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Elkins Letter To City Manager, staff, Council

Bloomington Councilmember has asked that we post the following letter on the Better Bloomington web site:

November 17, 2002

Mark Bernhardson
City Manager
City of Bloomington
2215 W Old Shakopee Rd
Bloomington, MN 55431

Dear Mark,

Thank you for facilitating Thursday's meeting with MNDOT and City engineers to allow me to express the concerns that I and my neighbors have concerning the design of the new East Bush Lake Road interchange and related "improvements".

At this point, I am resigned to the fact that it is too late to make substantive changes to the design. To do so would delay the scheduled January letting of the construction contracts and would expose the City to up to $1.5 million in redesign costs that the City cannot afford (and would not be willing to pay, even if it could). I nonetheless continue to feel that I and my constituents will be very badly served by the execution of this design and I feel compelled to document my concerns for the record (and then I'll sit down and shut up - on this immediate issue, anyway).

My overarching concern is my belief that the City and MNDOT will be spending an enormous amount of money on improvements to I494 and its interchanges in northwestern Bloomington over the next several years without materially improving access between the Normandale Lake Office Center and I494. With about 7,000 permanent employees, the Normandale Lake "traffic analysis zone" (TAZ) is already the second largest employment concentration in the south metro area, after the Mall of America.

"Ultimately, this notion that the need to serve the interests of the motoring public trumps the needs of surrounding neighborhoods is at the heart of the matter. "

Once the already approved "Duke Weeks" office complex adds another million square feet of office space and 4,000 new employees to the complex it will equal the Mall's employment level of 11,000 permanent jobs. I do not see anything in the current designs that will provide new or meaningfully improved access to those jobs to alleviate the concerns that northwestern Bloomington residents feel about the volume and speed of overflow cut-through traffic in our neighborhoods.

In response to this contention, MNDOT and City engineers point to the new eastbound off-ramp from I494 to East Bush Lake Road. In order to use this new option, Normandale Lake employees will be required to turn left from the end of the off-ramp onto southbound East Bush Lake Rd, and then make another immediate left onto the new alignment of eastbound Green Valley Drive. During the discussion of this new option, MNDOT engineer Chris Roy voiced the opinion that this would be attractive option because the City would be able to time the lights so that traffic would be able to flow freely along this routing. Chris was corrected by City Public Works Director Charlie Honchell, who pointed out that there is a large volume of neighborhood-originating traffic that flows northbound down East Bush Lake Road to the eastbound I494 on-ramp during the morning rush hour. The City has commissioned SRF Consulting to conduct a study of traffic flows in the Lake Normandale area, and I'm sure that the study results that we will receive in December will bear this out. At present, the light at the East Bush Lake Road/84th/Chalet Road intersection, which I traverse every work day, is "green" for this movement the vast majority of the time during the morning rush hour. Instead of providing a smooth ingress to the office complex, the new configuration will set up a severe contention between these conflicting traffic flows during the morning rush hour. As a result, I predict that most Normandale Lake employees from the western suburbs will continue to travel I494 eastbound to Normandale Boulevard southbound to 84th street eastbound in order to get to their offices without having to wait for stoplights. The primary use of the new eastbound off-ramp will be by employees who work in the Edina industrial park, for whom the ramp will represent a new and improved commute option.

"There are a number of very real reasons why residents of neighborhoods affected by traffic emanating from the Normandale Lake office complex feel especially afflicted."

I appreciate the offer to approach the Federal Highway Administration one more time in another attempt to secure their approval for the incorporation of a much-needed westbound on-ramp to I494 across the railroad tracks at East Bush Lake Rd. Without this element, there will be no reason to expect an increase in westbound use of Green Valley drive on its new alignment, since it will not provide access to any new routing options that do not already exist today.

If anything, the new Green Valley Drive will facilitate the continuing use of East Bush Lake Road, Highwood Drive, 86th Street and West Bush Lake Road as overflow commuter routings. As the traffic survey will reveal, use of the current Green Valley Drive is minimal. I predict that use of the new Green Valley Drive will also be minimal. On its proposed alignment, a much less intrusive two lane cross section would be more than adequate to satisfy any reasonably projected traffic level. Instead, the City and MNDOT are insisting on a $3 million four lane arterial design (with left turn lanes) that will be capable of serving over 20,000 non-existent trips per day. If money is as big a issue as has been suggested, the City would be better served by building a new access road to the Jostens building overlooking the marsh and saving its considerable share of the cost of the new Green Valley Drive bridge to East Bush Lake Road.

I have also been distressed to learn that local residents did, in fact, express their concerns about the design of the new Green Valley Drive at last year's I494 Open House, and were told by MNDOT officials that their concerns and suggestions had merit - only to find that none of their suggestions or comments are reflected in the final design. As the design stands, it incorporates no landscaping or noise buffering to shield the adjacent neighborhood.

As I expressed in our meeting, my biggest objection to the proposed design is that it permanently precludes an extension of the Bloomington "Ring Road" from East Bush Lake Road to West Bush Lake Road along the I494 frontage to provide I494 overflow relief. While I can accept that the Administration and the rest of the City Council may feel that building this extension should not be a near term priority, I strongly believe that the City will one day wish that it had left this option open for the future. Between Best Buy and Duke Weeks, another 11,000 jobs will be added to the "494 Strip" over the next few years, an amount equal to the total permanent employment at the Mall of America. The new third lane that is being added to I494 between Highway 100 and Highway 212 in Eden Prairie will be full from the day that it opens. When the I494/169 interchange is finally rebuilt, access from Highway 169 to Highwood Drive will be severed and the Highwood Drive traffic problem will, in some sense, be "solved". Where do we expect the overflow to go once Highwood Drive is no longer a routing option?

I realize that this extension could never be built without obtaining Federal funding that cannot be obtained before 2007, at the earliest. I also know that no more than $5.5 million can be obtained for any single project through this funding source and that it is, therefore, essential that we enable the most cost-effective routing for this extension. Bloomington Public Works estimates that a routing extending from the proposed Green Valley Drive end-point along Forest Glen Road (at the base of the bluffs) to West Bush Lake Road would cost from $15 to $20 million, which effectively means that it can never be funded.

"We seem to have adopted an attitude that traffic problems will always be with us, so we might as well accept traffic complaints as 'background noise' "

In rejecting a proposed design for the East Bush Lake Road - I 494 interchange that would preserve the option of extending the Ring Road along the I494 frontage, MNDOT engineers cite the difficulty of providing an optimal configuration for the eastbound on-ramp from East Bush Lake Road to I494, ultimately concluding that the originally
proposed design "best suits the needs of the motoring public".

Ultimately, this notion that the need to serve the interests of the motoring public trumps the needs of surrounding neighborhoods is at the heart of the matter. (Though, in this case, even the needs of the motoring public are poorly served.)

In this case, the sum of a set of individual design decisions, each of which represents an "optimal" design for the individual element, adds up to an overall design that does not sufficiently address the need to improve access between I494 and the Normandale Lake office to absorb projected increases in employment that will result from new office development that has already been approved by the City.

Over the course of the discussion of this issue, an ugly undercurrent of thought has emerged: the idea that traffic is as bad, or worse, in other Bloomington neighborhoods, and that, therefore, I and my neighbors are due no "special" consideration with respect to relief from cut-through traffic problems. In support of this proposition, average daily trip volume (ADT) figures from other Bloomington collector streets are cited. I'll put aside for a moment the fact that the street segment at the top of the list of examples, 82nd street from Lyndale to Penn, will be relieved when the Ring Road bridge across I35W is built next year. There are a number of very real reasons why residents of neighborhoods affected by traffic emanating from the Normandale Lake office complex feel especially afflicted.

Unlike other commercial development concentrations in Bloomington, the Normandale Lake Office Center has been developed as a single-use center with an employment base made up almost entirely of office workers. As a result (and as the traffic survey will reveal), the area is awash in commuter traffic during the morning and evening rush hours and quiet at other times. These are the same hours when neighborhood residents are also active; commuting to their own jobs and seeing their children off to neighborhood school bus stops that lie along busy streets such as 84th Street and Highwood Drive. We're like the guy with his head in the oven and his feet in the freezer, whose temperature is OK, on average. In other neighborhoods with similar average traffic volumes, there is a better mix of uses and a more even spread of traffic throughout the day (though traffic is obviously worse in all neighborhoods at rush hour - just not as much worse).

"There is a pervasive resentment over the fact that the City is building its tax base on our backs..."

"The fact of the matter is that our neighborhood traffic problems are exacerbated by the development forms that the City has encouraged at Normandale Lake, and the City therefore does bear an obligation to help address the problems that these development patterns have caused."

Had the City followed the recommendations of its Land Use and Transportation Study (LUTS) task force, which recommended the development of Normandale Lake as a mixed-use development center, our neighborhood traffic patterns would have approximated those of other commercial areas of the City. I was a member of the Traffic and Transportation Advisory Commission when the City undermined the intent of the LUTS study by changing the zoning of the land at the northwest corner of 84th and Normandale from hotel to office. I remember thinking to myself: "One big building is the same as another - why not?" I now understand the reason "why not": Another office building exacerbates the existing morning and evening traffic peaks, while a hotel generates traffic that is spread more evenly across the day.

In the Highwood neighborhood, this effect is further exacerbated by the design of the local street network. In most Bloomington neighborhoods, we have well-connected grid street networks that provide residents with multiple neighborhood access points. In contrast, because of area topology and the street design thinking of its day, all streets in the Highwood neighborhood empty out onto Highwood Drive, itself. As a result, neighborhood residents have no choice but to contend with high volumes of overflow commute traffic at the very hour that they must themselves access Highwood to get to their own jobs, or walk their children across Highwood to get to its school bus stops.

In the 84th Street neighborhoods, we have many homes that front directly onto 84th street who have difficulty getting out of their driveways during the morning peak. We have neighborhood school children who have difficulty safely crossing 84th street to get to Poplar Bridge School.

In addition, both Highwood and 84th have high "design speeds" that encourage speeding (a characteristic that they share with other collector streets in Bloomington).

We obviously have many other streets with similar problems, and the concerns of those neighborhoods ought to be a priority, as well. Bloomington residents consistently rate neighborhood traffic concerns at the top of their list of issues that the City needs to be addressed, nowhere more so than in these neighborhoods. I must have knocked on close to 1,000 doors during my campaign last year, and at 95% of those doors, the answer to the question: "How do you feel about living in Bloomington and what issues do you think the City Council ought to address?" was: "The City needs to do something about all the traffic speeding down our neighborhood streets".

"I know of no other business that could survive by acknowledging marketing research that reveals that its customers are profoundly dissatisfied by one aspect of its product design - and then ignores that research the way we have."

Frequently, this answer was supplemented with "You didn't vote for that Duke Weeks development, did you?" (I didn't.) Neighborhood residents connect their neighborhood traffic problems with the intensity of the development at Normandale Lake. Surprisingly, many of them understand the role that dense commercial development has in building the City's tax base and holding down their property taxes, but they resent the fact that the City has done little to address the resulting traffic impacts on surrounding neighborhoods. There is a pervasive resentment over the fact that the City is building its tax base on our backs and this resentment is strongly reflected in voting patterns in these neighborhoods. The fact of the matter is that our neighborhood traffic problems are exacerbated by the development forms that the City has encouraged at Normandale Lake, and the City therefore does bear an obligation to help address the problems that these development patterns have caused.

I know of no other business that could survive by acknowledging marketing research that reveals that its customers are profoundly dissatisfied by one aspect of its product
design - and then ignores that research the way we have. We seem to have adopted an attitude that traffic problems will always be with us, so we might as well accept traffic complaints as "background noise" and move on to other issues that we think we can do more about. I'm not prepared to accept this thinking. There are many things
that we can do to address these problems and I'm going to keep bringing ideas forward as I find them.

Sincerely,

Steve Elkins
Bloomington City Council, District III

cc. Tom O'Keefe and Chris Roy, MNDOT
Charlie Honchell and Jim Gates, Bloomington Public Works
Bloomington City Council
District III Residents

^New!Traffic Calming Pictures from St. Paul.
Contrasted with NW Bloomington neighborhood street examples.

Bloomington Councilmember Steve Elkins has researched and developed two documents related to NW Bloomington traffic issues. Here are links to those documents:

NW Bloomington Traffic Plan
As most of us are well aware, neighborhood traffic volumes and speed are the single biggest complaint of Bloomington voters, by a wide margin. Nowhere are these complaints more deeply felt than in the neighborhoods adjacent to highway 169 and 494 in northwestern Bloomington.....

Bloomington Residential Street Policy
Over the course of my city council campaign last year it quickly became apparent to me that District III residents are generally satisfied with their neighborhood quality of life, with one important exception. Deep Discontent with neighborhood traffic volume and speed is pervasive.....

Northwest Bloomington Traffic Discussion Group
A Yahoo Groups site organized and moderated by Steve Elkins.
Click here to subscribe via email.

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Take our Web Poll about the Walser expansion proposal.

The above documents are in PDF format. If you are unable to view these documents, you may need an updated version of the FREE Adobe Acrobat Reader.