Eric -- I read your post with interest.� While the position you have described includes several issues worthy of note, I would like to ask you to consider and respond to one of these. If it seems good to do so, I hope the list will join in, and we might consider other issues as well.� But here goes with the first issue I see in your statement of Abbott NW's position.
You state that this project "will improve access to Minneapolis neighborhoods, businesses, and major institutions including Abbot Northwestern."� I wonder how you and your corporation can ignore the evidence of cities all around the world� -- including for example Atlanta, Los Angeles, and London -- who have found that it is impossible to reduce traffic congestion and improve real access by adding more car-based transportation infrastructure.� The project proposed by the "Phillips Partnership" will only benefit the large businesses who want to segregate and insulate suburban commuters from urban traffic and neighborhoods. In effect, your group desires to externalize the cost of isolating your businesses from the urban neighborhoods by forcing taxpayers to build private driveways from the suburbs directly to your parking ramps.
This segregation of your institutions from the context will not bring economic development, jobs, or housing for these neighborhoods.� You assert in the first paragraph of you remarks that this project will "help manage future growth in south Minneapolis."� This is true.� This project will help to destroy small businesses and any walkable, bikable development we try to create, while encouraging an urban landscape of big-box, big-parking-ramp institutions.� The primary link between the community and your institutions that I can see will be the availability of low-level service jobs in your large facilities.� These jobs will not pay a living wage to most of these employees, but will be a telling "McJob" McLink between your institutions and some of the working poor who live nearby.
I wonder too how it is that the institution you work for -- part of the "healthcare industry" -- can ignore the warnings and recommendations of the World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control regarding transportation infrastructure.� We are warned that many cancers and respiratory illnesses -- notably asthma -- are made much, much worse by air pollution. Not all of these pollutants come from cars, but most of them do.� (Over 66% in our city do.)� By increasing traffic and congestion through overbuilding car-bound transportation infrastructure, you are condemning the people who live near your buildings to breathe ever-more "secondhand smoke" from the traffic and congestion you produce.
This harms the health of us all, especially of infants and children, who scientists are particularly concerned about in this regard.� Your institution in particular, Mr. Eoloff, must take bold steps to reduce the suffering and economic costs associated with these pollution-caused illnesses.� We do not have unlimited dollars to spend on healthcare, so why should we waste so much of our healthcare dollars curing diseases we have caused ourselves through pollution-intensive transportation infrastructure?
The WHO and CDC also note that obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, depression, anxiety, and cardiovascular disease are also cause by sedentary lifestyle, which is directly linked to "passive transportation" which is forced on urban people as less is spent to accommodate "active transportation" such as walking and biking.� As infrastructure squeezes out active transportation, people who would rather walk or bike are actually discouraged or prevented completely from doing so.� Your institution is contributing to this problem rather than remedying it.
You state that you take nearly $200,000 a year from your annual parking ramp revenue to subsidize Metropass cards for your employees.� It seems to me that you are being subsidized by us all in exchange, and to a far greater degree.� We pay in terms of our health.� We pay taxes as well to subsidize the roads and new roads you seem to want so much -- amounts which dwarf this mere token subsidy your institution pays to Metro transit.
I challenge you to take these comments to whomever you report to at Allina, and discuss ways in which Allina can take a lead in transforming our urban infrastructure into a truly healthy network of neighborhoods.� We have spent billions of dollars subsidizing the automobile industry for car-infrastructure.� Now we need to spend billions of dollars for active transportation infrastructure linked to a variety of clean, comprehensive, reliable mass transit options.
I challenge you and your institution to advocate for a transportation revolution so that Abbott NW Hospital will be integrated into one of many healthy urban neighborhoods in our city and Metro area.� This can be done, but it will require courageous leadership from persons such as yourself and from institutions such as the one you represent.
The best public relations of all will be bold leadership toward a healthy, smart urban infrastructure of the future, not simply bogging your institution down in the unhealthy urban transportation infrastructure of the past.� We know better now. We've had too many years of experience in too many places to spend another $150-200 million dollars on this I35W-Excess folly.
We also ought to place this local into the larger global perspective. The federal DOE/EIA predicts that the USA will use more petroleum for transportation every year for the next 20 or more years, that we will import twice as much petroleum in 20 years that we do now -- nearly 70% of our total petroleum consumption.� We will make more related pollution every year for the next 20 years, until by 2020 we will make 33% more greenhouse gasses tha we did in 2,000.� This does not take into account the sharply increasing use of fossil fuels around the world, or the overall lowering of pollution standards led by the USA.
Also, note that we drive more miles per capita every year in our country, and with larger vehicles which get worse mileage. The federal government predicts that this trend will continue as well. So it looks like larger SUVs will be cramming the lanes and parking lots of your healthcare institution.� (Yikes! -- are the parking spaces big enough for Hummers, or does one have to pay for two spaces to park one at your ramps?)� Has your institution taken any of this information or analysis into account when making the decision to encourage more traffic and congestion in our city?
Rather than delve more deeply into the larger environmental and geopolitical implications of the I35W project here, I'd like to ask you to respond to key points I've made.� Will you please take these comments to people in your organization and ask them if it might not be better to revisit the basic premises of the proposed I35W Excess project?� Can you see why I feel like it is "excess" and not "access"?
I look forward to your reply.� If we can converse our way through the questions I've raised so far, I have more, too!
--pedaling for peaceful urban infrastructure -- Gary Hoover, King Field
