Opinion: Minnesota ‘Buttonhook’ Project a ‘Highway Engineer’s Fever Dream’

In a post on Strong Towns, Charles Marohn questions the purpose of a $58 million project planned by the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT), which will elevate a highway over a major interchange in Baxter and includes six new roundabouts designed to drive traffic to the surrounding strip malls and big box stores.

According to Marohn, “Even the visual renderings of this project are absurd. To the untrained eye, it looks like a highway engineer’s fever dream. To anyone familiar with how our transportation system works, it looks familiar in all the worst ways.”

While the project is ostensibly designed to reduce congestion, Marohn argues that it in fact prioritizes preserving access to the businesses, resulting in  a compromise that “doesn’t fix that conflict; it institutionalizes it, pouring asphalt over a bad idea so we don’t have to confront the reality, at least not yet.”

For Marohn, the project, dubbed the ‘buttonhook,’ represents “physical manifestation of a larger problem: our refusal to let go of the stroad.” Marohn suggests that MnDOT should opt instead for its first proposed alternative for the interchange, a single-point design that would cost less and address traffic issues, and remove left crossover intersections that often lead to crashes and backups.

According to Marohn, “This project isn’t a one-time failure. It’s the system working exactly as designed: subsidize the fragile, reward inertia, and call it progress.”