Maybe we could use these ideas to eliminate the freeways through our fine city.Sean Ryan wrote:
Some interesting excerpts from 'The Minneapolis Plan', adopted in 1998snip
http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/citywork/planning/planpubs/mplsplan/oldversions/v4/index.html
-Pursue the reclamation of air rights above freeways so that through the use of land bridges, neighborhoods can be reconnected and land can be used more productively.'
The Traditional Street Grid
'The residential street grid laid onto the city from its earliest days has provided yet another powerful organizing force for our neighborhoods. Since the first residents claimed title to land along the Mississippi in the 1850s, the street grid has exerted a great deal of influence over land subdivision. The grid is a primary organizing element, easily understood and navigable by all, whether a neighborhood is familiar or foreign to the traveler. Freeway construction removed blocks of housing and series of neighborhood streets, forever altering how neighbors interacted, did their shopping, or strolled through their neighborhoods. Maintaining the grid pattern of our streets and "healing" it whenever possible is a strong prerogative for the continued vitality of city neighborhoods. In cases where street closures have been approved for the sake of development, attention should be focused on creative solutions to reopening these thoroughfares.
Being able to find one's way through unfamiliar territory brings tremendous benefit to the urban landscape and, whenever possible, new development should correspond to the historical street grid pattern.
Minneapolis will restore and maintain the traditional street grid.'
Why not put 35W and 94 mostly below grade and in tunnels or under bridges through Minneapolis?
1. It allows restoration of the grid, and with the many benefits referenced above.
2. It recovers land space for Minneapolis.
3. It greatly reduces traffic noise.
4. It reduces traffic generated air-born dirt.
5. It allows MnDOT and commuters to pay for and build more freeway lanes whenever they want more road capacity, as long as they're willing to pay for more bridges, excavation and/or tunneling (depending on how the "tunnel" is formed and the geographical constraints).
6. It reduces weather-related traffic delays.
7. It reduces weather-related financial loss due to traffic accidents and delays.
8. It reduces weather-related injuries and fatalities.
9. It greatly reduces snow removal costs.
A similar "underground" freeway system has already been built (perhaps several times, I only researched the one I know about).
Compare the Twin Cities with the Munich metro area in Germany:
The 7-county Minneapolis metro area had a 2000 population of about 2.6 million people. The urbanized metro area had a population of 2.38 million people. The 7-county metro area has a land area of 2974 square miles. The urbanized area is 894 square miles (there's lots of open space in Scott, Dakota and Carver counties).
The Munich urbanized metro area is 2.39 million people in a land area of 2123 square miles.
Thus the two areas are quite comparable for population and area. Germans on the average own .53 cars per person or slightly more than one car for every two people. Americans own slightly more than one car for every one person if I recall correctly. I don't know the car ownership numbers for Minneapolis or the metro
area.
In Munich, the metro area is surrounded by a conventional (above ground) freeway ring, just like our 494 / 694 loop. Inside this loop, there are two more rings, both below grade, and in tunnels or under so many sequential bridges so as to make it seem like a tunnel. Most freeways going into / out of Munich also drop below grade between the outermost ring and the next ring road.
There are surface arterial streets in Munich that carry heavy traffic, but by putting the highways below grade, they've saved themselves tremendous amounts of land and made the whole urban area much nicer to live in, work in and travel in. Walking and biking proceeds sanely on the surface, and millions of cars and trucks go about their business out of the way just below it.
And it's cheaper to do that here than there. They don't have the weather advantages of moving below ground, and excavating anything is much more expensive than here. We're blessed with great geology for tunnels. (A subway system downtown, for example, would be much easier to construct here than the digging through the swamps they did to build one in Washington DC. Every building they passed under had to be shored up in a big way from underneath or it would have sunk or collapsed.)
Actually, much of 35W and 94 is already "below grade" -- it just happens to be in a gaping chasm of a canyon, instead of being covered over by the bridges and tunnels that should have been there from the start.
The mistake that was made was the "gotta have" priority of bigger highways without the "gotta have" of the intact grid system aka neighborhood fabric. That is, highway designers gave the city and its residents the short-shrift and got away with it.
Not much point in having a unit of government known as a city if its citizens and elected representatives get bulldozed at every juncture by the county, state and/or federal government. How many times has the city been culpable of shooting itself in the foot without that help of outside parties? Those outsiders are going to mostly care less what happens to us most of the time, so we certainly do NOT need to shoot our own feet. How about we pull TOGETHER to make this a nice place to live, for a change?
Imagine if streets like 23rd, 24th, 25th, 27th, 28th, 29th, 30th and 31st Ave N were through streets across 94? Or if Linden, Chestnut, 12th and 13th streets downtown went through? Or Clifton Ave to 16th and Oak Grove to 17th? Or Stevens, 2nd Ave, Clinton Ave, 4th Ave, Elliot Ave, and 10th Ave on the south side of downtown all went through? Bet that would have a big affect on the Hawthorne, Near North, Loring Park, Stevens Square, Elliot Park and Ventura Village neighborhoods. They'd no longer be split, or isolated.
Similarly south along 35W: putting 19th, 22nd, 24th, 25th, 32nd, 33rd, 34th, 37th, 39th, 40th, 41st, 43rd, 44th, 45th, 47th, 48th, 49th, 53rd, 54th, 56th, 57th and 61st Streets through would be dramatic.
And that's not all of them. I've left out the west and east banks, as well as northeast.
Radical notion, eh? Expensive, too. But how expensive is it to ruin neighborhoods, increase noise and pollution, dislocate families, businesses, churches and so forth?
Chris Johnson Fulton
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