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David Shove said: When it come to StPaul politics I've noticed is that slower thinkers keep right. The slower, the far righter.
I say: Despite my desire to agree with you and gang up on bashing those nasty conservatives, I think that's a bit insulting to those who consider themselves a member of the "right".
Brett Sprangel said something a post back about that artificial canyon trapping the carbon monoxide. I think he might be onto something. My first thought about the dying plants was the increased levels of de-icer used for the highways. Highways (or parkways or whatever you want to call I-35) get deicer and chemicals (drying agents, specifically) whereas city streets usually get sand and plowing. The different treatment might have a lot to do with the different viability levels for local plants. However, airflow is very, very important. Acid rain doesn't take a long time to form. Pass water through heavily polluted air and you'll get it. What might be happening to the plants along that corridor is highly localized acid rain or the equivalent. Emissions from the cars are trapped in a narrow space between sound barriers. Rain falling through this air becomes acidic, then falls on the plants and soil, killing them.
Maybe if we tore down the sound barriers, we'd get the plants to live.
I'm of two minds on the whole I-35E issue. On one hand I think neighborhoods should be able to band together and lobby for issues important to them, including concessions on local roadways or road construction projects. On the other hand I think what the neighborhood ended up implementing on I-35E is a bad solution for just about everyone. Property values probably still fell, you still have the noise pollution and when the wind finally sweeps into that "artificial canyon", you get a big dose of car fumes anyway. Everyone else has a section of interstate that you have to slow down for and cargo shipments have to go **way** out of their way to get where they're going. You do realize that keeping semi trucks off of I-35E there increases the number of such trucks on the side streets, right? They'll get as close as they can by highway, but then they have to drive side streets further. Besides, these big trucks are delivering needed products. Making it difficult for them to get where they're going is dumb.
Hindsight and all that. Now that things are as they are, I don't know what to do about it except suggest, in a mild and somewhat timid tone, that overturning the original court case might be a good idea. Just my opinion and not one I feel strongly enough about to even defend it much. Besides, the only points of view I have on it are from driving that stretch of road, talking to a friend of mine who works as a local truck driver, and reading this list.
About the whole Pace car concept - I don't like the idea. It sounds similar to the idea of putting up a whole bunch of stop signs on every corner or saying that pedestrians should be able to step out into traffic at any time they please. The reason we have streets is so that people can get to where they are going. Getting out there and creating impediments seems to me causes more problems than it's worth. Back in Tulsa, they put a new stop sign near my husband's parent's home. It was really annoying so we called the city civil engineers about it and talked to a friend we knew in the police. Since the stop sign had been put in (with the intent of slowing down traffic on a residential road), there had been 13 accidents at that corner. In the 30 years they had records of *before* the stop sign went in, there had NEVER been an accident at that corner. The stop sign seemed like a good idea to solve a problem of people going too fast, but instead it caused a lot of wrecks and injuries. I think the Pace car thing will have a similar effect. It sounds nice - people going slow are more careful and easy to stop, right? - but in effect I suspect it will cause a lot more difficulty than it fixes.
Mary Baker East Side
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