new freeways for $20 billion?

Star Tribune editorial

published 10.19.03

online at http://www.startribune.com/stories/562/4160977.html

by Steve Berg

Star Tribune

Although Missouri claims to be the "show me" state and takes the mule as its official animal, I've long considered Minnesota underrated as a skeptic. Anything proven true elsewhere must be proven again here before it's accepted, and even then it's a tough sell.

The traffic mess is a prime example. Other busy metropolitan places have long assumed that congestion is the price of success, that you can't "build your way out of it" in any reasonable, affordable way by only adding freeway lanes, and that the best way to cope is to offer people choices, like transit, that invite them to opt out of traffic altogether.

Until now, Minnesota's response has been of the mulish sort. Lt. Gov. Carol Molnau, the transportation commissioner, gave the classic answer during last year's campaign: We don't really know that we can't build our way out of congestion because we haven't tried.

But, thanks to just-published research from the University of Minnesota, the costs and physical implications of trying the all-pavement solution are now clearer. "Building Our Way Out of Congestion," by Gary A. Davis and Kate Sanderson, projects how much concrete it would take to satisfy this region's growing traffic demands:

If all efforts went into roads, metro freeway capacity would have to rise by 71 percent to achieve free-flowing traffic by 2020. That would mean adding 1,150 lane miles to the current 1,608-mile network.

At a seminar last week, Sanderson used aerial photos to illustrate several examples: Fourteen additional lanes near the junction of Interstate Hwy. 94, I-494 and I-694 in Maple Grove; eight new lanes cutting through the Lowry Tunnel in downtown Minneapolis, and dozens of wider bridges, including four new lanes for I-94 over the Mississippi River near the University of Minnesota.

The cost would be stunning. The report made no estimate, and Davis stressed that the report makes no policy recommendations. But, at $17 million per lane mile, not an unreasonable price for urban freeway construction in Minnesota, the total bill for 1,150 new lane miles would approach $20 billion. That's five times the amount committed by the Pawlenty administration's current expansion program.

Here's another cost question to consider. If, somehow, this concrete wonderland were achieved, who would want to live in it? The environmental and aesthetic degradation costs are as important as the construction costs in rendering the all-roads solution unaffordable.

No one expects the freeway build-out to happen. Others have tried it, notably Atlanta, and it hasn't worked. Even some of Minnesota's most strident conservatives have begun to talk about more balanced solutions.

Rep. Phil Krinkie, R-Shoreview, attended last week's seminar and told WCCO television something remarkable. "In heavily congested corridors you have to look at additional public transportation or additional options to just expanding freeways," he said.

Another conservative leader, Rep. Mary Liz Holberg, R-Lakeville, is working on a proposed BRT (bus rapid transit) corridor along I-35W between Dakota County and downtown Minneapolis. The notion that transit is not welfare for the urban poor but necessary for middle-class mobility seems finally clearer.

Why this change? Suburban constituents understand better than anyone the futility of relying solely on more pavement in fast-growing areas. Without other choices, lanes will simply fill up with more cars. Even charging tolls on premium lanes, as is now being considered by the administration, won't make demand magically disappear.

"This should be an apolitical discussion," said Jim Hovland, an Edina Republican and City Council member who has been active in regional transportation issues. "It's really about how to keep jobs and enhance our quality of life."

There's a growing realization in the suburbs, he said, that thriving regions produce heavy traffic, and that balance is the best response -- wider roads, yes, but also the choice of opting out of traffic altogether.

The region's first light-rail line, set to open next year, will offer that opportunity. Already, it has been widely demonized for its cost. But, as the Davis-Sanderson analysis suggests, 20 Hiawatha lines could be built for the price of a freeway build-out.

No one's proposing anything close to that. Perhaps only three extensions from Hiawatha eventually make sense: east to the University of Minnesota and St. Paul; southwest toward Eden Prairie, and south from Bloomington to Apple Valley. A St. Cloud-Rochester commuter line would help, too. But express busways and somewhat wider freeways are a better fit for most other corridors.

These are the components of a more reasonable, less costly solution than the concrete nightmare exposed by the Davis-Sanderson study. The real danger, of course, isn't that Minnesota will waste money building too many roads. It's that the state will continue to skimp on the real solution that combines roads, buses and trains, and that its main economic engine, the Twin Cities region, will be a lesser place than it might have been.

Steve Berg is at sberg@startribune.com