Council resolution makes Lake Street a priority

BY DENNIS GEISINGER

With last month’ s passage of a resolution supporting the I35W/Lake St. Access Project, the Minneapolis City Council gave priority to the development of plans to provide an inside lane multi-modal bus rapid transit (BRT) station at Lake Street, a connection to the Midtown Greenway, and ramp access to Lake Street as part of a larger I- 35W access improvement and Lake Street reconstruction.

Council member Elizabeth Glidden (DFL-Ward 8) and Betsy Hodges (DFL-Ward 13) added an amendment to the resolution to study whether or not to include a northbound exit ramp from 35W to 28th Street,with a report on its feasibility to be submitted no later than March. According to the text of the full resolution, “the decision to build 35W without complete access at Lake Street was a disservice to the City of Minneapolis and the neighborhoods and businesses on Lake Street, and the City strongly supports complete access ... as soon as possible.” “Improving access at Lake Street would help correct the historical inequity of the 1960s I-35W construction, which bypassed Lake Street and fostered the economic decline of area neighborhoods and businesses,” said Glidden in her December newsletter.

The resolution, in effect, provides a kind of disconnect between the Lake Street access project and a much larger, full access project which is expected to cost between $430 and $480 million and not scheduled to begin until sometime between 2024 and 2030. According to Glidden, once the Lake Street access project became part of an entire access plan, it was lumped in with such things as “expanding the freeway to add a dedicated lane for transit, removing the 35th/36th Street ramps, adding ramps at 38th Street, reconfiguration of the 5th Avene ramp to northbound I-35W, and the necessary mitigation measures for neighborhood streets.”

“With our state transportation funding crisis,” said Glidden, “this means that the access project is going nowhere fast.”

Among the changes that have occurred since the concept of the existing access project was developed, a federal grant awarded to MNDot last Sept. for BRT on 35W was found to exclude funding for the Lake Street transit station. Prioritizing Lake Street access will help in finding the money to pay for it.

Also,MnDOT now claims that I- 35W does not need to be expanded to accommodate a dedicated lane for transit (one of the full access project assumptions). A transit lane can be added by restriping the existing freeway.
And even though the Midtown Greenway is now widely considered for rail transit or streetcars connecting the Hiawatha and Southwest LRT lines, the access project does not provide for a future connection to the Midtown Greenway.

Lastly, the City has recognized that global warming requires transportation models focus on increasing transit options and reducing congestion.

I-35W/Lake St. access plans began in 1998 when the Phillips Partnership, a group of political and corporate leaders working to improve the Phillips neighborhood, funded a study to examine the feasibility of constructing access ramps between the freeway and the neighborhoods. In May of 1998, the Hennepin County Board, who has been designated as the project’ s prime mover, unanimously passed a resolution asking Congress to fund the project and the City Council passed a similar resolution only days later. The Met Council and Metro Transit supported the project since they wanted the new Lake Street transit station.

Back then, construction of the ramps was expected to begin in 2001 and be completed at a cost of between $12 and $20 million. By the end of 2005, the project’ s price tag had swollen to $150 million, and today, according to Glidden, the full access project comes in at around $100 million per freeway mile.