Spend a few minutes on the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) website and you’re bound to find all sorts of road reconstruction projects, as well as a cornucopia of information about each of them. Project pages typically contain a map, a description of the space the MnDOT is looking into reworking, a summary of potential work and cost summaries.
This transparency is unequivocally a good thing. It allows the public more opportunities to engage with the infrastructure as a living thing. It helps residents who wish to be involved in the growth of their city get in on the ground floor.
However, there’s a serious catch here: All this construction takes time and costs money. This is by no means a bad thing on its own. It is unreasonable to expect any government project to simply materialize. But infrastructure and zoning projects are often bound up in knots of red tape that cause more harm than good.
Take MnDOT’s proposed reconstruction of Central Avenue. The project is complex: According to the Department’s website, the project involves working closely with Metro Transit on the integration of “a planned bus rapid transit line that will provide improved transit service.” It also involves a thorough reconstruction of the Avenue, including options for pedestrians, cyclists and drivers. The reconstruction project involves roughly six miles of roads, which is hardly a small lift for any organization.
The process is already involving a mixture of feasibility studies, outreach events, traffic analyses and material considerations. Various groups — pedestrians, artists, business owners, commuters, transit riders, cyclists — all have different needs and desires for the avenue.
Though MnDOT was transparent that they were starting the visioning process without a clear timeline for funding and implementation, the uncertainty can have a chilling effect on businesses and leave residents wondering if their input will have mattered. Even a two-year gap between outreach, studies, plans and the eventual implementation begs the question of whether the whole process needs to be redone.
This level of red tape and bureaucracy, while beneficial in theory, is frustrating, both economically and logistically.
Business owners on Central Avenue have expressed concern about how construction might impact sales and store traffic. This is speculatory but not without merit. At present, in Minneapolis and the surrounding metro area, construction — and redesigns, as well as all the preceding (and undeniably important) labor — take an unnecessarily long time to go from broken ground to ribbon-cutting.
Advocates for building an “Art Walk” on Central Avenue may be correct about it being a potential economic boon for the area. But that can only happen if it gets constructed.
Any trepidation about construction is understandable. If a project goes sideways, tearing it up again and starting from ground zero would be exponentially expensive and complex. Therefore, new projects typically don’t happen until the infrastructure reaches its end of life. Changing the contours of roads, trimming lanes from avenues and changing transit options impacts the character of an area. Doing so changes incentives for businesses, developers and residents, in ways that are difficult to predict in advance.
But the current status quo, of endless meetings and planning commissions and exploration studies, is equally untenable. Minnesota’s cities cannot change to adapt to a growing population and a changing metro area if MnDOT cannot build quickly.
Yes, moving too hastily on infrastructure projects carries its own kind of risk. This is not intended to advocate for an improvisatory MnDOT. But surely there is a middle ground available. The current speed of development sees a department running the risk of moving reactively rather than proactively, responding to problems three years too late rather than building in a way that encourages healthy growth for the future.