Allen Graetz wrote:
Traffic problems on Hiawatha? I'd be curious to know what exactly those problems are in terms of numbers once those numbers are available. Years ago when I lived in Highland Park and drove to work downtown, on the way how the left turn lane to go east on 46th would frequently back up into the lane of traffic. And when it did that, you normally sat at the light for an extra cycle because you wouldn't make the green arrow the first time around. I never hear a public outcry of that being a problem. I'm curious to know what the difference in #s and time are between that and, say, waiting to cross Hiawatha on 38th during rush hour. I'm not a fan of LRT but I wonder if this issue isn't much ado about next to nothing.
Peter Vevang writes:
Clearly, traffic is getting worse. It is a regional problem that is shared by Minneapolis and the rest of the Metro. The projected growth for the Metro over the next 30 years is 460,000 households, or about a million people. That is an astronomical amount of growth. The bulk of that is projected to be in the developing suburbs, where people will be driving further than ever before. Downtown Minneapolis is already exceeding these growth expectations.
http://www.metrocouncil.org/directions/planning/growth_overview.htm
There are a number of reasons that adding highway alone will not slow traffic. One is that adding roadway can actually slow traffic. People simply drive more. This is a paradox that has proven itself true for a long time. Light rail isn't a panacea, but it will slow the increase in traffic.
http://www.davros.org/science/roadparadox.html
Another problem is that people will be living in the furthest suburbs drive further, and have a tendency to cross through all regions of the metro. The effect of this is an exponential growth in traffic. I am ballparking the numbers here. A highway can handle roughly 2,200 cars per lane mile, depending on the speed and lane width. We will need roughly 4181 lane miles to accomodate this new traffic if we assume a single 20 mile trip per additional household by 2030. If you asume a 20 mile commute each way you double that. If you assume additionally that there are 2 working parents, kids going to after school sports and trips to the grocery store you can quadruple that or more. A household can easily drive 100 miles in a day all total. We aren't going to add 16,000 lane miles of highway to the metro to accomodate that. If compressed, that would be a strip of asphalt 1 mile wide and 36 miles long. That is the bare minimum capacity we need if we use a highway only solution to transit. I am not even going to figure in that highways are used at peak capacity durign rush hour and not used to capacity late at night, meaning we will nead an unkown rush hour capacity that is much greater. At current highway costs of about $1 million per lane mile, we can expect to run up a tab of about $16 billion to build that much roadway, which will be less than adequate to provide for future growth. With real estate escalation and increases in material costs, that number will only go up. We aren't even considering the environmental impact of hardcover runoff into our streams and lakes and smog, or how much land it is going to take to park 750,000 to 1,000,000 cars, which is about 7-10 square miles for just the stalls without any roadway. To put that in perspective, Minneapolis is about 23 square miles. If we add roughly 50-75 square miles of paving to the metro we will be getting near the amount of hard surface we will need to accomodate this growth with a highway based solution. That scenario makes me uneasy to say the least.
Clearly, we don't really have any good highway options any more if those growth projections hold true. We will need to start doing more dense housing and transit based development. Otherwise we are going to strangle our economy because of traffic, and ruin our quality of life. I think the New Urbanist movement has some good ideas for what sustainable future communities might look like, and how re-development should take place. Their ideas are a bit too Disneyesque for my tastes, but the underlying principles are solid. A lot of people really like these kinds of housing. Unfortunately it is against the law here in Minneapolis, zoning, setbacks and road building rules forbid it, along with a host of other smaller regulations.
http://www.newurbanism.org/pages/416429/index.htm
I think special note should be given to transit oriented development. Where mass transit is linked to housing and jobs. If the growth projections hold true we will have no other choice than this kind of development. This has been very succeful in some parts of the country. Imagine if you could cut your household from 2 cars to 1 car and how much money you would save.
http://www.transitorienteddevelopment.org/pages/1/index.htm
In realistic terms, in the next 15 years traffic is going to become unbearable. Current 20 minute trips will stretch into 40 or 60 minute trips. That is why we need light rail that links our regional centers to critical economic and cultural infrastructure. Cities around the world have time tested and proven methods for moving large numbers of people, efficiently, cheaply and cleanly. Light rail here is not being used anywhere near its ultimate capacity. The reason we need to start laying track now, is so we have a transit option in 2015 when highway traffic starts becoming a serious economic problem. Light rail can be threaded through existing urban nieghborhoods, we won't have to put whole nieghborhoods to the torch as was done for I-35W, something we are only now recovering from after several decades. It takes 30 years to build a decent rail system, we need to start now so that we stay ahead of the traffic curve. Light rail isn't some crackpot scheme thought up by utopian transit junkies. It is a response to real problems we are facing now and it has a proven track record around the world. If we want growth, we have to make a choice: we can build rail now, when we have time to plan, or we can build it later in 2015 or 2030, when we don't have time to plan, traffic is out of control, costs are greater and we are less able to cope. We don't have any other decent options unless we manage growth in a radically different way.
Peter Vevang Holland
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