For years, advocates and the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) have been engaged in a subtle game of three-dimensional advocacy chess. It centers on the central portion of Interstate 94, the state’s most used freeway, which carries around 150,000 cars a day between Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Built more than 60 years ago, the central link of I-94 is approaching its “design life” and soon much of it will have to be reconstructed at great expense. The open question is whether MnDOT will try to expand the freeway when it undergoes construction.
The agency is rapidly approaching a key decision point as a committee meets this week. Following a multiyear agency public-engagement effort on one hand, titled “Rethinking I-94,” groups of social justice and environmental advocates have taken a preemptive position on the future of the state’s busiest freeway.
“There are a lot of layers and complexities to any kind of transportation project,” explained Keith Baker, the managing director of Reconnect Rondo. “This is the most important corridor in the state, and having MnDOT, the city, the Met Council, and Ramsey County on the same page in reference to this opportunity is critical.”
Before he began working with Reconnect Rondo, an advocacy organization for St. Paul’s freeway-adjacent communities, Baker worked for 15 years at MnDOT. Last October, his Reconnect Rondo organization sent the agency a detailed eight-page position paper [PDF] calling for “an equitable and restorative development model” in planning for the freeway’s future. And in December, the Minneapolis City Council unanimously passed a resolution [PDF] laying out a series of demands and expectations for how the freeway is used. (The St. Paul City Council is expected to pass a very similar resolution next week.)
Elephant in the room: climate change
The elephant in the room remains climate change, now a more urgent problem than ever. The problem is that, statewide and nationally, the transportation sector poses the largest challenge for decarbonization. While Minnesota has succeeded in cutting emissions from sectors like electricity generation, transportation pollution has grown as larger cars, trucks, and SUVs continue to increase the state’s overall Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT).
In 2019, MnDOT released a report on its goals for reducing carbon through encouraging electric vehicles. But even those plans barely included overall VMT reductions, making it difficult to reach ambitious climate goals.
The decision around central I-94 might be an opportunity to take the next step.
[image_credit]Minnesota Department of Transportation[/image_credit]
[image_credit]Minnesota Department of Transportation[/image_credit]
If you look at the Minneapolis City Council resolution, it’s full of ideas that point to reducing traffic on the freeway. In it, the council states flatly that it “strongly opposes the repair or reconstruction of I-94 in its current form and categorically rejects any roadway expansion within its boundaries or any right of way expansion.”
In place of some existing freeway traffic, the City Council proposes taking an existing travel lane and converting it to a transit/carpool lane that would allow express buses and other “high occupancy vehicles” to speed between the cities, even during rush hour.
The resolution’s other details include better bridges and connections for walking and bike paths, sidewalks, and trails over the freeway, alongside mitigation efforts to reduce harmful pollution for people living nearby.
“I-94 was the most destructive project, and this is a once in a generation opportunity to repair that damage,” explained Burns. “The Sierra Club position is that if, MnDOT wants to brand this thing as ‘Rethinking 94,’ we’re calling on them to do that, and to really create infrastructure that centers on the health of people and ecosystems.”
The ugly history of I-94
Of course, the central spur of I-94 is not just any freeway, but a particularly infamous stretch of urban highway that is held up as a national example of the worst kind of midcentury freeway construction. When it was built it destroyed St. Paul’s largely African-American Rondo neighborhood, and that story has filled several books, a handful of documentaries, and at least one play. Thanks to the tireless work of African American community leaders in St. Paul, commemorating the historic Rondo neighborhood has long been the subject of an annual summer festival.
“While this is a transportation project, it cannot be viewed solely as a transportation project,” said Keith Baker of Reconnect Rondo. Baker’s four-year-old nonprofit centers on building support and funding for a “land bridge” that would put a lid over a central stretch of the freeway, relinking both sides of the historic Rondo community.
Since then, Reconnect Rondo has reframed its mission, to focus less on infrastructure specifics and more on revitalizing the city’s African American community that the freeway destroyed in the first place.
“Reconnect Rondo will help to create a unified voice within the community that will lead a restorative movement,” explained Baker. “By leading a restorative movement, we aim to revitalize the past of Rondo, looking to the future of an African American cultural enterprise district that’s connected by a community land bridge. The land bridge [itself] is merely a tool.”
For Baker, the Minneapolis City Council’s I-94 resolution is a good step forward, and he suggested “we don’t see anything within the resolution that hinders the work we’re doing.”
But as Baker sees it, the key for the future of Rondo community will be for MnDOT to truly rethink its goals. That’s why their position paper lays out an alternative vision for the DOT, rethinking the “purpose and need” of the freeway in the first place.
“The position paper speaks to the importance of social, economic, and environmental considerations to be up front in purpose and need rather than simply talking about infrastructure,” Baker explained.
MnDOT evolving?
For generations, traffic engineering has been nearly synonymous with freeway expansion. DOTs have long been tasked with the problem of reducing traffic congestion, which is an almost impossible goal given the perniciousness of human behavior around induced demand.
But this year, during a pandemic that saw travel behavior rapidly shift, there were some glimmers that MnDOT is starting to change its habits. In December, an external committee that advises the agency on climate policy, the Sustainable Transportation Advisory Council, approved recommendations to set goals for reducing driving statewide. Among the adopted principles are “reducing VMT statewide by 20% by 2050” and the corollary to “stop expanding highway capacity to reduce congestion.” [PDF]
Thirty years in the future might not seem like a significant time horizon, but even that goal represents a massive shift for an agency that has predicted growth in driving since its inception.
[image_credit]Minnesota Department of Transportation[/image_credit]
Elsewhere around the country, it’s another story. Destructive urban freeway expansion projects continue to be pitched and planned in cities like Portland (Oregon), Houston, Cleveland, Los Angeles and dozens of other cities.
Ending highway expansion would represent a huge political fight, especially for fast-growing exurban communities. But with incoming U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg openly calling for an urban freeway removal fund, the time might be right for MnDOT to shift gears.
[image_credit]MinnPost photo by Bill Lindeke[/image_credit][image_caption]I-94 at sunset in Minneapolis' Seward Neighborhood.[/image_caption]
“Our community has a continuum, and people are at different places,” said Baker. “Some want the doggone thing just to be filled in. Others say it’s OK to have a freeway, but don’t want expansion. Or that we need transit considerations, as well as ensuring connectivity so that biking and walking can take place.”
Baker and others will be closely watching this week’s meeting of the freeway’s policy advisory committee, as is members draft their “Purpose and Need Statement” for the freeway project.
“We are at an important point, talking about mobility equity,” he said. “Anything that gets us to mobility equity, we completely support.”
Hmmm… there seems to be a certain pattern at work. I wasn’t here when I-94 was built – I was in metro St. Louis, where building I-70 through the city’s north side accomplished much the same thing as the building of I-94 between Minneapolis and St. Paul did here. And, having moved here from Denver, I’m reminded that I-70 and I-25 through Denver both have histories similar to the same I-70, but 900 miles east in St. Louis, and I-94 here. CDOT in Colorado did a better job of at least keeping I-70 out of downtown proper than MoDOT did in St. Louis, but made up for it with the routing of I-25, which has traffic congestion to rival any metro in the country on a daily basis. Construction of both interstates in metro Denver was nonetheless similarly destructive to communities of color as was I-94’s construction here. The route(s) chosen also just happened to be through low-income neighborhoods, with relatively low-value housing, which made that / those highway routing(s) a more economical use of taxpayer dollars, and also made political opposition less persuasive.
More and better transit options seem to me a worthy alternative to expansion of I-94 between the Twin Cities, less costly to the environment – for which we have no alternative – and incentivizing new styles of development and residence in both cities. If the existing highway is not expanded, it’s possible the hue and cry will be loud and persistent, which should provide leaders in both cities, as well as in the legislature – if there are any – to devise and implement alternatives that are equivalent in terms of both convenience and cost to the consumer. The goal should be to move people and goods, not machines, between the cities. Electrical power seems to be the power source of the future, and while that will provide plenty of business and profit opportunities for companies big and small, it also will require a power grid that’s more sturdy and reliable than the existing one. I’ve had more power outages in my 11 years in Minneapolis than in my previous 65 years in St. Louis and metro Denver combined.
It’s worth noting that automobile manufacturers were, and are, well ahead of the failed Trump administration in terms of planning for a more environmentally-friendly future. I bit the bullet a couple years ago and purchased a hybrid, not so much, I admit, for environmental reasons, but simply to lower my operating costs. It has done that handsomely, and the pandemic has cut my driving by, I’d guess, 2/3. I’m not sure how it can be monitored without the usual outrage from the right, but VMT (vehicle miles traveled) seems to me a much more fair and equitable means of raising revenue for road and infrastructure maintenance – and it adoption would provide another incentive for local, state and federal officials to devise and implement transportation options for the general public that are more efficient than everyone driving, individually, to destinations that could be equally well served by something other than an automobile. There are perfectly good reasons why schools, both public and private, use buses to transport children to and from their facilities rather than having families bring each child individually.
I was here at the time that I-94 planners bulldozed the route through the heart of the city, tearing out the Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul and slicing off one half of Butler Square at the Augsburg campus. I recall that Otto Silha, who became president and publisher at the Star Tribune, had repeatedly railed against such planning. He repeatedly called for adequate and improved mass transit instead of urban freeways.
Others have taken up the mass transit plea, but few of them have scrutinized the bad planning process that usually prevails at both the local and regional level. We have a Metropolitan Council not elected by voters which is not responsive to public transit needs; instead it kow-tows to local and county politicians who advocate for real estate interest and developers, while pursuing the dream of higher property tax revenue.
Thus we got the Green Line, advertised as an urban transit trunk line but realized as an LRT hobbled by placement on University Avenue where it cannot run as a train should, nor does it have the frequency of stops that would be provided by a much less costly streetcar line. The Green Line is probably the slowest LRT line built in the U.S. in decades. It’s much too slow to serve as a metropolitan transit trunk line.
I refer the readers to a column in the Star Tribune, “Understanding the Green Line, neither this nor that” of August 4, 2014, and to an in-depth article in streets.mn, “Strangulation on the Green Line,” July 7, 2014.
Mr. Lindeke will likely respond to this comment by proclaiming the Green Line a huge success but he has been involved in St. Paul Planning, and his statements must be viewed in that light. As a matter of fact, the Green Line does not meet the standards cited by St. Paul planners during their planning and development process, and it falls far short of the standards met by most of their own comparison examples.
The Green Line is a huge success.
“I refer the readers to … an in-depth article in streets.mn, ‘Strangulation on the Green Line,’ July 7, 2014.”
Don’t you mean your article, Mr. Markle?
Yes, I do.
I neglected to add: there’s a hearing at the Minnesota House today about I-94 and efforts to fund land bridge planning. https://www.twincities.com/2021/02/02/rondo-land-bridge-makes-6-million-pitch-to-legislature-for-pre-design/
What happened in the past is, well, the past. You can’t stop “progress” you can only get in front, or ahead of it, or get out of the way.
Not sure if this is meant to be sarcastic, or what your use of quote marks around “progress” is meant to indicate. Highways are not progress in a world where we know that the climate is warming because of greenhouse gases and that the largest share of Minnesota’s (and the U.S.’s) greenhouse gas output is from transportation.
Does progress instead mean moving forward to a place where humans can live together in a relatively peaceful civilization? If so, that is not what we get from continuing with highways like I-94.
I disagree… in regards to general purpose lanes.. I think the status quo should be maintained with 4 lanes in each direction (along with proper outer shoulders in segments where the freeway was haphazardly widened following the 35W bridge collapse), elimination of lane drops at Snelling and 280 (I-94 EB, along with reconfiguring that interchange to eliminate lefthand merges). Bus lanes along with inline BRT should be added through the corridor, with several freeway caps (and widening bridges to include more pedestrian facilities and amenities). Reducing lanes will not drive down existing demand by any meaningful margin, so reducing general purpose lanes in a facility that already cares 150k AADT is irresponsible.
Regardless of what happens in terms of physical changes to this segment of I-94, a more subtle (ok not that subtle) change I would ask MnDOT to consider is to remove its designation as “I-94”, instead signing it as a “spur” route (likely 194 or 594, following USDOT rules for numbering). Instead, the I-94 designation would move over to the current I-694, really hammering home the point that the northern loop (current 694) is intended to be the main through-route to bypass the cities, and the “spur” through the downtowns is truly not intended for long haul through-travel. I don’t know how many trips this would actually remove from the section between the downtowns, but even if the answer is “a few”, that’s good enough for me and worth the cost of replacing a bunch of signs (and freeway signs are expensive, this would likely cost several million dollars to re-sign these corridors).