rather than waiting for the project to finish.

The Places Holding Steady Through All Of It

Everything above is churn. Underneath it, a handful of local anchors are not moving. The Local 218, in a building dating to 1941 and a few steps from Gregory Park and the Mississippi River in downtown Brainerd, won both Best Entrée and Best Overall at Brainerd's 2026 Taste of the Lakes under owner and executive chef PJ Severson. Jack Pine Brewery in Baxter keeps its regular rotation of food trucks and live music going regardless of what is happening a mile away at Westgate. Five Rocks Distilling on Washington Street in downtown Brainerd is close enough to the construction zone to feel it, but it is still pouring. And on September 21 this year, the Northland Arboretum on Conservation Drive in Baxter marks its 50th anniversary, a reminder that some of what defines this area was built for the long haul, long before any of this year's permits were filed.

That contrast, between a corridor being rebuilt around speed on one end and shared use on the other, and a set of local institutions that outlast both, is the actual shape of the Brainerd Lakes Area right now. It is not one story about growth and one story about construction headaches. It is one highway learning to be two different roads, and the businesses and residents along it adjusting block by block to figure out which one they are actually driving on.

If you are watching this stretch of 210 change shape and start wondering what it means for property values along the corridor, or where the next wave of interest is likely to land once the roundabouts and the drive-thrus both settle in, that is exactly the kind of read on this market the Mike Kennedy Group tracks every day. Reach out when you are ready to talk about what any of this means for your own address on the map.