There’s a journalism adage that, for any headline ending with a question mark, the answer is always “no.” Using the interrogative is certainly a tempting frame, and one that I’m also guilty of adopting. (See this example on drought, this one on concrete diverters, or this one on an old rail spur.)
The recent Star Tribune Editorial on the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s (MnDOT) proposed options for reconstructing central Interstate 94, “Is Rethinking I-94 too ambitious?” is a good example of the interrogative headline in action. Historical scrutiny about the terrible effects of urban freeways on their communities, combined with the urgent need for climate action to reduce driving, makes the question of “too much ambition” sound silly.
Weighing the options
Before jumping to conclusions, it’s important to understand that major changes to I-94 are still years away. Replacing and reconstructing the 60-year-old freeway, nearing the end of its “design life,” is going to take a long time. MnDOT is currently in its “scoping stage,” about sixteen months where “develops alternatives” before going into years of study and engineering around details. Actual construction is not set to take place until at least 2028.
In contemplating the future of I-94, this summer is the first time the public has had rough plans to examine, and a few of them are pretty eye-opening. As I wrote when the idea for an “boulevard” was first floated by transportation advocates, the “at-grade” options represent an ambitious sea change that would transform a 14-mile corridor between Minneapolis and St. Paul. MNDOT deserves praise for putting this kind of bold alternative on the table, and it’s an idea that should be taken seriously.
The key benefits of an at-grade boulevard would include opening up huge swaths of valuable urban land for other uses, reducing speeding in urban neighborhoods, reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMT) with fewer lanes and less traffic, and reducing harmful air and noise pollution currently take years off the lives of the state’s most vulnerable people. Those would be amazing outcomes.
[image_credit]MnDOT[/image_credit]
There are riveting examples from around the world that show that, counterintuitively, traffic often either moves elsewhere or simply disappears. This happened, for example, after the collapse of the I-35W bridge in 2007. Other examples come from Seattle, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and many other countries reinforce this reverse “induced demand” phenomenon.
That said, even if you assume that half the traffic “evaporates”, that still leaves around 60,000 cars a day, which is a lot for a four-lane boulevard to handle. By contrast, Highway 55 / Hiawatha Avenue in south Minneapolis averages about 25,000 cars a day, giving you a rough sense of what a boulevard option might feel like if designed according to historic parameters.
However, the at-grade designs include bus rapid transit (BRT) that would have three stops along the route, and would maintain plenty of capacity – 20,000 people per hour – to move people on the corridor. If we imagine a substantial shift in how people get around, the boulevard proposal could handle the load. Just because it’s hard to envision that amount of change taking place in the next 10 years, doesn’t mean change is not possible. It’s good that advocacy groups like Twin Cities Boulevard are continuing to build support for this alternative.
[image_credit]MnDOT[/image_credit]Expansion option should be dead on arrival
Meanwhile, other design alternatives MnDOT that add lanes are terrible choices in the year 2023. Twenty years ago, it was conventional wisdom the MnDOT would expand I-94 at the first opportunity. After all, traffic engineering and been predicting ever-increasing traffic volumes.
These days, when commute patterns looking much more flexible than previously assumed, and per-capita vehicle miles traveled no longer steadily rising, spending billions to expand the freeway should be a non-starter. Local elected officials in both Minneapolis and St. Paul should make it clear that the agency’s “Expanded Freeway” options are unacceptable.
[image_credit]MnDOT[/image_credit]
Furthermore, recent changes to state law add another wrinkle to the “expansion” options. This year, the state Legislature created new agency rules that will make it difficult for MnDOT to expand VMT without serious mitigation around alternative modes. In the case of adding a lane on I-94, it’s difficult to imagine anything the agency could do that would offset that level of damage to transportation goals.
“We are monitoring that,” MnDOT’s Project Manager, Melissa Barnes, admitted during the press briefing last month, discussing the new state VMT law. “It’s something we’re aware of and will learn more about over this winter.”
Middle ground and frontage roads
Meanwhile, interesting alternatives lay between the two extremes. Both the “Reduced Freeway” and the “Local/Regional” options have features that would be big upgrades over the status quo. Personally, I’m enamored with the “local/regional” plan, because it includes quality transit and transforms the residential streets on either side of the freeway footprint.
[image_credit]MnDOT[/image_credit]
[image_credit]MinnPost photo by Bill Lindeke[/image_credit][image_caption]Concordia and St. Anthony (above) Avenues next to I-94 are two-lane, one-way streets that encourage alarming levels of speeding.[/image_caption]
Urban freeways reconsidered
In the 60 years since I-94 was constructed, there’s been a stark shift in how urban freeways are remembered. Thanks to decades of community efforts by people like Marvin Anderson, David V. Taylor, and many others, I-94 is a textbook case of freeway destroying thriving Black communities, made famous around the country. It’s thanks to their work that there’s political possibility for a freeway cap, or “land bridge” in St. Paul’s historic Rondo neighborhood. According to the MnDOT spokesperson, that’s a separate but connected process.
“We are aware of them, coordinating with them and moving forward in tandem,” said project manager Melissa Barnes.
Sadly, critical attitudes on the part of historians and others haven’t really changed the practices of state DOTs. Even now, the Texas DOT is destroying working-class housing to expand freeways in Houston. The Louisiana DOT is harming a Black neighborhood to expand a freeway in Shreveport. The Washington DOT just expanded I-5 through Downtown Seattle. The Oregon DOT has been trying for years to expand a downtown freeway through one of the last remaining Black neighborhoods in Portland, though community pressure and budget overruns have halted it yet again.
It’s all deeply counterproductive when transportation carbon emissions continue to rise. Every day climate news like record-low ice in the Antarctic or out-of-control Canadian wildfires alarm anyone paying attention.
To make a long story short, the options MnDOT put on the table are not too ambitious. The agency has a chance to lead the nation in the redressing harmful mistakes of previous generations. A public engagement survey is available now, to gauge opinions about the various options. If there was ever a time for the Minnesota DOT to be ambitious, it’s now.
I realized the other day that the conversation about “rethinking I-94” is already taking the wrong approach because we’ve given it to MnDOT to study which by default means that land will be used for roadways.
I’d like to suggest taking a further step back and asking ourselves what we’d do with that strip of land if it were completely empty and a blank slate. Would we decide a multi-lane freeway through the city was the best use of the land, or would we do something else?
The idea of replacing a major urban thorough fare with a 2-lane boulevard is the definition of insanity.
Please just widen 94 and help reduce the traffic congestion. It’s so simple. I think people are overthinking it. Just widen it out and we will spend less time waiting in traffic, spewing pollution from our cars.
We already have University Avenue for people who want something more like a boulevard that is super slow, but has lots of businesses and housing along it. There’s also a light rail line that goes along that exact same route, plus a bus line. People who want to use those are welcome to do so.
Personally, when I’m trying to get from St. Paul to Minneapolis, or vice versa, I want to do it as quickly as possible on a freeway that is as wide as possible with the least possible traffic congestion.
I’m not a fan of the blvd proposal, but i have to push back on the theory that widening the freeway is the answer. Any trip through Atlanta, Houston, Chicago, LA etc, is proof of that. At the end of the day, no matter how many lanes you have, bottlenecks will still happen when that traffic is routed towards entrance and exit ramps.
You mention the damage highways have done to historically black neighborhoods, but the Regional Bike Trails you are so fond of running through small neighborhoods are doing the same thing on a smaller scale.
Do you have examples?
I can’t think of a bike lane in the metro that exists only through eminent domain & tearing out homes & neighborhoods to acquire the right-of-way. The vast majority seem to either replace rail lines, or half a lane of roadway. But I haven’t ridden them all, so I’m curious.
Maybe if the “smaller scale” refers to ants?
One needs to remember that the “Ike freeways” with massive subsidies were designed to connect cities and not for commuting to work in your own city. Obviously, that didn’t work and killed the inner cities. Will current funding keep supporting highways? Near Snelling & 94 there is a bus ramp for EB buses and carpools that has yet to be removed- bus garage is long gone. This Pascal ramp is rarely used and often not legally. It is a blind spot for those using the other EB ramp.
It is also obvious that adding lanes on 35E north of St Paul did not help traffic congestion.
All options need to look at the entire metro and not just a small segment like few miles of 94. How does it the system connect with other cities looking at air, rail, & bus terminals? How do those riders then finish their trip? With younger people driving less will there be better local connections to these hubs?
“No, rethinking I-94 is not ‘too ambitious’”
It’s a battle against the inertia of the status quo. It’s easy to see a busy freeway and conclude there’s a need to leave it as a freeway. It’s much harder to imagine how current 94 users would reach their destinations by other means.
It’s rarely too ambitious to consider all possibilities and think things through very well, always good to plan things well. But who was thinking well, planning well, when the Green Line was placed on University Avenue? Answer: none of the decision-makers. We remain in need of a high capacity central corridor transit link that’s sufficiently rapid.
Regarding the current thinking about our urban I-94, I see no consideration in the above article or anywhere else concerning truck traffic, local and non-local. If this is not taken into account, any reconfiguration will have bad results.
I will repeat this again and again: The LRT line on University Ave should have been elevated.
And I will repeat again, Frank, that elevating it would have worked, as would have tunneling it or (much less expensively) placing it along I-94. But if you’re going to do the infrastructure for elevating or tunneling, better think ahead to heavy rail.
Bill – first, I’m SO grateful you continue to write about the 94 project. It’s very important.
Second, I’m glad the bill we worked on is already having impact!!
And lastly, I’m shocked to hear that Hiawatha only carries 25,000 vehicles on average. For context, Hennepin in Uptown carries between 15,000-31,000 (https://www.minneapolismn.gov/media/-www-content-assets/documents/Hennepin_OnePager_Final_v3.pdf). I would think a Hiawatha-like design for 94 could and would handle more. I also wonder how many of those trips are “through-trips” and could be accomplished using 494/694.
As a resident local to Hiawatha, I avoid it. Parallel minnehaha avenue is often a faster option, despite the lower speed limit. The main issue with hiawatha is the timing of the lights. The intersections at 46th and 31st are particularly troublesome – with red light wait times measured in minutes, and green lights measured in seconds. The issue is tied to the bias towards trains. The choice was made (reasonably, in my view) to prioritize trains & switch the signals so road traffic stops and trains sail through. The problem is that the light sequence seems to restart rather than resuming where it left off. The last action in a cycle, often left turns, sometimes wait multiple cycles to get tgeir turn.
Major design mistakes leaving 46th and nearby at-grade LRT crossing at-grade. Before $millions more get spent on slow, street-running LRT concepts such as the Blue Line Extension over West Broadway, these Hiawatha at-grade intersections need to be grade separated.
Smarter light timing would be far less expensive.
Tim Keane’s op-ed in today’s Star Tribune, on bad planning of street alterations at 42nd and Cedar that are killing small businesses (as is similarly happening in Uptown) is also apropos for this discussion.
I read the MNDOT report on the 35W bridge collapse and resulting traffic. It states that “total travel demand did not change” but people simply figured out alternate routes.
Yes, that’s almost always what happens. We have a robust freeway network in the Twin Cities, with lots of alternatives.
This places increased traffic on alternative routes while increasing commute times , increases miles driven and required the expansion of alternative roadways.
I’m sure this increase in ghg emissions will negate the efforts of the cyclists who believe their pedaling is making any difference.
More pipedreams… 20,000 people a day are going to switch to bus rapid transit if we eliminate I-94? What are you smoking?
Not every commuter needs to switch to BRT – in all of the stated plans, car lanes will remain.
Inevitably though, when faced with a speedy BRT route free from traffic or a rush hour jam, I think most people will choose the former. People like to choose the fastest way to get from point A to point B.
Great article Bill! Appreciate the response to the framing of the Strib editorial and the accessible overview of where we are in the process / why its not too ambitious to have a broad set of alternatives to consider.
Imagining a world where MN-DOT moves forward with the at-grade boulevard option…is it even possible to design it such that it doesn’t become a “strode” like so many of the other urban arterial state highways (i.e. Snelling)?
Would love to hear thoughts from the Twin Cities Boulevard folks and/or the many transit/urbanist enthusiasts who read your column on this.
I also like the local/regional plan that separates the traffic between Minneapolis and St. Paul from the traffic through the Twin Cities. I also think there’s an opportunity for a few more bridges to stitch the north and south sides of the freeway together. One bridge between Lexington and Dale is not enough.
There are so many great places where freeway caps, even small ones, would make a huge difference. Downtown St. Paul, south of Downtown Minneapolis, and Seward, to name a few…
I rarely travel to St. Paul from Minneapolis, so if I have a dog in this fight, it’s a very small one. That said, some of the comments strike me as illuminating of the sorts of things that MNDoT and other highway agencies don’t often try to take into account. James McCorkell, on the other hand, seems to have stepped out of a time machine from 1955. Imagine the level of taxation necessary to fund the freeway he envisions for his personal convenience, not to mention the environmental consequences.
Beth Artner makes a valid point, I think, though cyclists will disagree.
David Markle’s 2nd paragraph is spot-on, and an area that’s often disregarded in discussions of traffic.
Katie Jones’ final sentence is worth consideration, as well.
Dan Landherr addresses something I’ve often thought about in his first sentence – why did/do some traffic engineers feel it necessary to bring an interstate highway directly into the downtown area, with all the associated (and expensive) issues created thereby, while others bring the interstate near, but not into, the downtown, and use arterial “stroads” to bring traffic that final mile to the city center? I don’t have an answer for that, but it’s a question that has interested me.
There is no reason for the average person to rethink I94. MNDot may have some performative community input sessions and fantasy alternate design briefs but it is just the planning equivalent of a show trial. They are just going to do whatever they want in the end, which is expand the lanes.
As someone who travels back and forth on 94 between Minneapolis and Saint Paul five days per week (sometimes by car, sometimes by bus), some thoughts: – 1) I don’t think extra lanes are going to improve the flow of traffic due to incredibly poor driving. It’s as if a significant number of motorists forgot how to drive on the freeway. Extra lanes only gives these motorists more opportunity to cause traffic problems . 2) If we are going to have an extra lane on each side, it should be dedicated to bus rapid transit (BRT) only, and those lanes should be on the inside that connect to new transit stations that connect to streets above. 3) The exit ramp from 94 Westbound onto 280 is a disaster. Any plan to redo 94 should include a plan to redo that ramp.
“I-94 is a textbook case of freeway destroying thriving Black communities,”
Well, not exactly. Read “The Days of Rondo” by Evelyn Fairbanks
https://shop.mnhs.org/products/days-rondo
A great narrative about Rondo in the 40s and 50s and while the freeway contributed to its’ decline you are also left with the undeniable issue that if you were a successful black professional during those days “movin’ on up” to Edina or Highland Park or similar neighborhoods was simply not an option, creating a thriving neighborhood of economic diversity that withered away after the freeway and a better ability to live where you wanted to.
Oh, and as noted in an earlier piece, solve a part of the car transportation issue using the Pierce Butler Route where I94 should have gone in the first place…
Well, as a general rule “thinking” is allowed, and not usually a “bad” idea, but one should note the difference between thoughts and fantasies. Once again, we have would-be planners who’ve taken it upon themselves to re-design major transportation routes the rest of us use without permission or consent. The design “principles” being deployed have not been vetted or approved in any rational sense by the community at large. Rather these principles and design priorities merely conform to a fantasy alternative future that some “urbanists” like to promote. Thought experiments can’t really be “ambitious”, but they can be more or less reality based.
In this case shutting a major transit corridor that tens of thousands of drivers rely on every day would be nothing short of daft. And the logic of shutting down freeways in an attempt to “calm” traffic elsewhere simply defies common sense. Sure, people always find ways to get wherever they need to go, but that doesn’t mean the alternatives people use in a crises should or could be “normalized”.
There’s no doubt that the gash through the cities created by the I-94 freeway was a tragic outcome in many ways, and there were those who pointed out better routes and predicted this outcome before it happened. But what’s done is done, sometimes there’s no going back, this is why it’s important to get really big decisions correct at the time… what done cannot always be undone.
When I fantasize about a different freeway corridor along 94 for years my fantasy has been a land bridge that re-connects downtown MPLS with the neighborhoods to the south. That’s a relatively short and narrow corridor, and “land” there would connect something significant with something else significant. Somewhere around here there’s an original design by the guy who designed the Institute of Arts that showed a mall running from the Art Institute downtown… that was a cool design. I’m not saying it’s feasible now, too much has been built in between, but it gives us some ideas as to possibilities without a big giant trench in between.
I was surprised to see the Rondo land bridge proposal get so much more discussion simply because that land bridge would be a much bigger and more expensive project, and it wouldn’t restore the Rondo neighborhood. But hey… got each his/her own fantasy eh?
Maybe a comparison of sorts is Boston’s big dig. For decades an elevated freeway wound through the heart of downtown Boston (I’ve seen this, I didn’t just read about it) until they tunneled underneath and tore down the bridges the highway used to run on. I can’t brag about the tunnel traffic below but the result for the city above has been amazing. Now re-connected by an actual mall of sorts the city has a completely different character. I think THAT was the most expensive civic construction project in the nations history actually, and yes it certainly was ambitious. But it wasn’t designed to “calm” anything or transform the city into a pedestrian or bicycle paradise.
Well the pioneers re thought St. Anthony falls, and without it, there would be no Minneapolis! The real question, are things better or worse because of their rethinking?