Rethinking the Unthinkable

Interstate 94, outside of St. Paul, MN. (Source: Strong Towns/Daniel Herriges.)

Things that feel like the bedrock of our world aren’t always so.

Sometimes even literally. A startling report a few weeks ago raised the eyebrows of a lot of people where I live in Minnesota. An article in MinnPost revealed that there is a real, if small, chance that St. Anthony Falls, in the very heart of downtown Minneapolis, might collapse entirely and be reduced to rapids, if an underwater wall that has been essentially holding it in place since 1876 were to fail. Little is known about the condition of this wall, including by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which built it.

Unsettling news, indeed, not just for the potential economic and environmental consequences, but because the waterfall—the only major one on the entire Mississippi—is the whole reason the city of Minneapolis exists. (It powered the flour mills that long dominated the region’s economy.)

This is just one reminder that what feels like a constant in our world rarely ever is. It’s just a question of how far you have to zoom out in time to see that. Humans were likely already living here in Minnesota when glaciers retreated and cataclysmic floods drained lakes large enough to dwarf today’s Lake Superior, leaving behind fertile farmland and vast river valleys.

It’s not only natural history where constancy is an illusion. Factor in humanity, with its unprecedented ability to modify its surroundings (particularly in the couple of centuries since we gained access to hundreds of millions of years of accumulated fossil energy). We are capable of producing radical discontinuity in our environment at a scale and rate many times faster than any geologic process.

Once unthinkable, for example, was the damage that American cities suffered in the second half of the 20th century. This damage, worse in some neighborhoods than anything total war could have inflicted, occurred through a combination of freeway building, urban renewal, and the withdrawal of investment and credit from inner cities while governments subsidized mass suburbanization.

Very few urban residents in 1925, a time when most large U.S. cities had experienced decades of rapid and robust growth, would have anticipated how wildly different the cities of 1975 would be. Imagine telling them that they’d see large swaths of their city abandoned, bulldozed, falling into ruin, or wiped off the map. That the park they once played in would be a spot their grandchildren would only ever know as a highway interchange.

We are living in our ancestors’ unthinkable future, in the outcome of a radical experiment in how to live, move, and design cities that was undertaken across the face of a whole continent.

I was born in 1984. I have only ever known Interstate 94, especially in the Midway area of St. Paul, as a giant, ugly gash through the heart of my city. It’s always been a realm of chaotic traffic, loud noise, and exhaust. Many of the lots near the freeway I’ve only ever witnessed as wastelands of concrete and asphalt, weeds, and broken glass. There have always been shuttered storefronts and dilapidated buildings, as long as I’ve been alive.

I’ve learned, too, to see the markers of community and care, and I’ve met plenty of people who live in and love the neighborhoods that flank I-94. But those neighborhoods have suffered deeply. I had to be taught the role that I-94 played in this suffering; I don’t think I would have figured it out on my own. It just was that way.

And I didn’t know it could be otherwise. I drew maps as a kid, hundreds of them. (I was never much of an artist, but maps? Different story.) Most were fantasy maps of imaginary places. Every single city I dreamed up, without fail, had freeways through the middle of it converging on downtown. It didn’t occur to me to conceive of a city without one. Unthinkable.

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The Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) has been tasked with “Rethinking I-94.” The stretch of freeway which connects the downtowns of Minneapolis and St. Paul, about eight miles apart, is due for its generational cycle of major maintenance. This is the first comprehensive review of the corridor since it was built in the 1960s, and our one chance in a long time to make changes beyond simple repaving and painting.

The roadway’s problems are no secret: physical deterioration, but also rush hour congestion, traffic safety concerns, and astoundingly dangerous and uncomfortable conditions for people trying to navigate through or across the corridor on sidewalks. The neighborhoods along I-94’s course continue to suffer from the public health effects of the freeway traffic (such as the region’s highest asthma rates) and a lack of local investment every day that the freeway continues to roar along. So what would it mean to rethink it?

We learned a bit about MnDOT’s answer this week when the agency revealed 10 possible scenarios for the freeway’s future. The most expected outcome of this meeting was the jarring contrast in language and priorities evident between a public-sector agency using the sterile, circumscribed language of public engagement…and an actual public pressing hard for the serious consideration of unthinkable futures.

MnDOT’s 10 options range from two involving replacing the freeway with a surface-level boulevard, to some middle-ground options involving the repurposing of lanes for transit, to two scenarios involving the actual expansion of the freeway. The fact that expansion is still on the table at all provoked the ire of local officials on the project’s steering committee, including St. Paul City Council member Mitra Jalali and a representative from Mayor Melvin Carter’s office.

It’s 2023 and understandings have evolved, and so MnDOT does start every public presentation about I-94 with an acknowledgment of what some in our community have long understood: I-94’s creation was a brutal act of dispossession and destruction undertaken with a clear racial bias. It was built in the 1960s, slicing almost surgically through the heart of the city’s Black neighborhood, along Rondo Avenue.

(Source: Council of Social Agencies, 1937. Colorized and annotated by Geoff Maas, 2014.)

I studied this history in planning school, and I studied it in elementary school. We read Evelyn Fairbanks’s Days of Rondo and walked out to the pedestrian bridge over the freeway in front of the school one day to discuss the obliteration of a neighborhood in service to commuters.

(Source: Strong Towns/Daniel Herriges.)

MnDOT now acknowledges that the way in which this freeway was created was inexcusable. So does that mean MnDOT is also able to entertain a future without it? Or is that a bridge too far even for a “rethink”?

The question isn’t hypothetical, because citizen advocates have fought to push the unthinkable into the conversation. The nonprofit Reconnect Rondo has received federal funding to develop a proposal for a land bridge over a half-mile portion of I-94 which could play various community development functions. Another group, Our Streets Minneapolis, has put forth a more ambitious proposal to replace the freeway entirely with a Twin Cities Boulevard: an urban street served by frequent transit and walkable development.

I will admit I fell into the trap of reflexively dismissing the Twin Cities Boulevard proposal as pie-in-the-sky. “This isn’t going to happen,” I thought immediately upon reading about it. There is zero chance MnDOT would ever go for it. That politicians would go for it. That the public outcry wouldn’t be so severe that it forced the agency to back down even if they wanted to remove the highway.

Maybe on a deeper level, the same me that, as a kid, only drew cities with freeways was just channeling that gut-level assumption that the world as it is is the natural state of things.

If I’m a betting man, I will say: it would be unprecedented and shocking if they opted to remove I-94. American cities have removed existing freeways before, but always short segments: spurs, loops, and connectors. Never anything as ambitious as an eight-mile segment of interstate traversing two major cities. And so everything I’ve been taught about public policy and politics says to pick an option closer to the center of the realm of the possible and fight for that. Be pragmatic.

And yet, why? It’s easy to imagine St. Paul with no I-94, because St. Paul with no I-94 was a real place that existed for over 100 years. It even existed with a 1950 population almost exactly equivalent to today’s: about 311,000. So why do I revert to the notion that removing it is unthinkable? Building it was unthinkable.

(Source: Strong Towns/Daniel Herriges.)

The crowd assembled at the MnDOT public engagement session was overwhelmingly in favor of shrinking or outright removing I-94, but that crowd was largely an echo chamber of the small minority of people who spend a lot of time thinking about such things. Take a random survey, especially in the Twin Cities suburbs, and I highly doubt you’d find majority support for removing the freeway. “But where would the cars go?” most would ask. (Here are some answers.)

Most of the public isn’t going to be ready to imagine that, but good on advocates for asking them to imagine it anyway, forcing the conversation, and getting local media to take it seriously. The future has been radically unlike the past before. Why not again?

We are in an era that lends itself to such consideration. American cities choke under drifting smoke from Canadian wildfires; Texas bakes in over-100-degree heat for weeks on end. Much of the world is living an unthinkable summer as I write this.

As for MnDOT, is a state highway bureaucracy ready to make a radical change, if prompted by public outcry and supportive local officials? Let’s ask them:

“We want to help the universe, but we have our evaluation criteria,” the Rethinking I-94 project manager is quoted as saying to the assembled crowd.

You can view MnDOT’s evaluation criteria here. It’s a grab bag of everything. It directs the agency to assess many sorts of positive and negative effects on the surrounding community, but it also includes a list of conventional mobility criteria, including vehicle speed and vehicle throughput. In other words, ”We want to fix the corridor for bikers and walkers and support environmental justice, but also, we’ve got to move the cars and we’ve got to move them fast. We’ve got to do all of it at once.” Somewhere in these criteria is a way to work in analysis of just about every objection any interested stakeholder might have, as well as plenty of ways to justify whichever alternative is chosen. But they don’t add up to a coherent vision of what MnDOT is actually trying to achieve.

And maybe that’s good. Maybe MnDOT’s role isn’t to set any sort of vision, but to be malleable in service of a vision that comes from the public and their elected representatives. There was a time when government agencies acted in ways that were much more ideologically driven, explicitly setting out to shape the world as it should be, not tweaking it as it is assumed to be. Those weren’t better days. In countries with very top-down authoritarian rule, they’re still using the 1960s American DOT playbook today.

Our bureaucracies, on the other hand, are designed for stasis, not transformative action. Everything must be done with exhaustive public consultation and extreme (if superficial) quantitative rigor. The end result is a pronounced conservatism, not in the political sense, but in the small-c sense. It’s just that the status quo we’re conserving is now the radical departure of a couple generations ago.

I don’t trust MnDOT to actually land on one of the two transformative alternatives that replaces I-94 with an urban boulevard, because it would fly in the face of that conservatism, the bureaucratic need to triangulate and offer something to every stakeholder. If we get our Twin Cities Boulevard—and I hope we do, because I-94 continues to do active harm, every day—it will be because a dramatic shift in public sentiment has fundamentally changed the game.

I don’t think that sea change is coming, at least before construction begins on a “rethought” I-94.  But then again, the future is looking more radically unlike the present all the time. And the present is already radically unlike the past. So I will resist my own impulse to triangulate and think smaller, and instead embrace those who are asking what kind of city we really want to live in in 50 years. And why on earth there should still be a freeway running through it.

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