No one seems to disagree that Hwy. 252 running through Brooklyn Park and Brooklyn Center is a dangerous road, rife with crashes and plagued with congestion.
There is little agreement on what the Minnesota Department of Transportation should do about it, if anything.
Last week, members of a safety task force gave their opinions at a presentation to the Brooklyn Center City Council. One member called MnDOT’s plan to convert the four-lane highway into a freeway with underpasses or overpasses at key intersections flawed and urged council members to withhold municipal consent.
“We need a thoughtfully designed Hwy. 252 to benefit our citizens and citizens who are traveling along 252,” said Lisa McNaughton, a Brooklyn Center resident and member of the task force commissioned by the city. “We must protect our community.”
MnDOT has looked at several layouts for Hwy. 252 in the past decade, and a few years ago tossed out results of previous studies and started over. A new study has produced options that include transforming the highway into a freeway with four or six lanes (two or three in each direction) and possibly incorporating an EZ Pass lane and using shoulders for transit buses.
Those options would bring “a cavalcade of harms” to Brooklyn Center, said task force member Stephen Cooper. The plan, he said, would increase traffic, noise and pollution. It also would remove homes and businesses and reduce the tax base for one of the most economically challenged cities in the metro without addressing the biggest concern of safety.
Cooper worries a freeway would not slow traffic on a thoroughfare that already is serving 50,000 to 60,000 motorists a day. Nor would a freeway eliminate crashes or solve safety issues, particularly at 66th Avenue where any interchange would be fewer than 1,000 feet from the already busy interchange at Interstate 694 and traffic is weaving across lanes.
“We can’t risk locking in a dangerous design for generations to come,” said task force member Bill Newman.