Late Peek: Wed May 8, 2024

Man, what a week! I meant to get a Patreon post up earlier, but there's a lot going on -- mostly stuff that should be good for the channel!

So today is the video I shot while I was in Minneapolis in mid-April. It's primarily about I-94, a freeway that cuts a wide, extremely unpleasant path between downtown Minneapolis and downtown St. Paul. And it's also about the planning process (and competing ideas) around a potential reconstruction or "rethinking."

One of the points I make in the video is that I-94 is of a VERY similar vintage to nearly every urban freeway in the US: it was planned and constructed in the 1950s-60s, when redlining and white flight had done their work, and building freeways (or, "uninterrupted flow" facilities, in traffic engineering parlance) to connect suburbs to downtown job centers had a sick logic to it. (But at least a logic.)

It isn't 1955 anymore. We spend very little time talking about "white flight" today, and lots of time talking about gentrification and displacement in our close-in urban neighborhoods. And those freeways we built 50-75 years ago? They're running into issues of structural integrity (overpasses, underpasses, retaining walls, roadbed deterioration, etc.). I-94 is one of many, MANY such freeways whose design assumptions, historical harms, and very reason for existence can and should be revisited. Will it be rebuilt as is? Widened, as in Alternative B above? Or transformed into something much, much more consistent with the housing and amenity-rich, healthy urban environments that make cities great?

The video references the Congress For the New Urbanism's "Freeways Without Futures" list, which includes...a grand total of ten urban freeways. Laughably short list, IMO. So tell me about a freeway in your city you'd like to see removed, or "boulevardized," as they say, and why. I bet we can come up with more than ten!