Dismantling Downtown Freeways

[MNdible]

Yes I do. I travel I-94 both ways daily. I remember a total non-event from a traffic standpoint. People adapted rather well, as we should expect.

Getting to and from Northeast Minneapolis was a nightmare.

[David Greene]

Yes I do. I travel I-94 both ways daily. I remember a total non-event from a traffic standpoint. People adapted rather well, as we should expect.

Getting to and from Northeast Minneapolis was a nightmare.

From where?

On the freeway or surface streets too?

[RailBaronYarr]

I also drove to/from Chanhassen and my house/apartment at the U every day, which took me straight through the 35W/94 commons. I had just started working in June 2007 (right before the bridge collapsed) so I had very little history with that particular route, but was astonished when the bridge re-opened and my commute was shortened by all of 2 minutes (which, realistically, was more from me not having to get off at Washington and crossing to the E Bank then snaking up through campus to get to Dinkytown).

I occasionally came up 494 and in by 394 on the way home to spice things up, and this route did not see any time improvement after the bridge opened, either.

[Viktor Vaughn]

...I seem to remember that when the 35W bridge was down, it was really no big deal. People just adjusted their routines and made do.

That wasn't my recollection. Crossing the river from downtown to northeast was complete gridlock. There was no good way to get from southside (where I lived at the time) to 35W north to get out of town. The new bridge opening was complete relief.

Now, I'm a bicycle-riding hippy like some of the rest of y'all. I lament the destruction caused by urban freeways over the last 50 years, but these main freeways aren't going anywhere. We can and should add bus lanes & stations, cap at strategic locations, remove/redesign interchanges to create developable space, and restore the grid with more street and pedestrian connections across the trench, but decommissioning sections of 35W isn't going to happen.

Freeways should be made more multimodal, but the grade-separated right-of-way will be valuable no matter the predominant transportation mode. The key is to mitigate the downsides while preserving the mobility benefits.

[seanrichardryan]

^ well said. And that ends the discussion. Everyone go home now.

[talindsay]

^ well said. And that ends the discussion. Everyone go home now.

Seconded.

[RailBaronYarr]

So, what's the takeaway, then, for us urbanists with varying degrees of consensus on short/long-term plans? A post by Bill Lindeke, then a follow-up by Marlys, and a re-hash on MPR. But reality is that none of those things are part of the Met Council, MnDOT, or anyone else's plans as of now. MC is in the middle of a 2040 plan, something I would assume would be important for at least some of these ideas to be present in.

Maybe just a bigger question.. is this a thread for discussing our thoughts and we all go home? Or is it a place to refine ideas that can then be brought to the powers that could implement them (at least partially)?

[Snelbian]

I think what's needed here is a local case study. Remove a less "vital" freeway with little real worth and see what happens. I nominate Ayd Mill. Please?

[mulad]

In my experience, getting to Northeast Minneapolis can be a pain even with I-35W -- the highway doesn't serve that quadrant of the city well at all anyway. Access is made worse from some angles due to the highway being in the way of potential cross streets. Of course the golf courses, cemeteries, and industrial areas along I-35W in Minneapolis, St. Anthony, and Roseville don't exactly help, either.

MN-280 was the official detour after the collapse, and I worked right next to 280 at the time. Lots of people had no idea 280 existed until the detour happened. Traffic obviously went up a lot on that highway, and because it had been poorly designed in the first place, MnDOT had to do some emergency reconfiguration to make ramp entrances/exits safer at Larpenteur and Como, temporarily closing off access to Broadway (which remains more limited now), and permanently closing some other at-grade intersections. That work, as well as converting I-94 shoulder lanes to through lanes and some reconfiguration up along I-694, was all accomplished within about a month of the bridge collapse.

I had lived in Marcy-Holmes neighborhood up until 15 months before the collapse, so I knew the traffic patterns there pretty well. Traffic went up along the University and 4th Street one-way pair, and on the 3rd/Central Avenue bridge, but other than that things seemed pretty normal. I think traffic got bad along the 19th/10th/"Cedar" Avenue bridge in the immediate aftermath, since that was the most direct detour around the collapse, but people figured out other ways to get around town within a few weeks (particularly after MN-280 was made the official highway detour). Pedestrian access in the neighborhood actually improved since they put up a temporary walkway on the northwest side of the 19th Ave bridge so people could view the cleanup and reconstruction.

I don't think it's directly related, but the time period around the collapse was when I was getting into understanding "new urbanist" (really just "urbanist") concepts better. If I had gotten into that a couple of years earlier, I also would have pushed more to just deactivate/reroute a chunk of I-35W rather than worry about replacing it. The experience definitely showed that the removal of a highway is not the end of the world.

[woofner]

At the very least, it seems that if all the 35W bridge did was make it easier to travel between NE and the rest of the city, the $250m would have been better spent on another river crossing, say between 11th Ave S & 6th Ave SE. Obviously that would have taken longer, though, and for some reason the replacement had to happen right away.

[MNdible]

Mobility is all relative, of course, and I know you can’t always get what you want. But it should be noted that many of the “adaptations” that people made in the aftermath of the bridge collapse weren’t just finding alternate routes – they were things like working staggered shifts, or not going to the northeast bars after work, or not shopping where they used to shop, or not visiting friends as often as they used to. They were the kinds of changes that might be acceptable on a short term basis, but weren’t good long term solutions.

[mattaudio]

Those are also the types of changes that don't result in higher economic output or tax revenue, so fixing these issues doesn't justify a half billion dollars.

[MNdible]

Says you. I'd counter that, based on the number of people that use that bridge every day, it is probably worth every penny of the quarter billion dollars that we collected by parlaying a horrible disaster into federal funding.

If you really don't care whether or not downtown Minneapolis is competitive on a regional and national scale, then by all means, go ahead and tear down the freeways that allow people from around the metro to access it. People will adapt, finding much shorter commutes by becoming subsistence farmers in their own backyards.

[Rich]

Turns out Mn/DOT has studied the economic impact of the bridge collapse. In their estimation, the lack of a 35W bridge resulted in reductions in economic output of $17 million in 2007 and $43 million in 2008.

http://www.dot.state.mn.us/i35wbridge/r ... impact.pdf

[seanrichardryan]

Nate Griggs has an idea, with savannahs and purple towers.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid ... =1&theater

[talindsay]

At the very least, it seems that if all the 35W bridge did was make it easier to travel between NE and the rest of the city, the $250m would have been better spent on another river crossing, say between 11th Ave S & 6th Ave SE. Obviously that would have taken longer, though, and for some reason the replacement had to happen right away.

To be fair it's a complete decontextualization of the tragedy to act as though this was a green-fields opportunity to evaluate how best to address transportation needs. I know that's not what you're trying to say, but in the face of a disaster, a severed major artery right next to downtown, a profound failure of the Department of Transportation, and the attention of national media on our city as an example of America's crumbling infrastructure, none of the decision-makers were in a place to say, "hey, this bridge fell down so let's just say screw the freeway model and try something completely novel, because this bridge isn't worth what it costs". They wanted to show that they could decisively work together to solve the problem as quickly and effectively as possible, and that's exactly what they did. The new bridge is rightly a source of civic pride because it demonstrates how well the system could work when it needed to.

[woofner]

the lack of a 35W bridge resulted in reductions in economic output of $17 million in 2007 and $43 million in 2008.

Yeah, which is .000085% and .000215% of the gross metro product, respectively.

This researcher found that of people in his sample group who were impacted by the bridge collapse, it reduced by 10% their social activities and by 15% their shopping activities:

http://nexus.umn.edu/Papers/I-35W-Trave ... tegies.pdf

That of course is only the small minority of people who relied on this particular bridge. Certainly it's reasonable to expect some impact on the extremely local economies of Downtown and Northeast Minneapolis, but to say that the loss of this bridge had an impact on regional competitiveness is stretching to the point of laffy taffy. Assuming the freeway bridge was replaced with a bridge connecting local streets, there may have been no economic impact at all. Of course, it may have been harder to cajole the Feds into paying for a non-freeway scale bridge, as you point out, which is of course part of the problem.

Here is more from the final CTS study on the bridge collapse:

Network redundancy–the availability of alternate routes, including other bridges across the Mississippi–was a critical factor in accommodating the excess traffic produced by the bridge collapse. Mn/DOT was able to detour traffic along alternate freeway routes including I-94/Minnesota Highway 280 soon after the collapse, mitigating some of the negative effects of the event. However, Levinson and Zhu note in their research report, if the I-94 bridge had collapsed instead, the asymmetrical nature of the road network in the area would have made the I-35W bridge route much less able to absorb excess traffic.

Obviously it's not realistic to remove all the freeways. But it's exactly those redundant freeways - especially the ones with as problematic an effect on the urban fabric as I-35W has on Seven Corners - that should be considered for removal, and the transport network robustness replaced with transit alternatives.

[woofner]

To be fair it's a complete decontextualization of the tragedy to act as though this was a green-fields opportunity to evaluate how best to address transportation needs... it demonstrates how well the system could work when it needed to.

Yes, I was alive and in MN in 2007. But I would say it shows exactly how the system doesn't work that no one in a position of power recognized how detrimental and duplicative the affected segments of 35w were and are. Frankly, the disaster of August 2007 was nothing compared to the daily disaster of our auto-addicted lifestyle. I believe in this thread we've had someone argue that the 35W bridge was important because it allowed people to stop at bars in Northeast before continuing their commute to the suburbs.

[talindsay]

Yes, I was alive and in MN in 2007. But I would say it shows exactly how the system doesn't work that no one in a position of power recognized how detrimental and duplicative the affected segments of 35w were and are. Frankly, the disaster of August 2007 was nothing compared to the daily disaster of our auto-addicted lifestyle. I believe in this thread we've had someone argue that the 35W bridge was important because it allowed people to stop at bars in Northeast before continuing their commute to the suburbs.

I'm sorry, that's nonsense. It's an easy and lazy thing to say in retrospect, but nobody - including nobody on the Minnescraper forum that preceded this - was saying in 2007 or 2008 that they shouldn't replace that bridge. "The daily disaster of our auto-addicted lifestyle" has nice alliterative properties - props for that - but dozens of cars on a major artery falling into the Mississippi river unexpectedly in the middle of a sunny summer day is certainly a cathartic event in a way that our auto-addicted lifestyle is not. Rabid, unchecked hyperbole makes urbanists look foolish, which actively works against our goals as a community who want to improve our urban fabric.

[woofner]

You're not listening. That's what I'm saying - no one at the time was saying that the segment of freeway affected by the bridge collapse was duplicative, that just became obvious after the fact. Which is a problem because people did recognize the impact this segment had on the neighborhoods surrounding it. In 2007 it had been a widely accepted fact for several decades that freeways can have severe effects on the neighborhoods they sever (did you like that wordplay?), so it is a sign of a systemic problem that no one in a position of power was willing to question its swift replacement, or that it hadn't officially been recognized as a duplicative facility.

And no, the fact that 13 strangers died in a bridge collapse was not more cathartic to me than when my grandfather was killed in a car collision. Neither was it more cathartic to my brother, whose coworker died in the bridge collapse.Frankly for you to suggest otherwise is offensive.

And it's not hyperbole to say that our auto-addicted lifestyle is a bigger disaster, it's a numeric fact. In 2011 88 Americans died in car wrecks on an average day. In 2012 the bridge collapse happened every 13 days in Minnesota in terms of fatalities. Isn't every car collision unexpected? Have you ever seen the Orchid Thief?

And don't call me lazy. I am, but that's beside the point.