You can't outbuild the traffic.
I have just returned from a trip on which I drove to Salt Lake City, flew to Los Angeles, drove to San Diego, flew back to SLC, and drove home to Saint Paul. I have often driven in Chicago and Washington, D.C. and once spent two hours going five miles on the Washington beltway. In Utah it took me an hour to go ten miles from Draper to Murray on a freeway with five lanes going my way (but reduced to two for road construction). I-270, from Washington, D.C. to Frederick, MD has, I believe, eleven lanes and is still jammed with slow traffic every morning and afternoon.
No matter how much you widen roads or build new ones, you will not reduce traffic either on the freeways or on residential streets. You only increase urban sprawl and destroy city neighborhoods, as the infamous Robert Moses demonstrated in New York when he built the freeway through the Bronx.
Not only do you destroy the neighborhoods through which you build new roads, you destroy the central cities as well, moving business out of the core and onto freeway malls, as the loss of retail stores in St. Paul and Minneapolis amply shows.
This is why it was not only illegal but foolish for Mayor Kelly to link Ayd Mill Road to 35E and why his plan to create a link to I-94 on the North end of Ayd Mill Road is even more foolish. As the next step in this scheme Randy Kelly started illegal construction contracts on August 15 to pave and push the four lane Ayd Mill Road Freeway alternative. This breaks MN Environmental Statutes and Rules and is fundamentally misguided. The pressure to create the Ayd Mill linkup to I-35E on the South and I-94 on the North comes from urban sprawl in Dakota County, which is itself a result of the building of I-35E.
The question is, why does the St. Paul mayor want to do accommodate the suburbanites at the expense of his own constituency? And why does the Pioneer Press support the mayor in this expensive, counterproductive scheme? Two possibilities come to mind. Either he and you are ignorant of the effects of road building or you are in somebody's pocket. The same possible answers spring to mind with regard to the policies of Governor Pawlenty, who pretends to hold the line on new taxes but borrows to build more roads. He, of course, is a suburbanite, without any responsibility or loyalty to the city of St. Paul.
Public officials should not only encourage public transportation, they should resist road building. Don't just do something when faced with demands from suburbia to build more roads, stand there. And city newspapers should become more informed about the effects on cities of exclusive reliance on the automobile. More road building is not the answer.
Ellis Dye
Saint Paul, MN 55105