Lack of snow has state roads looking quite trashy

The medians on either side of Interstate 94 in downtown Minneapolis have never been the most tidy, but this year drivers are having a hard time grasping the amount of litter that has collected on the side of the road.

A handful of Drive readers saw hundreds of large pieces of white paper tangled in the brush along the eastbound lanes between Cedar Avenue and Huron Boulevard, and in emails said it looked unsightly.

“We know,” said Anne Meyer, a spokeswoman for the Minnesota Department of Transportation. “We see it, too.”

The agency dispatched a team of in-house workers to clean up the area near Huron Boulevard on Tuesday, and in a few hours they picked up enough rubbish to fill 95 trash bags, Meyer said.

To further the I-94 clean-up effort, MnDOT hired a contractor to work over the weekend, de-trashing the medians between the two downtowns, she added.

MnDOT normally relies on its vast network of Adopt-A-Highway volunteers to pick up litter along state roads. In 2022, groups from schools, churches, community organizations, businesses and even families across the state picked up enough pop bottles, fast-food wrappers and other discarded items to fill 38,500 bags of trash. In April, MnDOT will put out the call for new groups to join the program for the 2024 and 2025 seasons. The agency has nearly 900 segments of highways available for groups to adopt and clean twice a year.

But in the urban core, it’s just too dangerous to send out volunteers to pick up trash, Meyer said. Interstates such as 94 and 35W have narrow shoulders, medians with steep inclines and heavy traffic volumes navigating multiple lanes at high speeds.

“We don’t have those as an adoptable area,” Meyer said

Next to unfilled potholes, Meyer said concerns about trash rank near the top of the list of complaints the agency gets from motorists. Snowpack normally hides most of the crud that accumulates for six months, but not this year. That has made all the roadside debris stand out even more.

Cleaning up the ditches is “on the list,” Meyer said, but there are other pressing needs that attention first. And like anything outdoors, it’s weather-dependent.

“We could still see winter,” Meyer said. “We will deal with it.”

Littering in Minnesota is a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $1,000, or 90 days in jail, or both.

It’s not clear how all that paper landed along I-94, but Meyer said windy conditions bring more trash. Another leading cause is motorists traveling with unsecured loads.

However it got there, “we are seeing a lot more trash,” she said.

As luck would have it, Metro Transit and the Minnesota Valley Transit Authority are offering free rides on buses and trains for St. Patrick’s Day, a day early. The agencies will not collect fares from 6 p.m. until the end of service Saturday, the day of the St. Paul St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

Metro Transit will extend hours that light-rail trains will run, with Blue and Green Line departures from Target Field Station at 12:30 a.m.

“We need to get people home if they come on transit,” said spokesman Drew Kerr.