RETHINKING THE WATERFRONT EXPRESSWAY.

I characterized Dubuque's riverwalk, which is separated from the business district by such an expressway and a parking crater as an inorganic amenity.  To the north, Duluth also ran an expressway between its business district and its Lake Superior waterfront.  Perhaps that make sense when the waterfront was, well, a working waterfront, with grain elevators, coal docks, and iron boats.  More recently, though, the bulk traffic went away, and Lake Superior serves as a yacht basin for the growing upper middle class.

That's got something called the Duluth Waterfront Collective thinking.  Get past the virtue signalling and consider the substance of their argument.

When I-35 was built, nobody saw the warehouses and scrapyards of Canal Park becoming the tourist destination they are today. As such - when the interstate replaced the rail yards between downtown and the neighborhood, few were concerned that a barrier would continue to exist between the two. Things have changed, and at present Canal Park and the associated waterfront are some of the most visited places in our city. Unfortunately, there are few ways of traveling between downtown and Canal Park, regardless of whether you're in a car or on foot. Some of the city's worst traffic backups occur when people are forced into these bottlenecks. Issues with pedestrians are two-fold, in that these unsafe crossings make it difficult for residents to access the lake and tourists are discouraged from visiting downtown businesses.

Even equity minded environmentalists can grasp the inefficiency of relying on public money.

A recent report by the Metropolitan Interstate Council indicates I-35's downtown stretch handles less than 50% of its intended capacity. Meanwhile, recent highway infrastructure projects in Duluth have gone significantly over budget while our pothole-lined streets struggle to be maintained. Eventually, our freeway will find itself at the end of its useful life, at which point scaling back this piece of infrastructure could create a win-win scenario, creating a solution that is less expensive to maintain (i.e. you pay fewer taxes) while creating more space for development (which adds more to city tax revenues).

That's the logic that led to Milwaukee's Deer District, which takes space that was once given to a spur expressway that was intended to ... separate the business district from the lakefront, and turns it into a space for basketball fans to be basketball fans.  The space will be available for partisans to gather during the Republican convention that, unless Our Political Masters dream up another national emergency, will occur in Milwaukee July of next year. 

The Duluth proposal suggests opening more arterial streets into Canal Park would ease local circulation and parking there.  It can be challenging, particularly on the three pleasant summer weekends you get at those latitudes.

Nowhere, though, do I see any discussion of a Passenger Rail station.  Once upon a time, the Amtrak service from the Cities terminated at the Hill Lines station that is now home to a railroad museum and preservation railroad.