ROCHESTER, Minn. – The city of Rochester wants to know what it would cost to build a deck over a portion of Hwy. 52 as it searches for ways to ease the city's parking woes.
If the structure held ramps like those behind Target Center in Minneapolis, it could serve some of the tens of thousands of new employees and new residents expected as the city and the Mayo Clinic expand.
The deck idea was one of several raised Thursday morning as Rochester's director of public works, Richard Freese, delivered a transit report two years in the making to the Destination Medical Center Corporation board of directors, the group overseeing a 20-year plan to grow the city as the Mayo Clinic expands.
Transit and parking have emerged as key issues in the city's expansion plans, and the much-anticipated report will help steer future conversations as Rochester grapples with how to get everyone to and from work without snarling city streets with traffic.
Some of the main ideas in the report included shifting Mayo workers and other downtown employees from surface lot parking to park-and-ride lots at the city's edges, providing better transit, upgrading and redesigning streets and encouraging people to bike and walk to work.
The key to making changes will be breaking people's expectations that they can drive themselves everywhere without creating traffic jams, said Freese. There's just not enough room to build the parking and streets necessary for single-occupancy cars.
"I don't think there's ever been one city that has built its way out of congestion," he said.
That said, the city still expects some 8,000 new parking spaces to materialize by 2040 with all of the construction activity downtown. Another 8,700 spaces could be built at large intermodal parking hubs at the city's outskirts. The hubs might feature needed services and retail to make people's commutes more convenient, said Freese.