When Interstate 94 cut through St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood in the 1960s, it fractured a thriving Black community and erased generations of wealth. The project remains a powerful example of how transportation decisions can cause lasting harm, and it continues to shape how planners think about infrastructure today.
Transportation projects are intended to improve access and mobility, but they also pass through neighborhoods where their effects are felt most directly. Depending on a project’s scale, the area’s residents, businesses, and communities will experience different levels of disruption.
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 lasting impacts of projects like I-94 through Rondo have fueled growing attention to how transportation planning can better account for equity, community history, and long-term outcomes.
At the 2025 Center for Transportation Studies (CTS) Transportation Research Conference, researchers affiliated with the Humphrey School of Public Affairs led a session on equitable planning—sharing 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 understanding how past infrastructure projects created benefits and inequities could help ensure that future projects create as many positive outcomes as possible, while minimizing negative impacts.
History of transportation impacts
The first presenter, Haila Maze (MURP ‘98), community planning division leader at Bolton & Menk and a Humphrey School alumna, recapped progress on the Metropolitan Council’s Highway Harms Study. The study posits that providing residents and transportation professionals with a deeper understanding of the history behind transportation infrastructure development could help mitigate negative outcomes in future projects.
The work so far has focused on relaying information about previous impacts, using a story map that walks readers through different periods of transportation history. This tool provides a good foundation that present-day planners can use to recognize past mistakes and build toward different outcomes.
How communities are responding
The next presenter was Camila Fonseca Sarmiento, director of fiscal research at the Humphrey School’s Institute for Urban and Regional Infrastructure Finance (IURIF) and a CTS scholar, who described her work in surveying active mitigation efforts and their outcomes.
Fonseca Sarmiento drew on a recent research project she led 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 IURIF research team reviewed ways that some large-scale infrastructure projects have changed neighborhoods and how each community mitigated those changes.
In almost every case, the goal was 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 study 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
The goal of these efforts was a desire to bring people into underused spaces. The research team noted that since every project is local, the planning must be contextualized with that in mind; there are few universal truths.
One common thread was the important role that state transportation departments play in supporting the exploration of alternatives. While state officials don’t have to lead or champion a community-based project or mitigation, it’s critical that they don’t oppose them.
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.
How agencies are responding
The third presentation focused on advancing equity in capital investment decisions. Alan Roy, a IURIF researcher and Humphrey School PhD student, shared the results from a survey of how agencies are incorporating equity into their work.
The research 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.
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The original version of this story was published by the Center for Transportation Studies.
