Brainerd plan lends hope for rest of state

SMALL-TOWN MINNESOTA

These cities also suffer from a traffic emphasis

The Oct. 8 article "Looking to the past to re-engineer U.S. towns," about engineer Charles Marohn, could mark a watershed in our thinking about land, especially urban and small-town land.

For almost three decades, I have been visiting my parents-in-law in Marohn's hometown of Brainerd. I have tried to spend time downtown, but there just isn't enough "there" there. Hopefully, Marohn can accelerate Brainerd's rebirth.

Environmentalists have long recognized the fallacies of sprawl, but every effort for change has come up against an infrastructure system that institutionalizes traffic for its own sake — not safety, livability or even convenience. Although there are traffic engineers who try to do the right thing, the profession as a whole, as the article states, is "intellectually bankrupt."

The causes are not speculative. In Minnesota and most other states, the state Constitution or state statutes still prohibit fuel taxes from being used for anything but the maintenance and expansion of roads at a time when more and more people drive less or would like to.

U.S. civil-engineering graduates thus have few alternatives to our current system for transportation work. In the private sector, bankers won't lend for complex, multiuse, mixed-use development without excruciating, and discriminatory, delays and guarantees that conventional sprawl development seldom experiences.

Municipal building codes, for the most part, still mandate parking site by site, meaning every new project must have off-street parking as if it were the only destination, making sharing next to impossible. Tax assessments favor empty parking lots in the middle of downtowns, giving family heirs a check in perpetuity, while the Legislature, in its wisdom, recently outlawed the use of eminent domain for redevelopment, leaving hundreds of downtowns cratered with alien asphalt.

We have made some progress recently. The Twin Cities is beginning to get the mass transit system it should have had 50 years ago. But as the article makes clear, many of Minnesota's small towns, which don't have the political pressure of population density, suffer from almost a century of traffic supremacy, where almost every decision has meant tearing out a building for another parking lot or road expansion.

The ecosystem cannot survive mass conversion to pavement and tires, nor can we humans.

Charles Marohn, the subject of your article, is the kind of reformed traffic engineer we need to help us back from the brink.