Quote Originally Posted by erikd View Post
This is another example of dogma and ideology trumping common sense.

I-375 is an outdated, obsolete, poorly-planned, terrible piece of infrastructure. It's sole purpose is to provide easy access to the tunnel, at the expense of accessibility to downtown, the riverfront, and the near east side. I-375 needs to be completely reconfigured to rectify these shortcomings, and that will likely happen at some point in the next 5-10 years.
Physician, heal thyself. Your statement is dogmatic, ideological and demonstrably incorrect on just about every count.

First, I-375 had nothing to do with the tunnel. It was designed to complete a symmetrical downtown loop. Had it been intended to serve the tunnel, it would not require a half-mile U-turn to reach the tunnel. Next, the access to downtown is a canard, since it exits every quarter mile into downtown [[Madison, Lafayette, Larned, Jefferson [[via Congress) and Jefferson itself), Third, there was no east-side destination at the time it was built - or even now [[you would have cut over at I-94 if anything). But the statement that I-375 cuts off access to the east side is false because it dumps smoothly into eastbound Jefferson. It's also false because you can go east on Lafayette or Larned from I-375 - and there are no other through streets anyway.

If "cutting off access" to the east side means reducing pedestrian access from BCBS, a casino, a jail, and a sports complex into a purely residential neighborhood that consumers of the above use as a parking lot/dumping ground [[you should see what it's like on game days), then it should make it easier for you to understand why the people of Lafayette Park are very opposed to surfacing the road. That, and the constant cut-throughs that are going to get worse when commuters frustrated with traffic aren't locked into the I-375 roadbed.

No one disagrees that you wouldn't built I-375 today. But the ideologue chorus in the I-375 debate makes a logical leap when it argues that just because something doesn't mesh with current thinking, it should be ripped out at tremendous expense and inconvenience to every actual stakeholder. There is no significant redevelopable land in any MDOT proposal, there is no massive contingent of Lafayette or Larned bikers that is actually being bottlenecked, and there is no natural affinity between the land on either side of the road, especially as fully developed over 40+ years. I would argue that to be compelling on surfacing I-375, you need to make a very strong economic case. Had this been the planning stages way back when, much less so.

HB