A friend of the blog emails:
So, the St Paul City Council unanimously told MNDOT to take away lanes in areas where POC live because of racism.
CM Mitra Jalali is really proud of the unanimous support. They’re really sticking it to those white supremacist racist highway planners by saying that these poor, mostly Black and Asian communities need to ride busses instead of cars. Wait a minute- what is our city council actually saying here?
It’s saying “we don’t care when you get somewhere – just don’t do it in a car”.
While I’m always ready to concede that freeway construction is disruptive and tends to displace neighborhoods that aren’t politically well organized enough to file lawsuits (case in point “Rip 35E”), the notion that Rondo Avenue was kind of a black Shangri-La is risible. I blame the LBJ antipoverty programs for destroying black family structure and economic vigor. Present day progressives want more of that. It’s as if they want minorities to fail in the worst way.
The problem of roads goes back millennia. You farm over there, the market is over here, I own the land between. How does society get goods from farm to market?
Libertarian: You pay me to cross my land, whatever I demand.
Romans: We’re building a road across the land that dead guy used to own.
Soviet: It’s our land now, comrade, and our farm and our goods, too.
Founders: . . . nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. [We’re taking a strip of land for the road, but we’ll pay you a fair price for it].
Mn/DOT: We have only so much money to spend. We could blow it all condemning six blocks of Summit Avenue, or condemn cheap land in Rondo and build the freeway all the way to Minneapolis.
Mitra: RACISSSSSSS
I’m on a roll. Moderation, two days in a row.
Unless Rondo extended from the border w/ Mpls to the Maplewood (or whatever is east of St Paul), there were lots of neighborhoods that were affected (if not devastated). As well as the neighborhoods in Mpls. As well as, and so on and so forth. And what about all the other freeways?
I wonder if the statue toppling craze will ever expand and morph into something that involves actual destruction of existing roads and buildings. For the people.
As a person of non-color, I feel unsafe and unwelcome in Saint Paul.
Uh………
(Maybe not.)
Okay, fine, it’s slightly off topic but Why does I-35E traffic slow down to 45 mph through Saint Paul south of downtown?
It is the inverse of the Rondo problem.
When you drive down I-94 just west of downtown, you might see POC living on each side of the road. It is why it is okay to let your Jake Brake rip into the silence of the night.
But on I-35E as you approach downtown from the south, high on that hill, live the people who own Saint Paul and much of the state.
You don’t wake those people up.
No way.
Greg, that’s the PF, the Practice Freeway. It’s for drivers who need practice understanding their place in society.
It’s completely different from the SF, the Secret Freeway, also known as Ayd Mill Road, which was proposed as a shortcut from I-35E to I-94 but peters out around Selby and Hamline and was never completed.
Neither of these freeway variations have anything to do with money or political influence, and anybody who says differently is spreading mis-information which leads to loss of faith in institutions; therefore, the mis-informers must be banned from social media, fired from their jobs, black-listed from employment, stalked, harassed and eventually, found dead of suicide by repeatedly stabbing themselves in the back. Don’t go there.
JDM – regarding destroying roads vs statues, the roads are much more difficult to destroy. It would take a lot of labor and machinery. But, it might be interesting to see them try.
Then again, some Minneapolis roads may be improved by tearing them up.
smh, yes, you’re right about the effort to, let’s call it, up the ante in the destruction of objects created by white men. Otoh, gleefully and without fear of arrest tearing down a statue on capitol grounds in broad daylight (with a cop present even, I thought) was a domino I never expected to fall.
Besides, who says they need heavy equipment? How about, say, large sticks of ka-boom strategically planted to make one or more of those I-94 bridges unusable? For Rondo!
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The secret freeway… heh. Thanks, JD. That sent me to a map. Interesting.
No more secret freeway. Kommissar Carter turned it into an ox-cart path and bike lanes.
“I wonder if the statue toppling craze will ever expand and morph into something that involves actual destruction of existing roads and buildings. For the people.”
The anti car types don’t need much help- this is probably something they’ve actually thought about.
The anti-car types… Good call, mjb
You know, I can assume for the sake of argument that neighborhoods were indeed harmed by putting 35W through in the 1960s. Um, but ahem; so we are to assume that in 50 years, these neighborhoods couldn’t re-establish themselves? Seriously? And in a city that’s lost 50,000 residents since the highway was built, the loss of 500 homes is super significant….why?
My admittedly politically mistaken solution for the lack of highway lanes in Minneapolis; stop subsidizing daycare for the middle classes and up. Watch thousands of parents with a working spouse say “s***w it, I’m not working for a buck an hour anymore”.