John McClellan wrote:
We need to remember that it's not just "our city", the
entire Metro is an interconnnected system. Like "no
man is an island", neither is our city. If everyone
who worked Downtown lived there or even within the
city border, we wouldn't have a freeway rush hour in &
out of Downtown. A large percent of Downtown workers
are commuting from outside the city. Likewise not
every citizen of Mpls works here either.
Peter Vevang writes:
I agree we are interconnected economically. But our tax dollars are not spent
that way. We need more money for mass transit. But because MN Dot is a
highway department and not a transit department, they will look to highways as
the solution for everything. Our entire funding mechanism is geared towards
highways. We can't even get mass transit in the budget in a systematic way.
We need transit much more than the outlying suburbs do, that makes us different
from them. We also pay taxes too, we shouldn't be paying taxes only to support
the needs of people outside of Minneapolis. We need to take care of our
problems too. We are not an island, but we are an individual.
A million people are going to move to the Metro, highways alone can't handle that. If we rely on highways for all of our transit needs we will be in real trouble. Minneapolis is already in the epicenter of a traffic meltdown, we will bear the brunt of this massive influx of new drivers. That makes us different from the rest of the metro too. Meters are the canary in the coal mine. If things are so congested that you can't safely merge onto the highway, that should be a warning to everyone that congestion is out of control. We will need vast increases in mass transit and highway capacity to meet future needs or we will be cut off economically. We will increasingly need mass transit just to bypass the overcongested highways because Minneapolis will be the worst affected by the future traffic problems.
I see no reason to tear apart the city for this pitifully small increase in
highway capacity being proposed by Mn Dot. We gain nothing substantial by
doing this. The 30 year plan they are proposing is not reasonable. It won't
solve our fundamental problems now or in the future, and will ruin several
neighborhoods. It is a waste of time and resources that could be better spent
addressing our problems in a different way.
Just because highways and our current development patterns are all we know doesn't mean that they are, the only option, an exclusive option or the best option. If the people living in Minneapolis are unable to move about the Metro, we will suffer economically and culturally. MN Dot can't help us on this, we have a multi-modal transit and development problem, they are almost exclusively a highway department.
Peter Vevang
NE Minneapolis
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