By Jerome Johnson

A half-mile long lid over Interstate 94 has been proposed to reunite St. Paul’s freeway-bisected Rondo community by placing 20 acres of residential, recreational and commercial development astride the freeway.

But 20 acres seems more commemorative than restorative, given the hundreds of acres and thousands of lives actually impacted by the invasive 1962 freeway project.

And the $450 million price tag seems high for a maintenance-intensive contrivance that does little to improve mobility options for either motorists or the transit dependent of Rondo and nothing to improve community air quality conditions.

The freeway, in other words, will still be there.

But should it?

I-94 west of downtown St. Paul is also at the end of its service life and, based on comparable metro area projects, will require at least $100 million to simply rebuild in-place through the greater Rondo area. That means a whopping $550 million could be spent on just 20 lane miles of renewed freeway and 20 acres of community restoration.

There is a better, less costly and even more equitable way to do this.

For roughly the same $500 million, 70 acres can be returned to Rondo, including the full street grid, by rerouting most end-to-end I-94 auto traffic to the south over a widened I-35E to Jefferson Avenue. From there it would swing back north to the existing right-of-way near Snelling via a four- to six-lane “parkway connector” through the underutilized Ayd Mill Road (AMR) corridor, with trucks and residual overhead auto traffic channeled to the north via Highway 36.

This will diversify and minimize incremental emissions and congestion by adding only a mile to the current freeway trip between downtowns. It will be effective, despite a net reduction in lane miles, because telecommuting, staggered workhours and reverse commutes are cutting pre-COVID peak hour volumes by 25% or more. Combine that with most local east-west traffic diverting to a new, traffic-calmed, Rondo Parkway running the length of the restored footprint and you have just over half the I-94 traffic that ran under Victoria Street in 2019 moving to the proposed bypass.

The “AMR Bypass” will generate land sales, development and property tax proceeds from 50 additional acres of reclaimed I-94 right-of-way not available to the community from the 20-acre lid. It will also create an unimpaired, north-south route through the Ayd Mill corridor for Rondo/Hamline residents to better reach southern metro destinations via I-35E at a time when higher paying manufacturing and distribution jobs continue to shift away from the urban core. That is tangible equity for the 70% of Rondo/Hamline households that drive, many to outlying essential services jobs.

Such an AMR inter-freeway connection, built standalone, would cost $150 to $300 million. Fold that instead into the $500 million construction and site development estimate cited above and the taxpaying public could realize a residual project cost under $300 million to fully restore Rondo with minimal, if any, net mobility loss.

There will, of course, be the inevitable and privileged Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) resistance to replacing the truncated, inefficient Ayd Mill Parkway with a limited-access thoroughfare that, arguably, should have been the original I-94 routing. But this resistance, likely focusing on right-of-way and selective environmental issues, is misguided.

The right-of-way situation is challenging but manageable, thanks to wide existing corridors and minimal additional lane miles, although 10 to 15 acres could still be needed, potentially displacing a dozen businesses and up to 30 Union Park homes. But unlike those originally displaced by I-94, these property owner/occupants are positioned to be treated fairly and generously, to include relocation priority to nearby prime acreage made available by this project.

As for the environment, the smaller, quieter and cleaner electric car fleet plying the new AMR parkway connector through Mac Groveland and West End neighborhoods will be a future-world upgrade from the toxic gas guzzlers menacing Rondo since the ‘60s. As such, it will be a small, diminishing, price to pay for Snelling-Selby congestion relief, a speedy and efficient Rondo Corridor bike/hike trail that will eventually extend the popular Midtown Greenway to downtown St. Paul and, most notably, the full restoration of Rondo to the vibrant locale it once was.

It is, in essence, a bypass deal too good to pass by.

Jerome Johnson is a retired transportation economist living in the Twin Cities.