Question 3: To what extent do you intend to support investment in maintaining Minnesota’s highway system and expanding its mass transit system given the age of the state’s highway system, population and business growth, and the mass transit needs of an aging and dispersed population?

FREEMAN Response to Question 3

Our State transportation system is critical to growing our economy throughout the State. Part of our problem is that we are spending too much money on infrastructure supporting urban sprawl and not enough maintaining and improving what we have. The Twin Cities is the third most sprawling region in the country and has the third highest number of freeway lane miles per capita. This is no small coincidence. Moreover, in one of the only regions of the country with a truly region-wide scope for transit funding, we have one of the worst funded, least adequate transit systems in the nation.

During the days of developer domination of the Met Council, the wealthiest regional communities, which receive the lion’s share of freeway and sewer dollars from the region-billions of dollars, were allowed to opt out of the regional transit system. Thus, while these communities received eight out of ten freeway dollars, and seven out of ten sewer dollars, they would not pay for transit. The creation of the opt-out communities not only prevented the possibility of getting workers to jobs in the job-rich, worker-poor communities, but it impoverished the transit system. It also effectively made automobile ownership a requirement for workers seeking to participate in the Twin Cities economy. That is wrong.

To secure the transit base, the opt-out communities must return to the system. We must also use more federal funds to build a transit system, rather than simply to continue to build highways that reach their twenty-year congestion capacities within a year of their construction.