Getting Rid of an Urban Freeway, Turning Back an Urban Clock

A thirteen mile stretch of Interstate I-94 connects the cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis. According to the Minnesota Department of Transportation I-94 traffic on an ordinary weekday will average about 160,000 vehicles going east and west under Snelling Ave.

Built between 1956 and 1968, the limited-access highway was installed in a direct line between the two downtowns and consequently required the acquisition and demolition of the homes and commercial property in its path. This has been the case with every such project in the history of the Interstate Highway System. The difference in this instance, if there is one, is that the new highway obliterated a mostly African-American St. Paul neighborhood called Rondo.

Other road projects in Minnesota have also changed the scenery and demographics of urban areas. A freeway built through Duluth erased much of the business area in the city's heart. A new bridge and highway over the St. Croix River eliminates an annoying trip through Stillwater for commuters living in parts of western Wisconsin. The business district of South St. Paul no longer exists since concrete now covers it. All three of these projects were limited access highway installations meant to speed traffic through the city. 

In rural America interstate highways connect major cities and pass by small towns. They also separate rural communities by pavement rivers with bridges miles apart. Farmers that once could walk over to the neighbor's place to visit must now make a 40 mile round trip car journey, which they no longer do. Little study has been done of this social negative and how it has affected rural culture.

Nobody seems to be talking about tearing these  freeways up and replacing them with pedestrian malls or the old two-lane blacktop of the past.

What's different about this busy stretch of I-94? It's that it was once a neighborhood of African-Americans. The effort to undo the freeway is being touted as a way to re-establish such a neighborhood after an interval of over 50 years. Many of the former residents have passed away or moved to a near-by area or across the country. Evidently the Rondo organization wishes to create a new and modern segregated society on top of the freeway based on an unpleasant historical situation. Perhaps the Dakota indigenous natives would have a similar desire but there's no discussion of it and certainly no accommodation by the Department of Transportation to even discuss the matter.

In the late 19th century St. Paul, like many other western US cities taking advantage of the boom in transportation and manufacturing, demolished its log cabins and tar paper shacks and replaced them with huge granite-clad structures. Nobody is suggesting that those buildings be bulldozed and replaced with the hovels that originally housed the residents and businesses of an earlier age.

Another participant in the process is Our Streets Mpls.,  a group of pie-in-the sky liberal college grads that don't live in what was once the Rondo neighborhood. The formation of an organization like this is made possible by social media, where a bad idea can spread like an invasion of locusts almost overnight. The NGO pressure groups seem to have completely ignored the fact that initiation of this project would commit to the spending of billions of dollars of public funds that could be better spent on other, more practical and beneficial projects. There are complaints about similar situations elsewhere.

The Twin City area is already in the throes of a financial disaster because of the Metropolitan Council's failed Southwest Rail project, bedeviled by enormous cost over runs and the abbreviated rail service to St. Cloud.  But these local affairs don't reflect similar situations over the country, such as the train to nowhere in California. 

While engineering and geological factors are an issue in some of these projects, the greater challenge has become the creation and manipulation of their funding. It might make more sense to convert existing and future freeways to toll roads, already common in many jurisdictions. But Yankees seem to think that the financial wizards that perch at the top of the country's totem pole of income earners can somehow arrange the completion of jillion dollar fantasies at little cost to the general public or themselves. The freeway to disaster is wide open for business.