The easy solution has been to repeat the pattern of flight, this time from the inner suburbs to greener pastures even farther removed from the city's core, said Morrish, who directs the university's Design Center for Urban American Landscape. Postwar communities built around cities, called first-ring suburbs by planners, are now themselves surrounded by a series of concentric outer rings carved out of rapidly vanishing farmland. As for the freeways and expressways, instead of delivering suburban residents home from their jobs in city centers, they have become catapults that vault workers past suburban off-ramps and deliver them far out into what was once the countryside. Along with the destruction of agricultural land, the longer and longer commutes are putting a tremendous strain on aging highways, according to Morrish and other analysts. And they are leaving suburban communities to decline along with their aging infrastructures.
Some people are angry, others see opportunities.
In the Minneapolis suburbs, Osbun and other officials found an opportunity in the freeway they initially identified as their major problem. Interstate 35 West, the major artery between Duluth and Des Moines, forms a corridor north of Minneapolis that includes Arden Hills, Blain, Circle Pines, Mounds View, New Brighton, Roseville and Shoreview. It both links and separates them, says Bob Benke, mayor of New Brighton and director of transportation research for the Minnesota Department of Transportation. Benke, Osbun and their counterparts in other neighboring cities joined forces to lobby for federal highway funding to repair the freeway built in the 1960s. Soon, however, they realized their county roads and bridges were in equally sorry shape.