Transportation projects facilitate access to destinations by also going through destinations. Depending on a project’s scale, the area’s residents, businesses, and communities will experience different disruptions. These might be relatively minor short-term inconveniences such as a loss of parking, access, and utilities—or long-term permanent damage such as increased pollution, fractured community fabric and history, displacement, and loss of household and community wealth. The case of I-94’s routing through the heart of the predominantly Black Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul is a frequently cited example of grievous harms inflicted on a community.
At the 2025 CTS Transportation Research Conference, a session on equitable planning featured examples of how agencies, communities, planners, and engineers have been grappling with the impacts of infrastructure projects, both past and present. Going beyond merely documenting those impacts, each presenter offered lessons about potential approaches for future work. Each argued that examining past infrastructure projects with an eye toward understanding how they created benefits and inequities could help ensure that future projects create as many positive outcomes as possible while minimizing negative impacts.
In the first presentation, Haila Maze, community planning division leader at Bolton & Menk, recapped progress on the Metropolitan Council’s Highway Harms Study. The study posits that providing metropolitan residents and transportation professionals with a deeper understanding of the history behind transportation infrastructure development could help mitigate negative outcomes in future projects.
Thus far, the work has focused on relaying information about previous impacts, using a storymap that walks readers through different periods of transportation history. This tool provides a good foundation from which planners of contemporary projects can recognize past mistakes and build toward different outcomes. Future efforts will use additional quantitative and qualitative research to document past harms from transportation infrastructure, including incorporating personal stories.
Next, Camila Fonseca-Sarmiento, CTS scholar and director of fiscal research at the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Urban and Regional Infrastructure Finance at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, described her work in surveying active mitigation efforts and their outcomes. Fonseca-Sarmiento drew on her recent research project on mitigating the harms of dense highway infrastructure, which explores community options to counter the impacts of dense, large-scale transportation infrastructure (e.g., urban highways and “spaghetti junctions”), which have caused harms similar to those identified in the Metropolitan Council’s study.
By looking in depth at eight case studies, the University's research team reviewed ways that some large-scale infrastructure projects have changed neighborhoods and how each of these communities mitigated those changes. In almost every case, the goal of mitigations has been to help create a different, improved experience for residents who live near the projects. The study has also aimed to drive economic development and provide more usable space in dense cities.
The researchers compared the goals and outcomes of mitigation efforts to the MnDOT Livability Framework so that the lessons learned could be directly applied to current project planning. Overall, they found four primary ways that communities responded to these types of infrastructure projects:
- “Greening” the environment in and around the projects through plantings
- Incorporating community-based public art
- Taking a complete streets approach that provides balanced access for all users,
- Empowering community action and planning around new uses
A common trait of the efforts was a desire to bring people into underused spaces. In its analysis, the team found that every project is local and therefore must be contextualized with that in mind—there are few universal truths. One common thread, however, was the important role state DOTs play in supporting the exploration of alternatives. While DOTs don’t have to lead or champion a community-based project or mitigation, it’s critical that they don’t oppose them.
In the third presentation, focused on advancing equity in capital investment decisions, Alan Roy, a researcher with the Institute of Urban and Regional Infrastructure Finance and a Humphrey School PhD student, shared the results from a survey of how agencies are incorporating equity into their work. The team surveyed nearly two dozen agencies and conducted nine interviews to document the ways agencies were identifying, prioritizing, or selecting projects that would positively affect equity. The aim was to identify how equity outcomes could be better integrated throughout the stages of a project. One major takeaway was that it’s critical to build trust and support local expertise.
Together, the three presentations challenged practitioners to look backward as well as forward when planning future efforts. The presenters called for those working in the moment to ensure new efforts are mitigating long-lingering harms, not reinforcing them.
—Kyle Shelton, CTS director
