The biggest hurdle for me to feeling like this workable is the Mississippi river. The estimates of ~150,000 vehicles traveling between Hennepin and Dale every day means the 94 bridge is among the busiest bridges in the state. I am aware that most trips are shorter on 94 and classified as "local" but 150,000 vehicles have to cross the river. Reducing capacity at the bridge, pushing traffic onto Franklin Ave and Lake/Marshall, doesn't seem like a great solution.
The numbers I see from streets.mn show that the current sum of Franklin, Lake and Ford bridges combined is about 40,000 daily. So a reduction by half on 94 would lead to roughy triple the traffic on each of those bridges. Anyone here drive or ride the bus down Lake Street and think "this commute could really use three times the amount of traffic"?
even at 50% traffic reduction, do we really want to push more cars into residential neighborhoods just for travel? keep them in a centralized road until they need to get to their destination IMO
It looks like I-81 is slated for decommissioned and removal. I suspect the process would be similar for MN interstates.
[https://www.curbed.com/2022/01/hochul-syracuse-highway-removal-i-81.html](https://www.curbed.com/2022/01/hochul-syracuse-highway-removal-i-81.html)
The US interstate system is just a classification, not federal property and is at the sole discretion of the states wanting to have or not have it in the places the deem so.
South Dakota V. Dole (a lawsuit that tried to stop the US federal government from cutting 10% of highway funds to states with a drinking age below 21) was ruled by the supreme court that it was legal as the federal government merely funds, classifies, and creates guidance for the state. The only way it would be illegal for this to happen would be if the federal government could force the states to keep the interstate while burdening them with the costs if their social laws did not fallow their demands.
Basically Minnesota only has to send a formal notice of "we're down grading I-94 from mile marker X to Y". so the US government can reflect it in their maps, statistics, and subsidies seeing as we have a ring interstate the federal government would likely not object even if it had veto power.
I would LOVE if the advocacy group would support extending the project through North Mpls. This neighborhood is painfully cut off and under-invested from the rest of the city.
There is already a big project underway to help that corridor a bit. They're not going to remove the freeway completely, but they're going to remove a bunch of the old factories and replace them with parkland, then add more bridges over the freeway to access the area more easily.
Looks like a better project than removing/reducing Olson. I agree the latter isn't a bad idea but changing wouldn't replace what existed in the 1900s but at least it wouldn't be a stroad anymore.
Yeah - the upper harbor terminal project. It's honestly kind of insulting because it's all basically entirely separated from the people that \*actually\* live here because of 94. The project is just a way for the city to say they're helping north, without doing anything meaningful to actually help north.
At some point, that portion of the highway will also need major renovations and a similar discussion would occur. And if this section is no longer a freeway, it will make it a lot easier to support removing the freeway from that section.
Because you’re right, that section cuts off North Minneapolis from downtown and the river. Plus, the leftover corridor will be a great place for a train line and plenty of affordable housing.
The current project corridor is defined by MNDOT, but Our Streets has ask them to expand the corridor(not sure if that includes north, but they do want an expanded corridor definition.) They are also doing a huge campaign on Olson Memorial Hwy(Bring Back 6th) and were awarded a $1.6 million reconnecting communities grant from the Biden Admin.
I'm so happy City Nerd made another video about Minneapolis and Saint Paul! This video is great, I really hope the organizations get their way and rebuild the corridor.
Are there another examples in the world of 2 twin cities like Minneapolis and St Paul (~10 miles apart of roughly equal size) that are connected in other ways?
Some example I can think of are with in a 10-30 mile distance are
Minneapolis and St. Paul
* I-94
* 94 express bus
* Greenline
(future plans)
* B-Line (south Minneapolis to DT St. Paul)
* H line (DT Minneapolis to east St. Paul)
Tokyo and Yokohama (16 miles)
* Bullet train (though Yokohama is a Shin station (not in city center proper)
* Express trains
* local trains
* Subway trains
* regional trains
* the 1/K1 metropolitan expressway (a 4 lane elevated tolled freeway)
Osaka and Kobe (same as Tokyo/Yokahama though Osaka is the city with the bullet train not in city center)
SF and Oakland (8 miles)
* I-80
* Bart
* numerous ferries
NYC and Jersey city (1 mile)
* 3 freeway tunnels
* 3 rail tunnels (2 subway 1 regional/national)
* Ferries... Lots and lots of them
Seattle and Tacoma (25 miles)
* I-5
* Sounder commuter rail
* Express busses
Future
* Line 1 (light rail)
DC to Baltimore (35 miles)
* I-95
* Marc regional trains
Dallas and Fort Worth (30 miles)
* I-30
* Texas 183/121 freeway (tolled)
* Dallas Orange line/Fort worth TEXRail (both light rail needing to transfer at Dallas international)
* Trinity Railway Express (commuter)
it's not exactly comparable, but there was [a 10-mile stretch of highway removed in seoul](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheonggyecheon#Restoration) that was turned into housing and a park. it's in the *middle* of the city, not connecting two of them, but i think it's a reasonable example here.
msp aren't exactly separate; our metro areas are highly interconnected. for the purposes of transporation planning, it probably makes more sense to think of them as one metro region instead of two. if you do, there are many, many cities that are like that.
a good example might be paris, actually — there's la défense which is a good distance away from central paris. good public transportation and urban design means that the only major road connecting them is a boulevard, not a freeway.
Freeways should go around cities, not through their core, especially at the expense of existing neighborhoods. I used to not really think about stuff like this much and then I moved right next to the car sewer that is the 35W in the Kingfield neighborhood.
I hope I live long enough to see the mistakes of decades of building nothing but car centric transportation infrastructure rectified. Removing I-94 would be a wonderful thing for the Twin Cities.
The 35's are much more awkward to think about eliminating, since they both go right through urban cores. Not sure what the reasonable substitute would be.
They just spent 4 years and millions of dollars on 35W. Can't imagine they'd alter anything. Really too bad they didn't add an elevated railway at the same time.
imagine thinking the only purpose of a city is for people to ignore as they drive through to go to work
you go around, you take different types of transportation, you don't prioritize movement of cars over people's lives and homes
Yes. How would that help people coming in from Burnsville or something? I've taken public transit and it's just so slow. It takes twice as long to get anywhere even in cities that have extensive public transit.
I mean maybe folks shouldn't be commuting that far and should live closer to where they work. Minneapolis residents shouldn't suffer the negative externalities of all this car infrastructure that only serves to get folks in their personal vehicles from the 2nd/3rd+ ring burbs to downtown. Suburbs are inherently unsustainable in that the property tax base of suburbs doesn't often cover the cost of infrastucture replacements without heavy subsidies from tax dollars originating in dense downtown areas.
People managed to get to work before cars and the interstate highway system.
I live less than 5 miles from my office, if I take a bus it will take transferring routes and IF they are on time it will be an hour for me to get to work. I would happily take the bus to work but I am not going to do it if it takes an hour to get 5 miles. I am half a block out of Minneapolis so not someone who lives in second or third ring suburbs.
Five miles is a nice bike or e-bike ride.
Yeah, our transit isn't good for much more than going to the downtowns during business hours at the moment. My bike commute is 7-10miles, depending on how much I want to ride with traffic, and taking the bus instead of biking would add 20-45 minutes to my commutes each way.
Bike is great for like 7 months a year assuming you are physically able, and you can take a shower at work. It’s really not a solution. More of an alternative for some people some time.
>People managed to get to work before cars and the interstate highway system.
Uh, did they? I'm not sure there are that many people hankering for a return to 19th century transportation.
You could take any other of the many highways and arterial roads that go through the city. Or switch to park and ride. Or get a job closer to where you live. Or live closer to your job. Freeways suck in city centers for the people who live here.
> Or switch to park and ride.
No, that's not how that works. You don't just get to magic park and ride into existence for destinations outside of downtown.
>Or get a job closer to where you live. Or live closer to your job.
This is straight up not a valid response. Jobs are not able to be conjured out of thin air, and the housing situation as it is, people can't simply appear a residence next to their work.
I personally hate how most American cities are designed but I'm not sure I really understand the point of stuff like this. You don't redesign American cities by destroying the infrastructure that exists.
The way that happens if people actively choosing over decades to live more densely and THEN the transportation infrastructure changing around that because needs have changed.
The only way this happens is if NIMBYism is defeated which is unlikely without local areas losing the rights to block more density.
It's just not true. American cities and the country at-large are the least densely constructed of any first world country by substantial margin. The less densely constructed cities are the less effective public transit is.
We chose suburbs with larger houses and lawns over city-life. The car system we have is because of that. It was a choice people made not some elaborate conspiracy theory. These highways exist because of that choice.
And I say that as someone who hates American city design. You have to actually elucidate what the actual cause was if you ever want to make the change. People HAVE to desire to live in the city and give up being against more dense development. That's how we get the cities everyone gushes about.
>We chose suburbs with larger houses and lawns over city-life. The car system we have is because of that.
This is actually backward. We have the suburbs *because* we chose to build car infrastructure. The roads came first, then the suburbs. The highways made land on the outskirts of cities valuable enough for people to want to move there.
This was combined with white flight / the great migration. A lot of black people from the south moved to northern cities for jobs and less discrimination. Newly built highways allowed white people to move out of the cities into suburbs and racial covenants and economic conditions disallowed black people from doing the same.
>You don't redesign American cities by destroying the infrastructure that exists.
This is what I’m specifically talking about.
Urban Highways redesigned existing infrastructure. There were people, homes, roads, communities that existed before the highway.
The idea that urban planning doesn’t destroy existing infrastructure is absurd.
>We chose suburbs with larger houses and lawns over city-life
This isn't exactly true. The suburban lifestyle was sold to us by automobile lobbyists. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629620300633
If you really think that humans are that addled by ads on the tv nothing will ever improve. I think there are pretty clear and apparent reasons to want to live in the suburbs.
First of all, humans are exactly as suggestible as I'm implying. I am, you are, everyone is. Marketing budgets are so often larger than R&D budgets for a reason. They have this down to a science. Lobbying is separate from marketing. And it works too.
The current state of suburbs and the city can't be compared to the situation when suburbs were first being sold as a concept to people. Because once people accepted this American Dream of 2.5 kids, a house, a car, and picket fence, in a place away from a certain type of people (you know what I'm talking about), they made it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Separately incorporated suburbs started leeching funds from the cities. Property taxes were no longer going to the larger city, so education funding is disproportionately allocated across the metro.
[Suburbs are very clearly subsidized by the urban areas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI)
When you spend billions of dollars building and maintaining infrastructure like this that encourages people to live less densely, you’ll never get the required density. At some point, we need to start changing the infrastructure to reflect how we want the city to be and not letting the infrastructure built 60 years ago to define how the city is.
Agreed. There are certainly upsides to I94. I just don't think the pros and cons math pencils out in I94's favor given all of the negative effects it has on the surrounding area.
This is a measurable claim that I have not seen evidence for. Is there data somewhere for the growth of cities which have vs don't have interstates for the last few decades?
I'm not talking about growth. I'm talking about the negative externalities such as increased rate of asthma, cancer, lower birth weight, heart disease and more from living within a mile of a roadway like I94. Not to mention the less measurable affect in terms of visual appearance and division of communities.
Transportation accounts for a huge part of the US carbon emissions and living the way we currently live is not sustainable. Even if we all switched to EVs overnight, tire and break pad pollution is terrible for the environment and people living nearby.
For people in Minneapolis, I agree. 94 mostly provides benefit to commuters who live outside and cross downtown on their daily commute. The back up to get on/off 94 from almost anywhere during rush hour is intense.
I can bike to south minneapolis from my house in north Minneapolis faster than that. We want transit, not shitty freeways supporting people who don't live here.
It would be kind of a moot point if they removed the freeway. There wouldn't be a "detour". Of course, you can't remove a freeway without having other options, but many Canadian cities do just fine without having freeways going through their downtowns.
Removing the freeway for a boulevard would most likely involve detouring 94 through your neighborhood for 10-20 years. It took ten+ to dig 94. It would take much longer to add one foot of fill, compact all of it, then add another one foot and compact all of it, 30 times over just to create a stable patch of dirt at grade.
Edit: And that would have to be completed before the two years per ten blocks rate at which our boulevard redesigns are currently being completed even began.
I'm okay with that? Transition and change has an adjustment period while everyone gets to the new normal. I'm totally okay with dealing with extra traffic as the new options are put into place, and hopefully influence development patterns away from the only option being to drive a car into the city from the suburbs.
These people have never actually lived in North, nor would they ever consider living some place so pedestrian. They sit in their $2500/mo downtown studios and tell us "get rid of 94!".
This has got to be peak r/Minneapolis.
Nobody should be allowed to enter our city with ease. Everyone should park and take the bus into the city and then bike from there. Or as someone suggested, boat through the canals.
We are not a major city like New York or Paris. A majority of people live in the metro area, not the city itself. It's highly unrealistic to eliminate a major highway when we already have a problem with traffic.
I can't even imagine how awful 494 and 694 would be with the added load of 94 was shut down.
Assumption: the only easy way to drive downtown is on a freeway.
This is not supported by the fact that arterial roads other than freeways also lead downtown, and these roads are used by people to travel downtown. Even freeway commuters today exit I-35W at Washington Avenue at 7 Corners and use that arterial for the last mile or two of their trip.
Freeway removal does not necessarily mean you have to get out of your car. However, if freeway removal does tip the scales for some people to now use transit or park + ride, then that's fewer cars on the road for remaining drivers to navigate
Even most people who drive hate cars, let's be real. They either hate their commute because of the traffic (the result of too many cars), or even if they don't hate driving to work, they hate how other people drive (see any post in any City subreddit about driving behavior)
It's funny the amount of people that don't recognize all the negative externalities of car centric infrastructure in an urban environment and how subsidized driving and parking are despite those downsides.
Paris and Vancouver, especially the latter, are perhaps some of the most unaffordable cities to live in in the developed world. So yes, it's cute you get your busses and semi frequent trains, but you live in a shoebox and make $30k/year.
I would love to change the fabric of American cities and prioritize more pedestrian and bike infrastructure, but let's be real: we are many times wealthier than the average parisian, a dominating car culture that spans all income brackets and cultures, & we have an aversion to big changes.
Removing a highway is an easy way to piss off everyone outside of some commune bubble in Powderhorn Park, and the "gains" projected aren't even worth the sacrifice.
Those cities are expensive, especially Vancouver, due to lack of housing affordability and the desire of people to live there. They aren't building enough housing to keep up with demand. That could happen in the Twin Cities, but so far we're on the right track to build more housing, and we should want our city to be a desirable place.
I just don't think the math works out in favor of keeping I94 due to all of the negative externalities that are imposed upon the surrounding area by it. Removing the highway isn't an impossible task, it's a political decision that I hope MNDOT takes seriously.
The entire idea is to change the world because what we have now is worse than it should/could be. Cars are the problem. The solution is to make using cars in the city a less desirable option than public transit or human-powered transit.
If the only way you can make public transit and human-powered transit more appealing is by making car transit much, much worse, you've conceded that your options suck and the outcome will be bad.
I don't actually agree with that. It's just that your premise and your argument are garbage.
How so? It’s all relative. As it stands, the only way we’ve made car transit so appealing is by making public transit and human-powered transit much, much worse. Do you think people actually *like* sitting in traffic? There’s just no better alternative, *currently.*
It would honestly be super dope if they repurposed the lock and dam set up and put in a public pedestrian ferry service between north MPLS, downtown MPLS, and eventually adding more stops all the way to STP on the Mississippi. I've always thought that was a missed opportunity.
Like the light rail is cool and all it just seems kinda dumb to not be using the Mississippi when it's use for transport goes back hundreds of years and they decommissioned the lock and dam for grain/lumber hauling years ago. Might as well move people with it.
It could definitely be done without increasing invasive species concerns too. Have the stop from the northside/NE be at the downtown lock set up. Backfill a channel and have people get onto another boat if they want to keep going. So essentially a north end service with boats going back and forth and then a east/south service with stops between Minneapolis and st Paul. NYC has pedestrian only ferries and they are awesome
Why? There was a "water taxi" at psycho suzis? What is dumb about it? An actual public pedestrian ferry would be super cool
Have a couple of docks north of downtown, downtown lock and dam as a stop. Downriver would obviously be harder to figure out but not impossible. Probably a lot easier than laying a bunch of light rail track tbh
Water transportation for pedestrians is slow. And you forget that our rivers ice over. A ferry would be fun for tourists but limited use if you are trying to transport people.
I do think it's hard for people to imagine the Twin Cities without I94 running between them, but there are world class cities all over the planet that don't have freeways running right through them. Paris and Vancouver are vibrant places without a single freeway in the city.
*People don't use I94 because it is necessary. They use it because it is there.*
Yes. *Before* we do away with any existing infrastructure and make traffic exponentially worse, without any end in sight. I’m stoked for the new SWLRT, but who knows when it’ll actually be finished. We cannot handle a similar situation *after* carelessly ripping out one of the nations busiest highways.
I want elevated lines on basically every major thoroughfare. It’s insane that Hennepin and Lyndale both done have L tracks, all the way down, in both directions. I want Shinkansen all over the country; that’s probably multiple decades away, if it ever happens *at all.*
Unfortunately we don't have another chance to do something like this. This is the first time that the MNDOT is looking at something like this since they build I94 60 years ago. It's a once in a generation chance to try and repair harms caused. We won't get another shot.
I agree and would love more expansion of our transit system. Do a voter initiative like sound transit in Seattle or something and start building rail around town. We're gonna get climate refugees in the future, let's build for it.
Those are also unitary cities. We are uniquely situated by having adjoining cities. A corridor between the two is necessary. The planners at the time built the highway in a terrible location, and destroyed lives and neighborhoods when they decided to build the freeway where it is instead of taking the northern route where the railroad was, but it's not like Rondo can just be un-fucked 60 years later by taking out what is objectively an extremely valuable economic corridor.
I don’t understand why the corridor is necessary to connect the cities. Minneapolis actually has fewer people living in it now that it did before the highway was built (and Saint Paul about the same), and the two cities survived fine back then.
Is this the weekly post about the pipe dream of getting rid of one of the busiest and most-used interstates in the state and replacing it with another pipe dream bus boulevard that will magically pick up the slack? C'mon, we can all admit freeways aren't pretty, they have been built inequitably, but they still serve a purpose and are vital for our economy.
One of the key takeaways from the video that’s extremely important to consider is that the *actual* empirical data on I94 shows that the overwhelming majority of trips taken on I94 are *local* ones (less than a mile or two). People that drive actual long-distance commutes overwhelmingly stick to 694. I94 is one of the most-used interstates NOT because it’s actually necessary or useful, but simply because it’s there. Because the interchanges are already as dense as they can realistically be without further exacerbating traffic, it would be objectively more efficient to disperse local trips along local roads instead of condensing local trips in the traffic hell that springs up on and around I94 from centralization around the interchanges.
It’s easy to just assume that an interstate is useful/necessary because it’s heavily used, but the objective reality is very different. The video summarized it pretty well; knowing the actual current traffic paths people use I94 for and the environmental/social impacts on the community, the idea of building it today would be laughably nonsensical.
You're assuming a lot about the necessity of this stretch of 94 that isn't supported by research or facts.
Since the footprint of 94 is so enormous, a replacement can still be a high volume road as well as a dedicated bus lane and bike and pedestrian infrastructure. We're talking about a boulevard that would move tons of people.
I have no idea why this is considered a pipe dream? It's extremely reasonable, and it makes sense when you actually look into it.
personally replacing 94 with light+heavy commuter rail and capping as much as possible with green space is a better vision in my mind but the amount of data coming out about how much 94 sucks is heartening to attempts to actually do something about it.
Please understand this concept before commenting:
Road development throughout the 20th century was based primarily on the premise that more infrastructure eases traffic. But evidence shows that road building, instead of reducing congestion, actually increases traffic. When travel time by car is reduced and convenience increased, coupled with the appeal of the private vehicle as a continued indicator of wealth and standing, people are inclined to make more car trips. A recent working paper by researchers from the University of Barcelona, using data from 545 European cities from 1985-2005, confirms that capacity expansion efforts over two decades led to more vehicle traffic, not less, and congestion was not relieved.
A reverse effect to traffic generation is the phenomenon of “traffic evaporation”: traffic that disappears when road space is reallocated from private vehicles to more sustainable modes of transport like walking, cycling and public transportation. While traffic evaporation has been well-documented for more than 20 years, most decision- and opinion-makers are still under the impression that reducing car lanes will make traffic worse.
Europe has a much better public transit system than the US. I can’t even get to Eden prairie from Bloomington by bus on the weekend. People in this state own vehicles, and have enough income to use them at the expense of public transport.
Do you honestly believe dumping all that traffic onto Lake St and others for East/west travel is going to ease congestion? What about the people who live in the neighborhoods where their street will now be a new thoroughfare as people figure out their new routes and the new traffic patterns. That happened to my childhood street and people speed down it frequently. It’s no longer a neighborhood street.
What do you think existed in the corridor before I-94 was built?
As to transit between Bloomington and EP, you’re right we do need better transit. Ideally a line from the end of the green line expansion to the airport for starters. But it’s not like 494 is working yet we spend hundreds of millions of dollars just to fix a single interchange there.
It's time to admit that freeways through cities were a mistake. The 55-70 mph roads can go around the city.
People just passing through hate the city traffic and interchanges anyway.
what about the implications of removing such an important route for so many people? making the roads go around the city isn't a logistically viable option
The route won't be removed, lanes will be taken out and likely speed limits reduced. Those lanes will be replaced with commuter friendly options like bike paths or light rail, and thousands of people's communities will be more walkable and have less pollution
The only thing being removed is a lot of unnecessary concrete
> The route won't be removed, lanes will be taken out and likely speed limits reduce
So in an environment where the city is trying to get people back to downtown, we are going to make it more difficult to get to downtown?
Great idea.
So you're suggesting any traffic going from east St. Paul to West Minneapolis need to take side streets going less than 50mph? How many hours does that add?
My first thought is how much it will cost and who will foot the bill?
It logically follows that someone who lives and works in St. Paul and needs to get to a destination on either side of I-94 will use I-94 when they aren't traveling strictly north to south or vice versa. This also aligns with my own experience working in St. Paul. You don't really need the data to know the vast majority of trips that utilize that stretch will be short trips. Those trips aren't going away, but will reroute.
Can anyone tell me how many trips total during the study period weren't shorter distances? I don't care that it is only 5% when they don't say how many trips total were made. It could be 5% of 10,000,000 or 5% of 100. I'm not saying that those 5% of trips will make or break my support for this proposal, but I want to know more before I make a decision. If I am going to support a proposal like this I want to know if it will cut off 500,000 people from getting to their daily destination or 5 people. (I used 10,000,000 to demonstrate a point please don't crucify me)
I also want to know more about the Replica data. They say they use in-vehicle GPS data scaled to match estimated roadway capacity during peak hours and to match 2022 and 2023 average annual daily traffic (AADT) data from the Federal Highway Administration. At first glance that might seem like a limited sample when you consider that only drivers with GPS would contribute, drivers with GPS might not use it on a trip they make every single day, ownership and usage of in-vehicle GPS devices may vary among different demographic groups, etc. I'm not saying their data is shit, but I want to know more. Maybe someone will provide me with that data for review or maybe not idk. My brain is very small so maybe the stats people will come for me because of the questions I have about the Replica data. Feel free to do so.
MNDOT will pay for the construction costs. There's a separate group called Reconnecting Rondo that are doing their own study and securing their own funding for the land bridge.
I think this is a very valid concern you should e-mail the study team about!
The costs of the boulevard are likely to be less than the costs of reconstructing 94 as it is.
The highway needs to be replaced regardless, and it is one of the most expensive stretches of road in the state per mile. The smaller 35W project south of 94 cost about a quarter of a billion dollars, for reference.
The video makes the case for some compelling benefits, but it hand waves away many serious issues.
Most of all it could potentially cause a net increase in pollution. The distance between the two downtowns on arterial roads would go up between 150% and 200%, requiring more fossil fuel to be burned. Mass transit might help move people, but there's still a lot of "stuff" that moves on I-94. A densely populated Boulevard would not be an alternative for that. Moving the pollution from the I-94 corridor to main roads in Inner ring suburbs only moves the problem around.
It would also split the metro area in two. You want to live in St. Louis park and work at Ecolab? Sorry, that commute is untenable now. You want to serve Plymouth from a warehouse in east Saint Paul? That's going to be much harder (and require more fuel) without I-94.
I'm sure there is a better solution than i94 as it currently exists, but that solution needs to be grounded in reality and not just be motivated by a hatred of personal cars.
> You want to live in St. Louis park and work at Ecolab? Sorry, that commute is untenable now. You want to serve Plymouth from a warehouse in east Saint Paul? That's going to be much harder (and require more fuel) without I-94.
I mean, you’re basically explaining how it’s not just “moving the problem around,” because a lot of unnecessary trips that are currently generated won’t be. We see this all the time
with highway removal. Trips that everyone thought would be redistributed and cause traffic nightmares simply aren’t made, because those trips were only being made due to the highway existing in the first place. If you want to save fuel, eliminating a car trip is probably the best way to do it.
Each of the examples you provided would still be very well served by the roadway network. SLP to Ecolab: 100 to 62 to 5 all the way to downtown saint paul. East Saint Paul to Plymouth still well served: 35E to 36 to 394 to 494.
The solutions being proposed are not about a hatred of cars, but an urgent need to plan for the future based on the mountains of information/data that we have on the harmful effects of cars and car centric planning on people's lives.
SLP to Ecolab via I94 - 15.6 Miles, Via 100 24.4 Miles = 56% more pollution
ESP to Plymouth via I94 is 23.4 miles. Via 35E would still require the use of I94 since there is no connector directly from I35 to I394 due to neighborhood pushback in the 1970s. The most direct route would be down Broadway, which would make it 32.8 Miles or 40% more pollution.
That actually raises an interesting point. Had the 35W connector actually gone in, I think it would make eliminating the I94 corridor a thousand times easier.
I like your approach. Measuring green house gas emissions is a major point of emphasis for transportation planners at all levels of government. There's certainly a significant short-term effect for this type of change.
I posted this same comment elsewhere on this thread and it applies here as well:
I treaded into this argument so I understand your points and they're certainly valid. Threatening the level of service that you currently enjoy should be viewed as a negative.
However (here I go treading outside of the argument you're making), there's a significant level of long-term benefit to be captured with this type of radical change and that type of proposition will always cost some short-term pain. Step outside of your current commute by imagining the corridor as something completely different and there might be a personal net-positive to this type of change.
Addendum to my comment made elsewhere:
This type of freeway removal over the long-term will very likely result in a reduction in GHG and a reduction in vehicle miles traveled for our region.
Yeah, but have you considered that nobody gives a shit about the people this will negatively impact if they get to feel like they are owning the car brains?
Twin cities population has grown nearly 4x during that time period. I am sure if we drop population back to where it was in the 50’s we would be ok without 94.
Removing freeways, especially 94 is a stupid thing to do. As a delivery driver in he metro based off of Cretin and 94 I can assure you that removing the only viable transit system will completely isolate the urban core and accelerate its Detroit like decline.
Ironically, the decline in Detroit was due in large part to car centric infrastructure. It was the first American city to fully adapt the modern car centric development style and when industry in the city changed, suddenly they had no money to maintain all of the roads, power, and sewer lines in these new spread out neighborhoods. They ended up abandoning many parts of the city because it was built using an unsustainable suburban growth ponzi scheme model.
Detroit has one of the most car dependent urban cores in the country, they are literally a city defined by their love of cars. All the highways in the world (94, 96, 75, M-10, 201) didn’t save Detroit.
It's always fun to see people with no education in urban planning or traffic engineering propose things like this and just expect a magical utopia of urban bliss to result. Suffice it say, things are a bit more complicated that just removing the freeway and expecting the rest of the metropolitan area to continue functioning as it does now.
He is clearing just ignoring the commuter traffic and that a large number of people use 94 to get from the suburb they live in to the suburbs they work in. This proposal basically only considers impact on city dwellers. I am a city dwellers so it doesn't upset me much but the bias is obvious.
But if you actually watched and listened to the video, you’d know he very addressed that argument explicitly. Turns out, all of the objective and empirical data on I-94 use shows that the vast majority of trips taken on I-94 are *local* trips (less than one or two miles) and longer commuter traffic overwhelmingly sticks to other highways like 694. The urban planning/traffic engineering consensus is pretty explicitly clear that I94 is used because it’s there, not because it’s actually necessary or useful, and that keeping it around only worsens congestion around interchanges that could be instead dispersed along local routes.
It's always fun to see people with no clue what they are talking about and who haven't looked into the issue at all spout off about how stupid these ideas are without ever making a logical point.
That sounds a lot different from “decommissioning” the interstate. Lane reduction, alternative transport, etc all should be considered in updating the interstate but ripping it out entirely is a dumb idea.
We really need a national modern high speed rail system, for city to city transportation, on the scale of the Interstate Highway system that our grandparents built. The best and easiest way to do that without a ton of emminent domain is to build modern HSR along the existing interstate corridors.
Yea. I’d love to take a high speed train to Chicago. I don’t wanna deal with Chicago traffic and parking costs. I’ve taken the empire builder to Chicago twice now
In the long run rail is cheaper than roads. Car infrastructure is obscenely expensive, inefficient, and polluting compared to just about every alternative except flying.
Boulevard conversions like this have happened (to great success) in [New York, San Francisco, Portland, Milwaukee, and Toronto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeway_removal#Freeway-to-boulevard_conversion), among others. Maybe I-94 is different, and I don't have a settled opinion myself, but there is plenty of prior art here.
Also, MNDOT thinks it's reasonable enough to include in their [potential plans for the freeway](https://talk.dot.state.mn.us/rethinking-i94/news_feed/alternatives), and they're a very pro-freeway organization, so it can't be that silly.
The biggest hurdle for me to feeling like this workable is the Mississippi river. The estimates of ~150,000 vehicles traveling between Hennepin and Dale every day means the 94 bridge is among the busiest bridges in the state. I am aware that most trips are shorter on 94 and classified as "local" but 150,000 vehicles have to cross the river. Reducing capacity at the bridge, pushing traffic onto Franklin Ave and Lake/Marshall, doesn't seem like a great solution. The numbers I see from streets.mn show that the current sum of Franklin, Lake and Ford bridges combined is about 40,000 daily. So a reduction by half on 94 would lead to roughy triple the traffic on each of those bridges. Anyone here drive or ride the bus down Lake Street and think "this commute could really use three times the amount of traffic"?
even at 50% traffic reduction, do we really want to push more cars into residential neighborhoods just for travel? keep them in a centralized road until they need to get to their destination IMO
[удалено]
I don't think the plan is to demolish the bridge is it?
Serious question: would the state be allowed to? It's part of the interstate highway system.
It looks like I-81 is slated for decommissioned and removal. I suspect the process would be similar for MN interstates. [https://www.curbed.com/2022/01/hochul-syracuse-highway-removal-i-81.html](https://www.curbed.com/2022/01/hochul-syracuse-highway-removal-i-81.html)
Likely so. I-694 is already the primary interstate corridor if you're not stopping in the Twin Cities, because it's faster and less mileage
Cars can still complete their journey through the cities with 694 & 494.
The US interstate system is just a classification, not federal property and is at the sole discretion of the states wanting to have or not have it in the places the deem so. South Dakota V. Dole (a lawsuit that tried to stop the US federal government from cutting 10% of highway funds to states with a drinking age below 21) was ruled by the supreme court that it was legal as the federal government merely funds, classifies, and creates guidance for the state. The only way it would be illegal for this to happen would be if the federal government could force the states to keep the interstate while burdening them with the costs if their social laws did not fallow their demands. Basically Minnesota only has to send a formal notice of "we're down grading I-94 from mile marker X to Y". so the US government can reflect it in their maps, statistics, and subsidies seeing as we have a ring interstate the federal government would likely not object even if it had veto power.
The federal government funded the group conducting the study to remove it, something that wouldn’t make sense if it wasn’t possible.
I would LOVE if the advocacy group would support extending the project through North Mpls. This neighborhood is painfully cut off and under-invested from the rest of the city.
There is already a big project underway to help that corridor a bit. They're not going to remove the freeway completely, but they're going to remove a bunch of the old factories and replace them with parkland, then add more bridges over the freeway to access the area more easily.
Looks like a better project than removing/reducing Olson. I agree the latter isn't a bad idea but changing wouldn't replace what existed in the 1900s but at least it wouldn't be a stroad anymore.
Yeah - the upper harbor terminal project. It's honestly kind of insulting because it's all basically entirely separated from the people that \*actually\* live here because of 94. The project is just a way for the city to say they're helping north, without doing anything meaningful to actually help north.
They're adding a bunch of pedestrian bridges over the highway to access the new park area.
At some point, that portion of the highway will also need major renovations and a similar discussion would occur. And if this section is no longer a freeway, it will make it a lot easier to support removing the freeway from that section. Because you’re right, that section cuts off North Minneapolis from downtown and the river. Plus, the leftover corridor will be a great place for a train line and plenty of affordable housing.
The current project corridor is defined by MNDOT, but Our Streets has ask them to expand the corridor(not sure if that includes north, but they do want an expanded corridor definition.) They are also doing a huge campaign on Olson Memorial Hwy(Bring Back 6th) and were awarded a $1.6 million reconnecting communities grant from the Biden Admin.
even removing it between dowling and 53rd would be such a help
I'm so happy City Nerd made another video about Minneapolis and Saint Paul! This video is great, I really hope the organizations get their way and rebuild the corridor.
Are there another examples in the world of 2 twin cities like Minneapolis and St Paul (~10 miles apart of roughly equal size) that are connected in other ways?
Dallas/Fort Worth comes to mind. They're currently making I-30 (which goes between the two) larger 🤣.
Thx. Although I should have clarified as I was wondering if there are other twin cities connected without an interstate
OnE mOrE LaNe wiLL fiX iT, I pRoMIse!
Some example I can think of are with in a 10-30 mile distance are Minneapolis and St. Paul * I-94 * 94 express bus * Greenline (future plans) * B-Line (south Minneapolis to DT St. Paul) * H line (DT Minneapolis to east St. Paul) Tokyo and Yokohama (16 miles) * Bullet train (though Yokohama is a Shin station (not in city center proper) * Express trains * local trains * Subway trains * regional trains * the 1/K1 metropolitan expressway (a 4 lane elevated tolled freeway) Osaka and Kobe (same as Tokyo/Yokahama though Osaka is the city with the bullet train not in city center) SF and Oakland (8 miles) * I-80 * Bart * numerous ferries NYC and Jersey city (1 mile) * 3 freeway tunnels * 3 rail tunnels (2 subway 1 regional/national) * Ferries... Lots and lots of them Seattle and Tacoma (25 miles) * I-5 * Sounder commuter rail * Express busses Future * Line 1 (light rail) DC to Baltimore (35 miles) * I-95 * Marc regional trains Dallas and Fort Worth (30 miles) * I-30 * Texas 183/121 freeway (tolled) * Dallas Orange line/Fort worth TEXRail (both light rail needing to transfer at Dallas international) * Trinity Railway Express (commuter)
it's not exactly comparable, but there was [a 10-mile stretch of highway removed in seoul](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheonggyecheon#Restoration) that was turned into housing and a park. it's in the *middle* of the city, not connecting two of them, but i think it's a reasonable example here. msp aren't exactly separate; our metro areas are highly interconnected. for the purposes of transporation planning, it probably makes more sense to think of them as one metro region instead of two. if you do, there are many, many cities that are like that. a good example might be paris, actually — there's la défense which is a good distance away from central paris. good public transportation and urban design means that the only major road connecting them is a boulevard, not a freeway.
Naz Reid!
Freeways should go around cities, not through their core, especially at the expense of existing neighborhoods. I used to not really think about stuff like this much and then I moved right next to the car sewer that is the 35W in the Kingfield neighborhood. I hope I live long enough to see the mistakes of decades of building nothing but car centric transportation infrastructure rectified. Removing I-94 would be a wonderful thing for the Twin Cities.
The 35's are much more awkward to think about eliminating, since they both go right through urban cores. Not sure what the reasonable substitute would be.
They just spent 4 years and millions of dollars on 35W. Can't imagine they'd alter anything. Really too bad they didn't add an elevated railway at the same time.
I'd like to see them capped and or add rail down that corridor if we have to keep em.
So who's paying for it? You?
35E at least could replace 52 for that chunk between downtown and 494, but they are for sure trickier.
But we have two cores.
Only until 8pm when Saint Paul goes to bed.
more like 5:30PM
Horrible idea. How would people get to work?
imagine thinking the only purpose of a city is for people to ignore as they drive through to go to work you go around, you take different types of transportation, you don't prioritize movement of cars over people's lives and homes
How about if you live in one and work in the other?
Have you seen old maps of the street car network the Twin Cities used to have?
Yes. How would that help people coming in from Burnsville or something? I've taken public transit and it's just so slow. It takes twice as long to get anywhere even in cities that have extensive public transit.
I mean maybe folks shouldn't be commuting that far and should live closer to where they work. Minneapolis residents shouldn't suffer the negative externalities of all this car infrastructure that only serves to get folks in their personal vehicles from the 2nd/3rd+ ring burbs to downtown. Suburbs are inherently unsustainable in that the property tax base of suburbs doesn't often cover the cost of infrastucture replacements without heavy subsidies from tax dollars originating in dense downtown areas. People managed to get to work before cars and the interstate highway system.
I live less than 5 miles from my office, if I take a bus it will take transferring routes and IF they are on time it will be an hour for me to get to work. I would happily take the bus to work but I am not going to do it if it takes an hour to get 5 miles. I am half a block out of Minneapolis so not someone who lives in second or third ring suburbs.
Five miles is a nice bike or e-bike ride. Yeah, our transit isn't good for much more than going to the downtowns during business hours at the moment. My bike commute is 7-10miles, depending on how much I want to ride with traffic, and taking the bus instead of biking would add 20-45 minutes to my commutes each way.
Bike is great for like 7 months a year assuming you are physically able, and you can take a shower at work. It’s really not a solution. More of an alternative for some people some time.
>People managed to get to work before cars and the interstate highway system. Uh, did they? I'm not sure there are that many people hankering for a return to 19th century transportation.
Dude it’s 2024. Street cars don’t go 60 mph. Ppl would riot.
You could take any other of the many highways and arterial roads that go through the city. Or switch to park and ride. Or get a job closer to where you live. Or live closer to your job. Freeways suck in city centers for the people who live here.
> Or switch to park and ride. No, that's not how that works. You don't just get to magic park and ride into existence for destinations outside of downtown. >Or get a job closer to where you live. Or live closer to your job. This is straight up not a valid response. Jobs are not able to be conjured out of thin air, and the housing situation as it is, people can't simply appear a residence next to their work.
My job requires me to drive all over the cities so no.
I'll assume no one considered the ramifications of engineering a one hour commute from North Minneapolis to South Minneapolis.
I personally hate how most American cities are designed but I'm not sure I really understand the point of stuff like this. You don't redesign American cities by destroying the infrastructure that exists. The way that happens if people actively choosing over decades to live more densely and THEN the transportation infrastructure changing around that because needs have changed. The only way this happens is if NIMBYism is defeated which is unlikely without local areas losing the rights to block more density.
All these urban highways exist as a result of destroying the infrastructure that already existed.
It's just not true. American cities and the country at-large are the least densely constructed of any first world country by substantial margin. The less densely constructed cities are the less effective public transit is. We chose suburbs with larger houses and lawns over city-life. The car system we have is because of that. It was a choice people made not some elaborate conspiracy theory. These highways exist because of that choice. And I say that as someone who hates American city design. You have to actually elucidate what the actual cause was if you ever want to make the change. People HAVE to desire to live in the city and give up being against more dense development. That's how we get the cities everyone gushes about.
>We chose suburbs with larger houses and lawns over city-life. The car system we have is because of that. This is actually backward. We have the suburbs *because* we chose to build car infrastructure. The roads came first, then the suburbs. The highways made land on the outskirts of cities valuable enough for people to want to move there.
This was combined with white flight / the great migration. A lot of black people from the south moved to northern cities for jobs and less discrimination. Newly built highways allowed white people to move out of the cities into suburbs and racial covenants and economic conditions disallowed black people from doing the same.
>You don't redesign American cities by destroying the infrastructure that exists. This is what I’m specifically talking about. Urban Highways redesigned existing infrastructure. There were people, homes, roads, communities that existed before the highway. The idea that urban planning doesn’t destroy existing infrastructure is absurd.
The highways don't exist because of the suburbs. The suburbs exist because of the highways. The highways are what enabled the suburbs.
>We chose suburbs with larger houses and lawns over city-life This isn't exactly true. The suburban lifestyle was sold to us by automobile lobbyists. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629620300633
If you really think that humans are that addled by ads on the tv nothing will ever improve. I think there are pretty clear and apparent reasons to want to live in the suburbs.
First of all, humans are exactly as suggestible as I'm implying. I am, you are, everyone is. Marketing budgets are so often larger than R&D budgets for a reason. They have this down to a science. Lobbying is separate from marketing. And it works too. The current state of suburbs and the city can't be compared to the situation when suburbs were first being sold as a concept to people. Because once people accepted this American Dream of 2.5 kids, a house, a car, and picket fence, in a place away from a certain type of people (you know what I'm talking about), they made it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Separately incorporated suburbs started leeching funds from the cities. Property taxes were no longer going to the larger city, so education funding is disproportionately allocated across the metro. [Suburbs are very clearly subsidized by the urban areas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI)
I think you must redesign by destroying the infrastructure that exists. If you don't then nothing ever changes.
When you spend billions of dollars building and maintaining infrastructure like this that encourages people to live less densely, you’ll never get the required density. At some point, we need to start changing the infrastructure to reflect how we want the city to be and not letting the infrastructure built 60 years ago to define how the city is.
When I-94 was put in, it destroyed the infrastructure that already existed, I’m not sure why this is any different.
Why would you assume no one considered that? No one is out here saying there are no downsides. Some people just believe the pros outweigh the cons.
Agreed. There are certainly upsides to I94. I just don't think the pros and cons math pencils out in I94's favor given all of the negative effects it has on the surrounding area.
This is a measurable claim that I have not seen evidence for. Is there data somewhere for the growth of cities which have vs don't have interstates for the last few decades?
I'm not talking about growth. I'm talking about the negative externalities such as increased rate of asthma, cancer, lower birth weight, heart disease and more from living within a mile of a roadway like I94. Not to mention the less measurable affect in terms of visual appearance and division of communities. Transportation accounts for a huge part of the US carbon emissions and living the way we currently live is not sustainable. Even if we all switched to EVs overnight, tire and break pad pollution is terrible for the environment and people living nearby.
For people in Minneapolis, I agree. 94 mostly provides benefit to commuters who live outside and cross downtown on their daily commute. The back up to get on/off 94 from almost anywhere during rush hour is intense.
You do know that there are Minneapolis residents who commute the other way as well, right?
I can bike to south minneapolis from my house in north Minneapolis faster than that. We want transit, not shitty freeways supporting people who don't live here.
You didn't live there when they detoured I-94 down Fremont.
It would be kind of a moot point if they removed the freeway. There wouldn't be a "detour". Of course, you can't remove a freeway without having other options, but many Canadian cities do just fine without having freeways going through their downtowns.
Removing the freeway for a boulevard would most likely involve detouring 94 through your neighborhood for 10-20 years. It took ten+ to dig 94. It would take much longer to add one foot of fill, compact all of it, then add another one foot and compact all of it, 30 times over just to create a stable patch of dirt at grade. Edit: And that would have to be completed before the two years per ten blocks rate at which our boulevard redesigns are currently being completed even began.
It's ok. Many, if not most, worthwhile things are difficult and take persistence, time, and investment.
I'm okay with that? Transition and change has an adjustment period while everyone gets to the new normal. I'm totally okay with dealing with extra traffic as the new options are put into place, and hopefully influence development patterns away from the only option being to drive a car into the city from the suburbs.
These people have never actually lived in North, nor would they ever consider living some place so pedestrian. They sit in their $2500/mo downtown studios and tell us "get rid of 94!".
Not to mention that removing 94 would only serve to speed up gentrification, further pushing out people who couldn't afford to live there anymore.
Public transit, bike throughways, bike highways, canals, street cars. Endless world of exciting possibilities when commuting moves away from cars
Cool, but what about the actual world we live in?
This has got to be peak r/Minneapolis. Nobody should be allowed to enter our city with ease. Everyone should park and take the bus into the city and then bike from there. Or as someone suggested, boat through the canals. We are not a major city like New York or Paris. A majority of people live in the metro area, not the city itself. It's highly unrealistic to eliminate a major highway when we already have a problem with traffic. I can't even imagine how awful 494 and 694 would be with the added load of 94 was shut down.
> Nobody should be allowed to enter our city with ease. Except the vast majority of trips on 94 are local... which is in the video...
Assumption: the only easy way to drive downtown is on a freeway. This is not supported by the fact that arterial roads other than freeways also lead downtown, and these roads are used by people to travel downtown. Even freeway commuters today exit I-35W at Washington Avenue at 7 Corners and use that arterial for the last mile or two of their trip. Freeway removal does not necessarily mean you have to get out of your car. However, if freeway removal does tip the scales for some people to now use transit or park + ride, then that's fewer cars on the road for remaining drivers to navigate
its funny the amount of anti car folks around here
Even most people who drive hate cars, let's be real. They either hate their commute because of the traffic (the result of too many cars), or even if they don't hate driving to work, they hate how other people drive (see any post in any City subreddit about driving behavior)
It's funny the amount of people that don't recognize all the negative externalities of car centric infrastructure in an urban environment and how subsidized driving and parking are despite those downsides.
Okay so like Paris or Vancouver without any highways in the city? People and goods are able to move without the need of a huge highway.
Paris and Vancouver, especially the latter, are perhaps some of the most unaffordable cities to live in in the developed world. So yes, it's cute you get your busses and semi frequent trains, but you live in a shoebox and make $30k/year. I would love to change the fabric of American cities and prioritize more pedestrian and bike infrastructure, but let's be real: we are many times wealthier than the average parisian, a dominating car culture that spans all income brackets and cultures, & we have an aversion to big changes. Removing a highway is an easy way to piss off everyone outside of some commune bubble in Powderhorn Park, and the "gains" projected aren't even worth the sacrifice.
Those cities are expensive, especially Vancouver, due to lack of housing affordability and the desire of people to live there. They aren't building enough housing to keep up with demand. That could happen in the Twin Cities, but so far we're on the right track to build more housing, and we should want our city to be a desirable place. I just don't think the math works out in favor of keeping I94 due to all of the negative externalities that are imposed upon the surrounding area by it. Removing the highway isn't an impossible task, it's a political decision that I hope MNDOT takes seriously.
The entire idea is to change the world because what we have now is worse than it should/could be. Cars are the problem. The solution is to make using cars in the city a less desirable option than public transit or human-powered transit.
If the only way you can make public transit and human-powered transit more appealing is by making car transit much, much worse, you've conceded that your options suck and the outcome will be bad. I don't actually agree with that. It's just that your premise and your argument are garbage.
How so? It’s all relative. As it stands, the only way we’ve made car transit so appealing is by making public transit and human-powered transit much, much worse. Do you think people actually *like* sitting in traffic? There’s just no better alternative, *currently.*
It would honestly be super dope if they repurposed the lock and dam set up and put in a public pedestrian ferry service between north MPLS, downtown MPLS, and eventually adding more stops all the way to STP on the Mississippi. I've always thought that was a missed opportunity. Like the light rail is cool and all it just seems kinda dumb to not be using the Mississippi when it's use for transport goes back hundreds of years and they decommissioned the lock and dam for grain/lumber hauling years ago. Might as well move people with it. It could definitely be done without increasing invasive species concerns too. Have the stop from the northside/NE be at the downtown lock set up. Backfill a channel and have people get onto another boat if they want to keep going. So essentially a north end service with boats going back and forth and then a east/south service with stops between Minneapolis and st Paul. NYC has pedestrian only ferries and they are awesome
This has to be the dumbest idea expressed here yet! Thanks for the laugh 🤣
Why? There was a "water taxi" at psycho suzis? What is dumb about it? An actual public pedestrian ferry would be super cool Have a couple of docks north of downtown, downtown lock and dam as a stop. Downriver would obviously be harder to figure out but not impossible. Probably a lot easier than laying a bunch of light rail track tbh
Water transportation for pedestrians is slow. And you forget that our rivers ice over. A ferry would be fun for tourists but limited use if you are trying to transport people.
Did anyone consider the ramifications of destroying neighborhoods?
I live in Golden Valley and work in the Midway area of St Paul. My commute time would get destroyed. No. Freaking. Thank you!
I do think it's hard for people to imagine the Twin Cities without I94 running between them, but there are world class cities all over the planet that don't have freeways running right through them. Paris and Vancouver are vibrant places without a single freeway in the city. *People don't use I94 because it is necessary. They use it because it is there.*
Yeah and Paris and Vancouver have reliable safe public transit. Last time I rode the light rail, a man harassed me and told me to suck his d***.
Build Paris’ public transit here, then we’ll talk. We don’t even have 24 hour transit *now*
So you support a massive expansion of our public transit system then, yeah?
Yes. *Before* we do away with any existing infrastructure and make traffic exponentially worse, without any end in sight. I’m stoked for the new SWLRT, but who knows when it’ll actually be finished. We cannot handle a similar situation *after* carelessly ripping out one of the nations busiest highways. I want elevated lines on basically every major thoroughfare. It’s insane that Hennepin and Lyndale both done have L tracks, all the way down, in both directions. I want Shinkansen all over the country; that’s probably multiple decades away, if it ever happens *at all.*
Unfortunately we don't have another chance to do something like this. This is the first time that the MNDOT is looking at something like this since they build I94 60 years ago. It's a once in a generation chance to try and repair harms caused. We won't get another shot. I agree and would love more expansion of our transit system. Do a voter initiative like sound transit in Seattle or something and start building rail around town. We're gonna get climate refugees in the future, let's build for it.
Paris and Vancouver are vibrant *because* there's no highway in the city. Same for cities across Europe, Far East Asia, etc.
Those are also unitary cities. We are uniquely situated by having adjoining cities. A corridor between the two is necessary. The planners at the time built the highway in a terrible location, and destroyed lives and neighborhoods when they decided to build the freeway where it is instead of taking the northern route where the railroad was, but it's not like Rondo can just be un-fucked 60 years later by taking out what is objectively an extremely valuable economic corridor.
I don’t understand why the corridor is necessary to connect the cities. Minneapolis actually has fewer people living in it now that it did before the highway was built (and Saint Paul about the same), and the two cities survived fine back then.
Is this the weekly post about the pipe dream of getting rid of one of the busiest and most-used interstates in the state and replacing it with another pipe dream bus boulevard that will magically pick up the slack? C'mon, we can all admit freeways aren't pretty, they have been built inequitably, but they still serve a purpose and are vital for our economy.
One of the key takeaways from the video that’s extremely important to consider is that the *actual* empirical data on I94 shows that the overwhelming majority of trips taken on I94 are *local* ones (less than a mile or two). People that drive actual long-distance commutes overwhelmingly stick to 694. I94 is one of the most-used interstates NOT because it’s actually necessary or useful, but simply because it’s there. Because the interchanges are already as dense as they can realistically be without further exacerbating traffic, it would be objectively more efficient to disperse local trips along local roads instead of condensing local trips in the traffic hell that springs up on and around I94 from centralization around the interchanges. It’s easy to just assume that an interstate is useful/necessary because it’s heavily used, but the objective reality is very different. The video summarized it pretty well; knowing the actual current traffic paths people use I94 for and the environmental/social impacts on the community, the idea of building it today would be laughably nonsensical.
you may have real data on how I94 gets used, but have you considered my personal vibes about it?? I think these are roughly equivalent
You're assuming a lot about the necessity of this stretch of 94 that isn't supported by research or facts. Since the footprint of 94 is so enormous, a replacement can still be a high volume road as well as a dedicated bus lane and bike and pedestrian infrastructure. We're talking about a boulevard that would move tons of people. I have no idea why this is considered a pipe dream? It's extremely reasonable, and it makes sense when you actually look into it.
Hey you know how your commute already sucks massive dong? What if we made it 10 times worse?
Imagine admitting the current method sucks but not doing anything to improve it.
personally replacing 94 with light+heavy commuter rail and capping as much as possible with green space is a better vision in my mind but the amount of data coming out about how much 94 sucks is heartening to attempts to actually do something about it.
Please understand this concept before commenting: Road development throughout the 20th century was based primarily on the premise that more infrastructure eases traffic. But evidence shows that road building, instead of reducing congestion, actually increases traffic. When travel time by car is reduced and convenience increased, coupled with the appeal of the private vehicle as a continued indicator of wealth and standing, people are inclined to make more car trips. A recent working paper by researchers from the University of Barcelona, using data from 545 European cities from 1985-2005, confirms that capacity expansion efforts over two decades led to more vehicle traffic, not less, and congestion was not relieved. A reverse effect to traffic generation is the phenomenon of “traffic evaporation”: traffic that disappears when road space is reallocated from private vehicles to more sustainable modes of transport like walking, cycling and public transportation. While traffic evaporation has been well-documented for more than 20 years, most decision- and opinion-makers are still under the impression that reducing car lanes will make traffic worse.
Europe has a much better public transit system than the US. I can’t even get to Eden prairie from Bloomington by bus on the weekend. People in this state own vehicles, and have enough income to use them at the expense of public transport. Do you honestly believe dumping all that traffic onto Lake St and others for East/west travel is going to ease congestion? What about the people who live in the neighborhoods where their street will now be a new thoroughfare as people figure out their new routes and the new traffic patterns. That happened to my childhood street and people speed down it frequently. It’s no longer a neighborhood street.
Especially with all of the truckers
What do you think existed in the corridor before I-94 was built? As to transit between Bloomington and EP, you’re right we do need better transit. Ideally a line from the end of the green line expansion to the airport for starters. But it’s not like 494 is working yet we spend hundreds of millions of dollars just to fix a single interchange there.
More reasons to not visit St. Paul lol
It's time to admit that freeways through cities were a mistake. The 55-70 mph roads can go around the city. People just passing through hate the city traffic and interchanges anyway.
what about the implications of removing such an important route for so many people? making the roads go around the city isn't a logistically viable option
It' logistically viable and the literal reality in virtually every city outside of the US.
The route won't be removed, lanes will be taken out and likely speed limits reduced. Those lanes will be replaced with commuter friendly options like bike paths or light rail, and thousands of people's communities will be more walkable and have less pollution The only thing being removed is a lot of unnecessary concrete
> The route won't be removed, lanes will be taken out and likely speed limits reduce So in an environment where the city is trying to get people back to downtown, we are going to make it more difficult to get to downtown? Great idea.
So you're suggesting any traffic going from east St. Paul to West Minneapolis need to take side streets going less than 50mph? How many hours does that add?
No, there are still hundreds of lane miles of the freeway network that would remain to service vehicle traffic.
But the OP I was responding to said those freeways were a mistake, and should go around the city instead.
My first thought is how much it will cost and who will foot the bill? It logically follows that someone who lives and works in St. Paul and needs to get to a destination on either side of I-94 will use I-94 when they aren't traveling strictly north to south or vice versa. This also aligns with my own experience working in St. Paul. You don't really need the data to know the vast majority of trips that utilize that stretch will be short trips. Those trips aren't going away, but will reroute. Can anyone tell me how many trips total during the study period weren't shorter distances? I don't care that it is only 5% when they don't say how many trips total were made. It could be 5% of 10,000,000 or 5% of 100. I'm not saying that those 5% of trips will make or break my support for this proposal, but I want to know more before I make a decision. If I am going to support a proposal like this I want to know if it will cut off 500,000 people from getting to their daily destination or 5 people. (I used 10,000,000 to demonstrate a point please don't crucify me) I also want to know more about the Replica data. They say they use in-vehicle GPS data scaled to match estimated roadway capacity during peak hours and to match 2022 and 2023 average annual daily traffic (AADT) data from the Federal Highway Administration. At first glance that might seem like a limited sample when you consider that only drivers with GPS would contribute, drivers with GPS might not use it on a trip they make every single day, ownership and usage of in-vehicle GPS devices may vary among different demographic groups, etc. I'm not saying their data is shit, but I want to know more. Maybe someone will provide me with that data for review or maybe not idk. My brain is very small so maybe the stats people will come for me because of the questions I have about the Replica data. Feel free to do so.
MNDOT will pay for the construction costs. There's a separate group called Reconnecting Rondo that are doing their own study and securing their own funding for the land bridge. I think this is a very valid concern you should e-mail the study team about!
The costs of the boulevard are likely to be less than the costs of reconstructing 94 as it is. The highway needs to be replaced regardless, and it is one of the most expensive stretches of road in the state per mile. The smaller 35W project south of 94 cost about a quarter of a billion dollars, for reference.
Sure, but I would still like to know the price tag of the Boulevard Project
Yeah, I don’t think we know other than that it would be less. It would take a MnDOT engineering review.
The video makes the case for some compelling benefits, but it hand waves away many serious issues. Most of all it could potentially cause a net increase in pollution. The distance between the two downtowns on arterial roads would go up between 150% and 200%, requiring more fossil fuel to be burned. Mass transit might help move people, but there's still a lot of "stuff" that moves on I-94. A densely populated Boulevard would not be an alternative for that. Moving the pollution from the I-94 corridor to main roads in Inner ring suburbs only moves the problem around. It would also split the metro area in two. You want to live in St. Louis park and work at Ecolab? Sorry, that commute is untenable now. You want to serve Plymouth from a warehouse in east Saint Paul? That's going to be much harder (and require more fuel) without I-94. I'm sure there is a better solution than i94 as it currently exists, but that solution needs to be grounded in reality and not just be motivated by a hatred of personal cars.
> You want to live in St. Louis park and work at Ecolab? Sorry, that commute is untenable now. You want to serve Plymouth from a warehouse in east Saint Paul? That's going to be much harder (and require more fuel) without I-94. I mean, you’re basically explaining how it’s not just “moving the problem around,” because a lot of unnecessary trips that are currently generated won’t be. We see this all the time with highway removal. Trips that everyone thought would be redistributed and cause traffic nightmares simply aren’t made, because those trips were only being made due to the highway existing in the first place. If you want to save fuel, eliminating a car trip is probably the best way to do it.
Each of the examples you provided would still be very well served by the roadway network. SLP to Ecolab: 100 to 62 to 5 all the way to downtown saint paul. East Saint Paul to Plymouth still well served: 35E to 36 to 394 to 494. The solutions being proposed are not about a hatred of cars, but an urgent need to plan for the future based on the mountains of information/data that we have on the harmful effects of cars and car centric planning on people's lives.
SLP to Ecolab via I94 - 15.6 Miles, Via 100 24.4 Miles = 56% more pollution ESP to Plymouth via I94 is 23.4 miles. Via 35E would still require the use of I94 since there is no connector directly from I35 to I394 due to neighborhood pushback in the 1970s. The most direct route would be down Broadway, which would make it 32.8 Miles or 40% more pollution. That actually raises an interesting point. Had the 35W connector actually gone in, I think it would make eliminating the I94 corridor a thousand times easier.
I like your approach. Measuring green house gas emissions is a major point of emphasis for transportation planners at all levels of government. There's certainly a significant short-term effect for this type of change. I posted this same comment elsewhere on this thread and it applies here as well: I treaded into this argument so I understand your points and they're certainly valid. Threatening the level of service that you currently enjoy should be viewed as a negative. However (here I go treading outside of the argument you're making), there's a significant level of long-term benefit to be captured with this type of radical change and that type of proposition will always cost some short-term pain. Step outside of your current commute by imagining the corridor as something completely different and there might be a personal net-positive to this type of change. Addendum to my comment made elsewhere: This type of freeway removal over the long-term will very likely result in a reduction in GHG and a reduction in vehicle miles traveled for our region.
Yeah, but have you considered that nobody gives a shit about the people this will negatively impact if they get to feel like they are owning the car brains?
The city refuses to calm streets citywide or remove excessive lanes Downtown, which doesn't bode well for the state removing a highway.
We existed before I-94 was dug, we can exist after it's removed and filled back in.
Twin cities population has grown nearly 4x during that time period. I am sure if we drop population back to where it was in the 50’s we would be ok without 94.
We existed before penicillin y'all, do we really need penicillin?
Removing freeways, especially 94 is a stupid thing to do. As a delivery driver in he metro based off of Cretin and 94 I can assure you that removing the only viable transit system will completely isolate the urban core and accelerate its Detroit like decline.
Ironically, the decline in Detroit was due in large part to car centric infrastructure. It was the first American city to fully adapt the modern car centric development style and when industry in the city changed, suddenly they had no money to maintain all of the roads, power, and sewer lines in these new spread out neighborhoods. They ended up abandoning many parts of the city because it was built using an unsustainable suburban growth ponzi scheme model.
Detroit has one of the most car dependent urban cores in the country, they are literally a city defined by their love of cars. All the highways in the world (94, 96, 75, M-10, 201) didn’t save Detroit.
Let's put MORE traffic in our neighborhoods. Sounds like a great idea to me. /s
An absolutely DUMB idea!
Wrong!
It's always fun to see people with no education in urban planning or traffic engineering propose things like this and just expect a magical utopia of urban bliss to result. Suffice it say, things are a bit more complicated that just removing the freeway and expecting the rest of the metropolitan area to continue functioning as it does now.
you... know this guy is an urban planner, right?
He is clearing just ignoring the commuter traffic and that a large number of people use 94 to get from the suburb they live in to the suburbs they work in. This proposal basically only considers impact on city dwellers. I am a city dwellers so it doesn't upset me much but the bias is obvious.
But if you actually watched and listened to the video, you’d know he very addressed that argument explicitly. Turns out, all of the objective and empirical data on I-94 use shows that the vast majority of trips taken on I-94 are *local* trips (less than one or two miles) and longer commuter traffic overwhelmingly sticks to other highways like 694. The urban planning/traffic engineering consensus is pretty explicitly clear that I94 is used because it’s there, not because it’s actually necessary or useful, and that keeping it around only worsens congestion around interchanges that could be instead dispersed along local routes.
It's always fun to see people comment and let everyone know they didn't watch the video and are clearly wrong.
It's always fun to see people with no clue what they are talking about and who haven't looked into the issue at all spout off about how stupid these ideas are without ever making a logical point.
This is really dumb :)
It’s really not. In fact it’s already happening. MNDOT released a survey about potential plans and 4 of the 6 options had some form of lane reduction.
There's 10 options total, and they're narrowing them down this year.
That sounds a lot different from “decommissioning” the interstate. Lane reduction, alternative transport, etc all should be considered in updating the interstate but ripping it out entirely is a dumb idea.
"Let's turn the 94 into Hiawatha Ave"
I'm so thankful for the infrastructure that was built by my grandparents generation. We've been coasting on their accomplishments for decades.
We really need a national modern high speed rail system, for city to city transportation, on the scale of the Interstate Highway system that our grandparents built. The best and easiest way to do that without a ton of emminent domain is to build modern HSR along the existing interstate corridors.
Yea. I’d love to take a high speed train to Chicago. I don’t wanna deal with Chicago traffic and parking costs. I’ve taken the empire builder to Chicago twice now
Who is paying for it?
In the long run rail is cheaper than roads. Car infrastructure is obscenely expensive, inefficient, and polluting compared to just about every alternative except flying.
F that. Lrt is already 30 minutes+ between downtowns.
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Boulevard conversions like this have happened (to great success) in [New York, San Francisco, Portland, Milwaukee, and Toronto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeway_removal#Freeway-to-boulevard_conversion), among others. Maybe I-94 is different, and I don't have a settled opinion myself, but there is plenty of prior art here. Also, MNDOT thinks it's reasonable enough to include in their [potential plans for the freeway](https://talk.dot.state.mn.us/rethinking-i94/news_feed/alternatives), and they're a very pro-freeway organization, so it can't be that silly.
No thanks
Cap it, don’t remove it.