Saint Paul’s senseless, self-inflicted Ayd Mill Road nightmare will continue to shamble on this week. The city council is expected to vote on a proposal to reconstruct the notorious pseudo-highway for a cost of $7.5 million. It may pass. It may not pass. But regardless, the almost-certain outcome is that Ayd Mill Road will continue being an enormous mess and a glaring missed opportunity for the city.
Already it's hard not to feel some disappointment. The original proposal, laid out by Mayor Melvin Carter in his State of the City speech, proposed to close one half of the road, leaving Ayd Mill winnowed down to just a single lane in each direction, without turn lanes. That original design would've created a luxurious pedestrian and bicycle facility while fundamentally shattering the character of the entire facility.
The proposed future condition now on the table is still much better than what exists today. But it is quite a bit worse than the original proposal. It calls for just one lane to be converted into a trail, with two southbound lanes and one northbound lane for cars. The new design preserves the road's use as essentially an extended interstate on and off ramp, degrading the quality of the new trail experience in the process. Some benefits still remain. Three lanes is a safer and more efficient design than four, especially given that Ayd Mill narrows down to a single lane at both its northern and southern ends anyway. Three lanes are also easier and less costly to maintain than four. A bike trail is better than no bike trail. Perhaps most importantly, this proposal represents the first-ever official check on Ayd Mill's decades long march towards becoming a part of the interstate system. Nearly two decades after Mayor Randy Kelly unilaterally connected the road to I-35W against the objections of the Council and neighbors, Mayor Carter may finally succeed in pushing back.
Seen through the lens of Saint Paul's decades-long battle over this issue, Wednesday's choice is fairly cut and dry, and it is tempting to accept the current plan as a compromise. But if you take a step back and examine the problem afresh, it's hard not to conclude that Saint Paul is making a myopic and costly mistake.
Ayd Mill Road doesn't need a diet, it needs a complete reinvention.
How Did Saint Paul Get To This Point?
The extended history of Ayd Mill Road has best been told by Bill Lindeke. The recent history of Ayd Mill Road goes something like this:
Last year, a group of Saint Paul residents inexplicably decided to blow up a repaving project in their neighborhood because it would've led to sidewalks being installed. The city decided to take that street reconstruction money and spend it instead on repaving Ayd Mill Road a couple years early. Then, in his August speech, Mayor Carter proposed that the city take advantage of the repaving and spend a bit more to make bigger changes to the road at the same time. Finally, last week, Saint Paul's Public Works Department returned to the city council and informed them that the cost of the Mayor's plan was nearly twice what was originally thought. This is in large part because the city staff determined that could not just repave the two car lanes, but would need to build entirely new turn lanes in the median in order to avoid the intolerable future of an Ayd Mill Road without free flowing traffic. The city staff offered the current three lane proposal as a cheaper way to accomplish the same thing, naturally trading cyclist safety and comfort for the convenience of drivers to never have to slow down. Because of further deteriorating pavement conditions (the road is built on a creekbed), the cost continues to rise, regardless of the chosen design. The City Council has had a week to make up their minds.
What Ayd Mill Road will not look like, under the revised proposal.
The current situation presents two unappealing options: repave the road as is for a lot of money, or more thoroughly repave the road and get something somewhat better out of it for a much greater cost. But narrowing the choice down to these two junk proposals is itself a choice, and it's a choice that requires ignoring something really important—Saint Paul cannot afford this road.
Ayd Mill Road is what departments of transportation call "limited access right-of-way." This type of road is describes any highway, with high speeds, heavy throughput, and well-spaced exits and entrances. This type of road exists in contrast to arterial and local roads, which serve different purposes. In Minnesota, the former is usually owned by the county, and the latter by a city. Limited access right-of-way is typically owned by MnDOT.
But Ayd Mill Road is an incredibly rare exception; a spur of the interstate highway system that is owned and maintained by a city. Not just any city, a city uniquely ill-prepared to handle it. Saint Paul has a population just over 300,000 people, with a below-average median income, and a huge portion of tax exempt real estate in its most valuable areas. The fiscal capacity of the city is extremely constrained. Saint Paul's FY20 budget is just over $620 million. Next door, Minneapolis will have a FY20 budget of $1.6 billion.
Roads like Ayd Mill are typically owned by DOTs for several reasons. One is that they serve travel from all over the region, not just local trips. The second is that they cost a lot more than local roads. Ayd Mill has far less annual average daily traffic (AADT) than other highway segments, but way more than virtually all local roads. 10-25,000 cars and trucks traveling at highway speeds every day will do tremendous damage to a road surface. Asking a city to pay for the maintenance of such a road is like asking a teenager to pay for college with their money working summer camp.
So What’s The Alternative?
If Ayd Mill is a fiscal albatross for Saint Paul, why is the city moving to pay an exorbitant sum for a solution that fixes none of the essential features of the road? Surely that doesn't make any sense.
The most expensive minute of time savings in America?
Reader, it does not.
But Saint Paul is so deep within this morass that it seems incapable of doing anything but blundering forward. It will pay at least a fifth of its entire 2020 street maintenance budget to kick the can further down the road, and probably ten years later, as Ayd Mill continues to crumble, it will probably have to do the same thing.
These decisions will come at direct cost to local roads in all other corners of the city, it will come at a cost to libraries and parks and public safety and everything else the city spends money on. Every time you hit a pothole in Saint Paul, remember that it goes unfilled so that commuters to and from very specific areas in Dakota County can shave 1-3 minutes from their commute to Minneapolis.
Is there another way? Can Saint Paul extricate itself from this ridiculous liability? Yes it can. There are two ways:
The city could negotiate with the state to give it ownership of Ayd Mill Road. This makes a lot of sense, since it's a road that operates exactly like an interstate highway entrance and exit ramp, and costs like one too. This would solve the money problem. But it would not solve the safety issues caused by commuters using Ayd Mill Road to cut through to I-94, via Selby and Snelling Avenues, and it would make it more difficult to one day build a bicycle trail in the trench that would serve as an extension of the Midtown Greenway. Which leaves the other option…
The city could close the road entirely. That would solve the money issue, since there would no longer be a need to maintain the road. But with no ticking clock for maintenance, this solution would also give the city the time it needs to plan something entirely different for the entire right-of-way that it owns.
The light at the end of the tunnel to this entire mess is the promise of "something entirely different." In the past two decades, cities around the world have woken up to the immense value of their abandoned or useless transportation rights-of-way. Most famously, New York City transformed an abandoned elevated freight rail line into one of the world's most celebrated parks. In Seoul, an elevated highway over a stream was removed, unearthing a green and blue ribbon that runs through the city. Madrid buried a highway and created a stunning river park in its place. Even in Atlanta, a city not know for progressive planning, a massive effort is underway to transform a belt of abandoned freight railway around the city into beautiful trails and maybe someday transit.
Saint Paul could have something like this too, if it wanted. It could have a park that garners international acclaim and puts the city on the map. There are tons of people in the Twin Cities who are desperately thirsty for something like this. But here's the other thing; Saint Paul could also not design a world-class linear park, it could simply let the land lie fallow and be overtaken with weeds, and eventually build a pedestrian and bicycling trail to extend the greenway, and it would still end up with a green space more useful to the neighborhoods and less costly to the city than what exists today.
It’s become a cliché that every city around the world now wants to build their own High Line. Every city except Saint Paul, apparently.
The current proposal before the city council will continue to strip Saint Paul of its wealth. Turning the road over to the state would not help Saint Paul gain wealth. But transforming the road into an incredible linear park and greenway, not just a designated traffic sewer, would build wealth. Developable land, especially where the current on and off ramps are, could be sold to make money back for the city. Property values along the park’s entire stretch would rise. People would drive less and walk and bicycle more. Nobody likes living next to a highway, but as New York, Atlanta, and other cities like Minneapolis have found, everyone wants to live next to a great linear park and greenway, and lots of people want to visit one.
Are there downsides to this approach? Yes there are. The one that comes up most frequently is a fear of the traffic volumes of Ayd Mill Road spilling over onto arterial streets like Lexington, Hamline, and Snelling. But here's the thing: Ayd Mill Road already dumps thousands of cars onto these roads. How many car trips does Ayd Mill Road attract to these arterials, and how many does it replace? Certainly at Snelling and Selby, it's clear to just about everyone that closing Ayd Mill Road would lead to less traffic, not more.
If the experience of every other city that has removed a highway can be applied here, some trips may spill over onto local streets, some will take the interstate highway instead, and some will simply not be made. To my knowledge there is no city that has closed a highway and promptly experienced fatal congestion.
Even rebutting this worst-case fear is probably giving it too much credit. If we accept its premise, can it even stand on its own? Money not spent on repaving Ayd Mill Road could be spent making safety improvements to these parallel arterials instead, obviating the reason for concern in the first place. Moreover, how much worse must these parallel roads get until their relief justifies the cost of maintaining Ayd Mill Road and the opportunity cost of not transforming it? The motto of Saint Paul is Omnia circum me damnum aversatio, which is Latin for "loss aversion rules everything around me" (NOTE: This is not really the city motto). Councilmembers living in fear of spillover traffic are not conducting an honest accounting of the advantages and disadvantages to this course of action. Rather, they are seeing the status quo, imagining everything getting worse, omitting any potential benefits, and proceeding accordingly. This is the Saint Paul way, but only so long as people continue to accept it.
Saint Paul Can Do Better
Until they break my heart yet again, I will be hoping against hope that this time is different, and that the Saint Paul City Council will give itself permission to take a risk and dream on behalf of Saint Paul. I hope they listen to Bill Lindeke, who has written more about this than any man should have to. I hope everyone who testifies on Wednesday does not accept a quarter loaf, and pushes for the obvious, long-term change that is needed. It is long past due that Saint Paul plainly accounts for the value that this land could have, and the value that it currently takes away. This is the idealistic argument and the hard-headed argument. The city's current path with this road is unsustainable, and every day it continues is another moment lost.