You bring up what is, to me, the most salient point related to the expansion of Lake Street as well of I35W. The projects are simply about moving more cars.
No one has asked whether or not there is a limit to the number of cars one can move through neighborhoods before the neighborhood is effectively destroyed.
Mature, healthy adults may find navigating many areas on bikes or as pedestrians to be unpleasant and difficult even in good weather. These healthy community-building, nonpolluting forms of transportation are being made impossible for the elderly, children, and people with a variety of disability issues.
According to folks at the CDC and World Health organization, "active transportation" is vital to our individual health, as well as to community health. I will volunteer for the "Safe Routes to School" program in Minneapolis this year, which will encourage students to walk or bike to and from school.
Doctors are concerned about obesity, diabetes, depression and other illnesses on the rise amoung American children, and so this program (like the CDC's "Active Community Environments") has been initiated nationwide.
Urban transportation systems are making us and our children sick. Even in simple economic terms, this makes no sense. We are paying to poison ourselves and lock ourselves into "passive" forms of transportation, and then paying the medical bills to try to get well again.
My point is this: active transportation (pedaling and biking) must be seen as the foundational form of transportation for people living and working anywhere in the metro area.
Public transportation needs to be designed to minimize the need for car commuting within the city. Cities and neighborhoods need to take an active role to put "smart growth" design into place, so that people can walk or bike to buy groceries and such, and so that folks can use public transportation for most longer trips in town.
Urban transportation design in Minneapolis currently seems to operate on a model that is about 50 years old, and which puts priority on automobiles, not people or communities or neighborhoods.
Here are some foundational urban planning questions regarding the Lake Street and I35W expansion plans:
***How many cars can be moved around the city before civic life is destroyed?
***How many cars can be moved around in cities before the environment is so degraded that our children will inherit a place not worth having?
***How does our car addiction contribute to problems of global warming and pollution?
***How can we create an urban environment which enriches the lives of the people who live and work in it while at the same time enriching (as opposed to degrading) the local and global environment?
We should note that the I35W expansion plans are going to cost about 150 million dollars. Why not step back and design a 150 million-dollar plan to help people move around town without driving everywhere? Sure it would take vision and creativity, but why not? We have plenty of knowledge and technology to apply; we need to change our urban design paradigm.
The air, water and soil of Minneapolis are not an infinite resources to be consumed, nor are they infinite sinks into which to dump pollution.
The existing people and neighborhoods of Minneapolis are not disposable, inorganic objects to be chopped and shuffled for the sake of pushing ever-increasing numbers of cars through our city.
Design for tomorrow will put people, active transportation, and ecological integration of urban life first.
We need more discussion of how our kids can get to school in a healthy, safe, active fashion.
We need more discussion about to promote active transportation as foundational activity in urban life.
We need more discussion about how to recover and create walkable, bikeable neighborhoods (which actually existed in some places) and to link them in ways which are best for our urban region as a whole.
I encourage list members to check out Time magazine's issue preparatory to the Johannesburg Earth Summit for more ideas and information. Also check out the report on "The Asian Brown Cloud" there (and on CNN online) for a little taste of what our collective denial regarding the environment is bringing us.
We can choose to create a better way than the outdated models rooted in "petroleum- and car-culture" offer. We humans were made to walk, run, dance and sing...old and young together....even in the city.
-Gary Hoover
King Field
In a message dated 8/26/02 12:06:36 PM Central Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes (in part):
I haven't even brought up the issue of how this
impacts children. My son's bus stop is scheduled for
31st and Grand. We live at 27th and Grand. That would
mean he would have to walk four blocks and cross Lake
Street to get to his bus stop. Thankfully, I take him
to school and my husband picks him up each day so he
won't have to take the bus. But, for those kids that
do, crossing Lake Street during rush hour will not be
fun.
I see how horrible the underpass is for pedestrians
and bikers at Lake and Hiawatha. That interchange is
not friendly for cars let alone pedestrians.
So, I hope people will continue to express concern
over the widening of Lake Street and I thank David
Piehl for his vigilence on this issue. This is not a
done deal by a long shot. I hope the county will
continue to work with the residents and business
owners who will be affected by the decisions made
about this issue. We are the ones who live with the
affects of these decisions on a daily basis. Our
concerns on this issue should be paramount to the
concerns about making it easy for people from other
places to get in and out of our neighborhoods.
