Politics and Freeways: Building the Twin Cities Interstate System. By Patricia Cavanaugh. Minneapolis: CURA and the Center for Transportation Studies (CTS), 2006. CURA Publication No. 06-2. 182 pp. Free.

CURA is pleased to announce the availability of Politics and Freeways, a new publication that reports on a study of the changing politics and participants in Twin Cities–area interstate decision making since the 1950s. The project was jointly sponsored by CURA and the Center for Transportation Studies (CTS), and was advised by an expert committee including former Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) commissioner and CTS director Richard Braun and former MnDOT officials Peter Fausch and Jim Newland. The report was written by Patricia Cavanaugh, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science and a research assistant at CURA.

“Transportation systems cannot be planned, developed, or implemented without contending with the politics in which they are always embedded,” Cavanaugh noted during a presentation of her findings at the CTS Seventeenth Annual Transportation Research Conference, held May 24–25 in St. Paul. Cavanaugh examined local cases representing different eras in the history of the interstate program. The era that launched the interstate in the 1950s was a period of great optimism and public support, she said, including backing by Minnesotans for gas tax increases. The protest era of the 1960s and 1970s, in contrast, saw the rise of citizen opposition and environmental advocacy. Citizen advisory committees and other groups emerged to fight freeway expansion, skeptical because of the visible effects of the interstate in other urban communities. The Minnesota Legislature also became more involved in major transportation project decisions during this time. The next—and current—era is known by many as the “era of falling behind.”

Cavanaugh focused on seven case studies spanning five decades, from which she identified three areas of political tension. First is the timeframe: Major projects take decades, but citizens and elected officials operate under a shorter outlook. Second, state departments of transportation look at a broader geographic area than do cities and neighborhoods. Although both views are appropriate, Cavanaugh said, the divergence leads to conflict. The third area—problem definition—is the one with the most potential to be resolved through political means. Citizens may define a problem in terms of social or moral aspects—Interstate 35W expansion in the late 1980s, for example—whereas MnDOT defines it in terms of reducing congestion. “When you’re trying to solve different problems,” Cavanaugh noted, “you’re not even in the same policy debate.” These types of differences were prevalent in all seven cases.

Cavanaugh also touched briefly on historical changes in leadership and funding. In 1981, the surface transportation bill had fewer than 10 earmarks, but recent bills have had several thousand.

Politics and Freeways was jointly published by CURA and CTS. The report is available online at www.cura.umn.edu/publications/Freeways.pdf. A limited number of hardcopies are also available from CURA.

This article is reprinted and adapted here with permission from the Center for Transportation Studies (CTS) at the University of Minnesota. A version of this article previously appeared in the July 2006 CTS Report, available online at www.cts.umn.edu/publications/newsletters/index.html.

Link to UMNnews feature story about this report.

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