Every time my family from outside of Minnesota visits the Twin Cities, we agree on the same thing: our highways are terrible.

All the interchanges are massive monstrosities that confuse drivers and destroy neighborhoods. Most infrastructure is old and outdated. Every single on-ramp feels like it leads directly onto an off-ramp within ten feet, forcing drivers to make loops until they finally squeeze onto the freeway.

Problems with highway design are rampant across the U.S. and by no means unique to the Twin Cities. However, the issues are still pressing, and some of the design flaws in Minnesota are particularly unusual.

Investments in highway infrastructure in the coming decades should focus on improving the efficiency and safety of road design and reducing the detrimental effects on surrounding neighborhoods. 

Marcus Shiell, a Minneapolis resident, said the positions of many exit ramps are confusing.

“There’s a little inconsistency,” Shiell said. “Sometimes, to get on a westbound, you get in the left lane. Other times, there’s a cloverleaf. It’s sometimes difficult to assume which way to get on the interstate.”

For Holly Lewis, another Minneapolis resident, on-ramps built too close to off-ramps make driving difficult.

“It’s tricky because the exits are too close to the entrances right behind it,” Lewis said. “But I don’t know what they can do about that.”

Kyle Shelton, director of the Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Minnesota, said most of these annoying designs are caused by outdated ideas about highway design from past decades.

According to a study about different ramps and traffic flow, on-ramps and off-ramps being close together leads to congestion. Shelton said it creates conflict points that make driving harder.

The Twin Cities also have a large number of cloverleaf interchanges — common design elements in the 1960s and 1970s. Cloverleaf interchanges, take up large amounts of space and often cause slow congestion.

Our freeways are not only unpleasant for drivers but local community members, too. Shelton said freeways are notorious for harming the environment of nearby communities by their mere existence.

“There are a range of environmental challenges for folks who live alongside the roadways,” Shelton said. “There’s well-documented evidence of environmental risks, everything from air quality to long-term health impacts.”

Shelton said society has collectively decided these effects are a necessary trade-off considering the value of transportation infrastructure.

However, issues arise when certain communities disproportionately receive these negative effects.

The construction of Interstate 35W infamously destroyed Black communities and cultural centers in Minneapolis, uprooting countless people and homes. The historic Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul, home to primarily people of color, was razed by the construction of Interstate 94. The negative impacts are still felt today. 

Historic Victorian buildings were demolished in downtown St. Paul to make way for Interstate 35E and I-94. Today, the massive expressways that cut through St. Paul still hinder community growth, separating the Capitol and other buildings from downtown.

Downtown Minneapolis is not much better, as gigantic interchanges between Interstate 394, I-94, I-35W and Highway 55 surround the skyline. According to Shelton, this infrastructure was built to accommodate thousands of people moving to the suburbs, which created a hub-and-spoke highway system where all roads connect to downtown.

“The logic in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, which obviously underpins all our existing systems, was, ‘Let’s build these hub-and-spoke models of the central business district, where we’re going to always draw people to,’” Shelton said.

Hub-and-spoke highway systems are efficient, but the attitudes toward many downtowns, including Minneapolis, have shifted since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Shelton. More suburban residents work from home or in suburban offices and fewer drive downtown for work.

This means the massive highways that physically separate neighborhoods should be restructured to account for new demands. According to Shelton, some infrastructure bills are working to accomplish this, but the process will take years, so continuous support is needed.

“Federal programs under the relatively new infrastructure bill, particularly the Reconnecting Communities Program, are geared towards thinking about what types of cities we want to see and what types of transportation systems could serve them,” Shelton said. “And how we address the wrongs of consistent development of highways through communities of color and low-income areas in particular.”

Building a better highway system will be a long process of reworking rather than expanding our existing infrastructure.

“Expanding highways doesn’t work,” Shelton said. “Decades of research shows if you expand highways, you’re going to just give more people the option to drive on a highway, and your highway will be congested again in the near future.”

Merging our highway infrastructure with other forms of transportation is essential to create a system that serves everyone, according to Shelton. Highways and cars will always be dominant in the U.S., but creating alternatives can lessen the negative effects of expressways on communities. 

“It’s not to say we have to abandon everything about auto-centric design, but we have to enable all people to have the mobility and access to transportation that everyone needs to thrive,” Shelton said. “We have to do it in a multimodal way.”

The opportunity for change is now. Several highway redesign projects are currently being planned in the Twin Cities, including redesign proposals for I-94. This would improve neighborhoods and multimodal transit options, but we must find a balanced project that does not ruin traffic with construction. 

On the other hand, plans to expand Highway 252 could move us in the opposite direction by destroying more communities.

The process of creating an ideal transportation system will take decades of consistent work, so the most important step is acknowledging and facing the issues. If we ignore the necessary reforms, the problems will only get worse.