A Southern California doctor accused of bilking Medicare out of millions by billing for unnecessary hospice services has been sentenced to 24 months in federal prison, federal prosecutors said.
Dr. Victor Contreras, 69, of Santa Paula was charged with falsifying medical claims for hospice care between July 2016 and February 2019 — billing the federal insurance program nearly $4 million during that time, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
He pleaded guilty to one count of healthcare fraud on July 24, and will have to pay nearly $3.3 million in restitution in addition to prison time.
Federal prosecutors say Contreras and 62-year-old Juanita Antenor submitted fraudulent claims through two hospice companies: Arcadia Hospice Provider Inc. and Saint Mariam Hospice Inc.
Antenor, who controlled both companies, paid illegal kickbacks to marketers in exchange for referring patients to these companies, authorities said.
Among those alleged marketers was 66-year-old Callie Black of Lancaster, who was charged in 2022 with 10 federal counts of healthcare fraud and paying illegal kickbacks for healthcare referrals. Black has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to go to trial in March.
Prosecutors say Contreras would falsely note terminal illnesses on claim forms to make patients eligible for hospice services via Medicare. Medicare paid about $3.2 million out of the $3.9 million false claims submitted by Contreras, despite him not being the patients’ primary care physician.
Since 2015, Contreras has been on probation with the Medical Board of California, which placed limitations on his practice.
Antenor remains at large. Authorities previously said they believed she may be in the Philippines.
The ex-wife of a Woodland Hills doctor — who a few months ago wept at his memorial — hired a hitman to ambush and murder him for financial gain, prosecutors say.
Ahang Kelk, 53, is charged with one felony count of murder and one felony count of assault with a deadly weapon in the slaying of Hamid Mirshojae, the L.A. County district attorney’s office announced Monday. Prosecutors said Kelk enlisted the help of several people to carry out the slaying, three of whom have already been charged for their alleged role in the murderous scheme.
The 61-year-old doctor was shot in the back of the head as he was leaving his Woodland Hills medical practice after work on Aug. 23. The shooting occurred just months after the doctor was jumped by a trio of men wielding baseball bats, an attack that he said left him fearing for his life.
Evan Hardman, 41, of Texas and and Sarallah Jawed, 26, of Canoga Park are accused of staging both the attacks.
Hardman delivered the fatal gunshot after ambushing Mirshojae with a handgun, prosecutors said. Both men are charged with one felony count of murder and one felony count of assault with a deadly weapon.
Hardman, arrested in Texas, was awaiting extradition to Los Angeles, prosecutors said.
Ashley Rose Sweeting, 40, of Reseda, is accused of driving Hardman away from the scene of the killing. She is charged with being an accessory to murder and has pleaded not guilty.
“The depth of the deceit and violence involved in this case is chilling,” said Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman in a statement. “We will not rest until justice is served.”
A fifth person, Shawn Randolph, 46, of Valley Village, was arrested Thursday on suspicion of murder. Charges against him have not yet been announced.
Hardman and Mirshojae were scheduled to be arraigned on Monday. Information on their pleas was not immediately available.
“For the last four months the LAPD, alongside our partner agencies, has worked tirelessly to bring those responsible for this ambush-style murder to justice,” LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell said in a statement. “The men and women of the LAPD will leave no stone unturned to deliver justice and return a sense of calm to our communities.”
Times staff writer Noah Goldberg contributed to this report.
More than 1 million people across the country earn paychecks of $500,000 or higher, according to a report that analyzed payroll records on millions of salaries paid over the course of a year.
The study titled “High-paying jobs? They’re a dime a dozen,” which was done by ADP, a leading management company that provides payroll and other services, concluded that “a substantial number of professionals found in every major metro” earn more than half a million dollars annually. Government data, including the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, typically obscure the prevalence of hefty paychecks by capping the level of wages reported.
One California metropolis stood out from the rest, the ADP report found. The San Francisco Bay Area has the highest concentration of jobs that pay more than $500,000, “vastly outranking” other major cities. One in 48 jobs in the Bay Area pays $500,000 or more, nearly double the share in Austin, Texas, which has the second highest concentration.
The Los Angeles and Long Beach region has the 12th highest concentration of jobs that pay that amount. Slightly less than 1% of employees in Los Angeles and Long Beach earn more than $500,000, while 0.22% earn more than $1 million and 0.06% earn more than $2 million.
The wealthiest neighborhoods in the Los Angeles area include Beverly Hills, Pacific Palisades and Malibu, according to real estate firms.
In the Bay Area, more than 2% of employees earn at least half a million dollars, 0.54% earn at least $1 million and 0.15% earn at least $2 million. New York, Boston and Fort Meyers, Fla., are among the other highest ranked cities for employee wages, according to ADP.
The report attributed San Francisco’s “exceptional concentration” of high earners to Silicon Valley and the tech industry, in which executives and other individuals earn “extraordinary compensation.”
Other highly paid professionals including doctors and lawyers face income restrictions based on how many patients or clients they can serve, the report said. In the tech industry, however, productivity has no such constraints, especially at large companies.
“The Bay Area’s considerable lead likely reflects not just the dominance of tech in its economy and workforce, but also its position as the nucleus for the industry’s top talent and the corporate giants that rely most heavily on their expertise,” the report said.
While Austin, Texas, which landed in second place on ADP’s list, is another tech hub, the Bay Area’s intense tech focus wasn’t the only factor contributing to its singular status. Skyrocketing housing prices in the Bay Area have pushed out middle- and low-income residents, leaving the area’s population to be dominated by those earning more.
Nationally, 0.79% of jobs pays more than $500,000, which accounts for more than a million positions. Remote work has drawn high earners to desirable locations including Honolulu and parts of Florida.
“High earners aren’t confined to one industry or region,” the report said. “Though tech is at the forefront, very high salaries are more prevalent than one might realize.”
ADP collected the payroll data between July 1, 2023, and June 30, 2024, from metropolitan areas with more than 1 million residents.
It’s only mid-December and already California’s weather is putting the state on high alert for winter — and it’s likely far from over.
Just this past week, a major wildfire raced into Malibu, fueled by dangerous Santa Ana winds, and a powerful storm dumped feet of snow in the mountains, caused flooding in the Bay Area and in Santa Cruz County, formed a tornado.
And now, forecasters warn that similar conditions are likely to return this week, with high winds in Southern California prompting further fire concerns, and a series of atmospheric rivers bound for Northern California that could bring more flooding and headaches for travelers.
These diverging winter weather patterns are providing the latest reminder about how much California can differ climatologically, especially when it comes to early-winter precipitation.
“It’s fairly common to have other parts of the West get targeted and we kind of get left out,” Robbie Munroe, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Oxnard, said of Southern California’s relative dryness to up north. He said the sharp contrast often eases by January or February, when the jet stream — which tends to direct moisture-laden storms — shifts further south.
So even as Northern California this weekend dealt with significant rainfall and high winds — closing roads in Sonoma County, downing trees along the North Bay Coast, cutting off power to thousands — firefighters in Southern California continued to work on the bone-dry landscape around the Franklin fire in Malibu, which was just over 50% contained early Monday.
The Southland remains in high fire season, which could last into the New Year without a wetting rainfall, and forecasters say more Santa Ana winds are on the way.
Beginning Tuesday afternoon, much of Ventura County and western Los Angeles County will be under a red flag warning, with northeast winds reaching up to from 40 mph and some isolated gusts hitting 60 mph, especially in the San Gabriel, Santa Susana, and Santa Monica Mountains.
Munroe said the winds are not expected to be as strong or dry as the winds that helped fan the Franklin fire last week, but conditions are still delicate with low humidity and dry brush. This “traditional Santa Ana corridor,” which includes the region that saw the Mountain fire explode in November, will again have the potential to see extreme behavior if a fire sparks, Munroe said.
“There is still plenty of shared concern by meteorologists and fire personnel across the area due to the receptive fuels that we have seen recently,” the fire weather warning said early Monday, which was later updated to a red flag warning.
There was some early hope that Southern California could get significant rain by the end of the week, when a string of wet storms are expected to make their way south from the Gulf of Alaska, but those have mostly evaporated.
“The greatest amount of rain impacts will stay to our north, more than likely,” Munroe said.
This next period of wet weather is forecast to kick off in Northern California Friday, bringing more rain, snow and potential flooding to the region as a “series of atmospheric rivers push inland,” according to the weather service’s Weather Prediction Center.
“We’re anticipating a wet week next week,” said Crystal Oudit, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Monterey. “We might stay in a wet pattern for… Christmas week.”
Workers remove a large tree that fell into a mobile home in Seaside, Calif. on Saturday.
(Nic Coury / Associated Press)
That precipitation will come days after much of Northern California was soaked this past weekend and into Monday. The most significant storm brought drenching rains and high winds Saturday, prompting the first-ever tornado warning in San Francisco, where wind gusts up to 80 mph caused widespread damage.
While a twister didn’t end up touching down in San Francisco, one did just south in Scotts Valley in Santa Cruz County.
The tornado recorded wind speeds up to 90 mph as it tore a path almost 30 yards wide for nearly a third of a mile, according to the National Weather Service. At least three people were injured as the tornado downed trees and power poles, ripped off branches, overturned vehicles and damaged street signs, the weather service reported. It was classified as a weak E-F1, which the National Weather Service considers a moderate tornado on its scale from EF-0 to EF-5.
Water from the San Francisco Bay spills onto the Embarcadero as a result of high tides and storm-driven waves on Saturday.
(Noah Berger / Associated Press)
While tornadoes aren’t regular occurrences in the Bay Area, there have been several recorded in the area, including seven others in Santa Cruz County, the National Weather Service reported.
The storm over the weekend also dumped significant snow across the northern Sierra Nevada, including more than two feet of fresh powder in Lake Tahoe. Quick bouts of rain temporarily flooded some roadways and underpasses in the Bay Area, submerging cars in one low-lying street in Livermore.
It doesn’t appear the next round of storms beginning Friday have any notable winds associated with them, Oudit said, but she noted that some forecasts are still too far out to know for sure.
Times staff writers Andrea Chang and Ben Poston contributed to this report.
Residents in one Tarzana neighborhood were jolted awake Saturday morning after a Lamborghini SUV fleeing law enforcement roared down their street, crashed into multiple cars, then caught fire.
The crash occurred about 4 a.m. in the 5500 block of Tampa Avenue, where residents say they found the black SUV upside down and a trail of destruction behind it. Residents pulled the driver out of the vehicle.
“We didn’t think he was alive at first,” a resident named Tristan told OnSceneTV, a breaking news wire service. “He wasn’t respondent and then he finally made a sound and that’s when we pulled him out.”
The Los Angeles Police Department said the vehicle was being pursued by the California Highway Patrol. Details on why they were chasing him were not immediately available.
The SUV collided with several vehicles, knocked down a concrete mailbox and landed upside down, resident Gina Patterson said. She said she heard the crash, went outside and saw a person lying on the ground.
The vehicle caught fire shortly afterward, neighbors told OnSceneTV. Los Angeles Fire Department paramedics took a 35-year-old man in serious condition to the hospital, according to LAFD spokesperson Margaret Stewart.
A magnitude 2.8 earthquake jolted the Los Angeles area Monday morning, sending weak shaking from its epicenter in Alhambra.
“Weak” shaking, as defined by the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale, may have been felt in places such as downtown Los Angeles, Burbank, Pasadena, East L.A., South L.A., Beverly Hills and Universal City.
In Highland Park, there was a gentle rocking that lasted for about three seconds, similar to when a large truck drives by a home or when a helicopter circles a neighborhood. But in other places, like Glendale, the shaking was so subtle some people didn’t initially feel it as an earthquake.
The preliminary epicenter of Monday’s earthquake, recorded at 10:04 a.m., was near the corner of Valley Boulevard and Grand View Drive in Alhambra, just a few blocks from the northern terminus of the 710 Freeway and a few blocks east of the city limits of Los Angeles.
There have been a notable number of felt earthquakes in this area of Los Angeles County since summer, centered in El Sereno, a neighborhood of Los Angeles just west of Alhambra.
On June 2, a magnitude 3.4 earthquake was felt widely across Los Angeles and the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys. Then, in almost the exact same location, a magnitude 4.4 earthquake hit on Aug. 12. That earthquake was felt far more widely across the Southern California region.
The magnitude 4.4 earthquake on Aug. 12 was centered within one of the region’s most potentially destructive fault systems, one capable of producing a magnitude 7.5 earthquake under the heart of the region.
A Times investigation published in November found that several suburbs in this general area of Monday’s earthquake have no active plans to require retrofits for seismically flimsy “soft-story” apartment buildings, despite the number of earthquakes felt in recent months.
The term applies to apartment buildings built decades ago where the bottom floor has room for a carport, garage or retail shop. In these buildings, the ground floor can be held up by flimsy, skinny poles that can collapse when shaken side-to-side in an earthquake.
Officials in Alhambra, with a population of around 82,000; and Monterey Park, where about 60,000 people live, said earlier this year their cities haven’t imposed mandatory retrofit ordinances for soft-story apartment buildings. Officials there said they’re closely monitoring neighboring cities and evaluating whether similar measures might be necessary.
In South Pasadena, with a population of 26,000, building officials said earlier this year the city has no plans to create an inventory of soft-story apartment buildings or consider mandatory retrofits.
Several years ago, there were plans to create an inventory of seismically vulnerable apartment buildings in South Pasadena, but city officials eventually determined it couldn’t devote the necessary resources, so plans to do so were scrapped.
More than a half-dozen cities in Southern California require soft-story apartment buildings to be retrofitted — Los Angeles, Torrance, Pasadena, Santa Monica, Culver City, West Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Burbank just passed a seismic retrofit law for soft-story apartment buildings last week.
Are you ready for when the Big One hits? Get ready for the next big earthquake by signing up for our Unshaken newsletter, which breaks down emergency preparedness into bite-sized steps over six weeks. Learn more about earthquake kits, which apps you need, Lucy Jones’ most important advice and more at latimes.com/Unshaken.
Aiming to narrow the state’s economic divide, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday is set to unveil a blueprint to create more well-paying careers for Californians, especially those who don’t have a college degree.
As more people question the value of higher education, unsure whether the economic payoff is worth rising college costs, Newsom wants to streamline and coordinate state and regional efforts to prepare students and workers for high-demand jobs with more hands-on learning, job-related skills and wider access to affordable education.
“Every Californian deserves the opportunity to build real-life skills and pursue a fulfilling career — including those that don’t require college degrees,” Newsom said in a statement. “California is working to ensure that every person has what they need to get a well-paying, long-lasting job so we can build an economy for the future that supports all families.”
Newsom is scheduled to present his plan at Shasta College in Redding, a Northern California city whose 93,000 residents on average have lower incomes and educational achievement than the statewide average. About one-quarter of Redding residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 37.5% statewide. The median household income is about $69,000 annually, compared with $96,000 statewide.
Key elements of the blueprint, called the California Master Plan for Career Education, include:
A new “career passport” is envisioned as a digital tool with academic transcripts, verified skills and credentials earned outside the classroom — in the military, for instance — to help workers showcase their abilities to potential employers.
A statewide collaborative of educators, job training providers and employers would evaluate economic trends and workforce needs and align curriculum and funding to meet the demand for skills. Newsom’s office has targeted healthcare, climate, education and technology as some of the hottest areas of labor demand.
High schools and colleges would offer more work-based learning, including internships and apprenticeships; career exploration and stronger counseling. The plan encourages more opportunities for high school students to take college classes to acquire skills sought by employers.
Wider access to workforce training and education would be encouraged, especially for people with disabilities, English language learners, youth who are neither working nor attending school and those whose parents did not attend college.
Newsom is also set to announce plans Monday to double the number of state jobs that will no longer require a college degree or other specific educational requirements, from nearly 30,000 currently to about 60,000 next year. The jobs include some research, analyst and informational technology positions. A high school degree will no longer be required for custodians. Some state investigator positions will allow more areas of study or experience, such as military service, to count as qualifications.
In addition, Newsom plans to propose a new initiative to help 30,000 military veterans turn their service experience into college credit. The effort, which would be led by faculty, would begin with California community colleges.
The final plan will be presented early next year, with funding commitments included in the upcoming state budget proposal in January. At least $100 million would be provided to develop the career passports, a statewide system to help veterans receive college credit for work experience and other career programs.
The master plan recognizes that college degrees still provide a valuable path for financial stability. It noted that households with at least one college graduate earned 33% more today than similar households did in 1980, indicating that the value of a four-year college degree has grown over time. In contrast, households with a high school graduate earned 8% less today compared with those in 1980, reflecting diminishing returns of a diploma. Research has shown that those with bachelor’s degrees are more likely to be employed and earn $1.2 million more over a lifetime than those with a high school diploma.
The HEA Group, a research and consulting firm focused on college access, value and economic mobility, has produced guides to top-value college majors that yield high pay with low debt along with the most lucrative degrees.
But, the plan says, California must find ways to help those without college degrees thrive — many of whom may want to pursue college but can’t afford it given the state’s high cost of living and complexities of accessing public assistance. California has one of the largest economic divides in the nation, the plan said, with the top 10% of California earners making an average of $300,000 annually compared with the bottom 10% at $29,000 annually.
“The economic divide underscores the imperative for a more coherent career education infrastructure,” the plan says. “Degree attainment cannot be the only pathway to stable, well-paid work. Even though individuals with bachelor’s degrees earn significantly more over their lifetimes than those without, degrees are not a panacea, particularly in the absence of practical experience and social capital.”
The Republican Party of Orange County has forcefully swatted down unfounded claims of voter fraud in the 2024 election, debunking allegations that went viral after Democrats flipped a hotly contested congressional seat.
In a county home to some of the most competitive House races in the nation, a local party leader said he feared the false claims could dampen Republican participation in future elections if they weren’t forcefully addressed.
Republican Party of Orange County Executive Director Randall Avila cited the 45th Congressional District in Los Angeles and Orange counties, where Democratic challenger Derek Tran unseated incumbent Republican Rep. Michelle Steel by just 653 votes in November.
“If 1,000 people see [the claims of voter fraud] and think, ‘Well, I shouldn’t even vote, it doesn’t matter,’ it really hurts our cause, especially in races that are so tight like that,” Avila said Friday.
The Orange County GOP pushed back on the voter fraud claims in a detailed email that went out last week to a mailing list of about 60,000 people, Avila said. The local party also debunked the claims in a question-and-answer format on social media.
“We support commonsense reforms such as Voter ID and ending universal vote-by-mail to ensure free and fair elections, but false claims of voter fraud only hurt our efforts and ultimately decrease Republican votes when our voters believe their vote does not count,” the email said, along with a point-by-point explanation rebutting several issues raised.
Voter fraud is vanishingly rare in the United States. But false claims of widespread malfeasance have permeated the American discourse — particularly in right-wing media ecosystems — since President-elect Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and falsely claimed to have won. The drumbeat of attacks on election integrity in the years since has taken a toll, with polling showing a sharp partisan divide in whether Americans have faith in the electoral process.
Sara Sadhwani, an assistant professor of politics at Pomona College who served on the state’s redistricting commission, praised the Orange County GOP’s decision to speak out on the claims.
“Bogus claims about voter fraud have been abundant in the last several years, many of which have been made by President-elect Donald Trump. So to see the Republican Party coming out so clearly to debunk those myths is is a breath of fresh air,” Sadhwani said.
The Orange County false claims were laid out in a blog post published recently and quickly went viral. They were amplified by a number of prominent right-wing figures, including Roger Stone, a longtime Trump ally who was convicted of lying to Congress during investigations of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign.
The blog post claimed to have revealed “huge ballot discrepancies” that could alter the results of House races. The alleged discrepancies centered on a few issues. One was the number of ballots issued by the county (which includes every ballot printed, including the vote-by-mail ballots sent to the homes of voters who later voted in person) being greater than the number of registered voters. Another concerned the difference between the number of registered voters at the pre-election deadline and the final number of registered voters on election day. Local GOP leaders said the difference was due to about 40,000 Orange County residents registering to vote on or close to election day, as allowed by California law.
Avila estimated that at least 20 people had walked into the party’s Tustin headquarters to raise the issue after seeing the misinformation online, along with 60 to 70 more individuals reaching out by phone. After the deluge of concerns, the party director said his office communicated with the local registrar of voters to gather information and get the facts straight before offering the detailed explanation.
“If there was voter fraud going on here with the House on the line, there would be lawyers here. We’d be in court,” said Jon Fleischman, an Orange County-based Republican campaign strategist and former executive director of the California GOP.
Fleischman reiterated that that wasn’t the “reality” on the ground, regardless of his criticism around some of California’s election laws, like the fact that every Californian receives a vote-by-mail ballot and such ballots are accepted for up to a week after the election, so long as they are postmarked by election day.
“Elections should be over on election day,” Fleischman stated, saying that laws that beget lengthy vote-count waiting periods add to public confusion and distrust.
Avila also called for reform of California’s voter accessibility laws, which allow voters more options than in other states, and help engender California’s notoriously slow vote counts. But like Fleischman, he drew a sharp line between those allowances and actual fraud.
“There’s no real legal challenges here,” said Mindy Romero, a political sociologist who runs USC’s Center for Inclusive Democracy. “So not speaking out or pushing back on allegations of fraud just hurts the integrity of the election, period.”
Via the Associated Press: Five people are dead and others injured after a shooting Monday at a private Christian school in Wisconsin, including a child who caused the attack, authorities said.
Kirsten Mitchell at WCCO News is reporting a 2023 survey by researchers at the Wilder Foundation found a 10% increase in the state’s homeless population from 2013.
Max Nesterak at the Minnesota Reformer reports Success TutoringandAchievers Tutoring billed Minnesota families thousands while paying Filipino instructors less than $5 per hour. Disgruntled parents state the companies outsourced instruction to foreign teachers online whom their kids couldn’t understand.
Jay Kolls at KSTP is reporting St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter and the City Council approved spending to add seven new firefighters in 2025, marking the first time new staff has been added to the St. Paul Fire Department since 2009.
Via Bring Me the News: The Nottingham Panthers Hockey Club, located in the United Kingdom, retired the late Hibbing High School alum Adam Johnson’s No. 47 jersey in a Saturday ceremony.
Dan Gunderson at MPR News heads to Fergus Falls to profile Maurice Skogen, who builds guitar amplifiers based on a 1950s sound: “The sound was better back then, the ’50s was the golden era of manufacturing.”
For months I’ve been asked questions about “Rethinking I-94,” the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s seemingly interminable planning process for changing the intercity freeway between downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul. Most people want to know: What do you think of the boulevard proposal? Is it even possible? Where would the traffic go?
You’re not alone if you’re skeptical about removing this central interstate. It currently carries between 100,000 and 150,000 cars a day, around 10 times that of an arterial street like St. Paul’s Lexington Parkway (near my house). Looking at the overwhelming scale of the freeway, it’s hard to imagine that reducing the road would be possible.
That’s why we’re lucky that the transportation advocacy group Our Streets hired consultants earlier this year to study this problem, a rare outside analysis. The team of experts included a national planning firm, a local data analysis firm and a traffic modeling consultant that picked apart the state-led procedure. The resulting study included inspiring renderings and policy points, but my eyes were especially opened by its critique of status quo modeling practices, a topic most people never consider.
Traffic modeling has long been a “black box” carefully guarded by expert bureaucracy, something few understand and everyone else accepts at face value. Somewhere an engineer uses a complex formula and reams of data to predict a trend, and decision-makers and the public swallow a “baseline scenario” of congestion and ever-more driving.
After years of models failing to accurately predict transportation trends – see for example, repeatedly wrong predictions of increasing “vehicle miles traveled” (VMT) – that’s starting to change. Alongside other 20th century traffic engineering concepts like “level of service” or parking demand studies, models are becoming a target of scrutiny,
In this case, led by consultants Toole Design Group and Smart Mobility, a Vermont-based traffic planning firm, the study raises questions about Twin Cities regional traffic analyses and how they are used in the “Rethinking I-94” process. The consultant’s report argues that options reducing freeway capacity might have counterintuitive traffic outcomes in central Minneapolis and St. Paul, and that answering the question of “what would happen to the traffic” isn’t straightforward. If the critique is correct, nobody should pretend they know the answers about what would happen to traffic alongside changes to I-94.
How traffic models work
Diving into the weeds, MnDOT’s traffic analysis is based on the Met Council’s “activity based” regional traffic model, which uses a “static” traffic assignment approach. Engineers break highways into segments and then input a certain amount of traffic based on past trends (almost always an increasing number). In that way, you get results about congestion and free-flow conditions based on those inputs.
The problem is that this isn’t how real-world traffic works. Not only does VMT not always go up, but the speed and volume of cars entering a freeway segment are highly dependent on the traffic conditions on either side.
“For a static model, even if you have a bottleneck upstream or downstream, it’s not going to affect traffic volume,” explained Vermont-based Smart Mobility President Norm Marshall. “Even though a real person would have to wait behind a bottleneck’d section of I-94, in the model you just ‘squeeze through’ anyway. By not treating road segments as interdependent, it’s not really modeling for urban freeway congestion at all.”
According to Marshall, the static approach amounts to a fatal flaw for predicting real-world networks. Instead, expanding or reducing capacity at any given point might make a big difference or have a negligible effect: everything depends on its larger context.
Credit: Our Streets
Marshall and his co-author, Lucy Gibson, argue that the MnDOT study seems designed to ignore the region’s persistent bottlenecks, limiting the “study area” to a stretch of freeway from Cedar Avenue in Minneapolis to Rice Street in St. Paul. As any Twin Cities driver already knows, the actual highway choke points are on either side: around the 35W and downtown on-ramps in Minneapolis (especially the constrained Lowry Hill tunnel) and near I-35E in St.t Paul.
“The Lowry Tunnel is a perfect example of how their modeling method is gonna fail,” agreed Gibson, an engineer at Toole Design Group. “There’s going to be a limited amount of traffic coming out of the tunnel towards this part of the study area, and that’s not going to grow. [The traffic increase] can’t really get through, even though their model shows that it can.”
The study’s lack of choke points makes the resulting analysis much less useful. The static assignment means that recurring stop-and-go jams because of the existing bottlenecks won’t shape the results for the stretch of highway in between. Instead, the engineers in the Our Streets report suggest that a dynamic model that looks at the system as a whole could better analyze the relationships between the constituent parts.
“The dynamic model treats every segment as part of the network,” Marshall added. “It says, if there is traffic stopped in front of you, then you can’t go until that traffic clears. Or, if that traffic’s going at 10 miles an hour, you’re going to be going 10 miles an hour slowly into that segment. It actually models congestion the way it really happens.”
According to agency spokesperson Ricardo Lopez, MnDOT will use a dynamic model for its “Draft I Tier EIS” analysis later in 2026. By that point, however, the options for change will be limited to a smaller pool. Designs like the “at-grade boulevard” or other freeway-reduction strategies will likely have been eliminated because of their poor initial congestion scores.
Creating traffic demand
Another key dynamic often ignored by traffic analysis is something called “induced demand.” By now it’s a well-recognized trend that freeway expansions can create as much new traffic as they mitigate with extra travel capacity. This happens even with the current form of I-94, where the free-flowing highway “creates” by attracting trips that would otherwise take place elsewhere, or not at all.
Take the freeway’s effect on Lexington Parkway, the main arterial near my house. According to Marshall and Gibson, one counterintuitive outcome is that expanding the freeway might make local traffic worse. The easiest way to see why is to type an address into Google Maps and look at suggested routes – say going three miles to visit my my favorite local chocolate shop. There are countless examples where the mapping software routes you onto the freeway to save a minute or two, even if city streets might be a geographically shorter route. This is exactly how people behave in the real world, often going well out of their way to use freeways.
This principle operates across all times-of-day and for thousands of people within the freeway’s catchment. As Marshall says, “no trip begins or ends on a highway.” This is why freeway expansion can “induce” highway trips, focusing even more vehicular congestion along arterial routes by interchanges, streets like Lexington, Snelling, Dale, and Cretin in St. Paul, or 26th and Cedar Avenues in Minneapolis.
The growing chorus of American highway planning critics reminds me of how different street design manuals emerged about 15 years ago. (See also the history of the National Association of City Transportation Officials.) In this case, more planners and engineers are calling into question standard 20th century practices of transportation engineering, forcing planners to look at more international and innovative approaches to urban design.
One prominent voice, an engineering professor at the University of Colorado named Wes Marshall (no relation to Norm), just released a book that debunks many long-standing highway engineering assumptions. For Wes Marshall, the limited capabilities of static traffic modeling are part and parcel of a whole list of antiquated professional practices for transportation planners.
“These models — and the conventional traffic engineering protocols that we’ve created surrounding how we use these models — make it very hard not to focus on widenings,” he told me. “On one hand, the models unrealistically overestimate how much delay we will have on a highway if we don’t do anything. On the other, they also unrealistically overestimate the benefit we will see in terms of reduced congestion.”
Before his academic role at the University of Colorado, Marshall worked in the field for years, including on the famous “Big Dig” project in Boston. That effort famously buried the “central artery” freeway through downtown, after a wildly over-budget process that set records in U.S. infrastructure. These days, similarly ambitious urban freeway widening projects are increasingly scrutinized by advocates and communities impacted by urban freeways, and projects like the I-5 expansion in Portland have stalled while other widening projects in cities like Austin or Houston go ahead.
Wes Marshall says this is all part of a system that actively promotes expansion and driving with little consideration of alternatives or consequences.
A rendering of I-94 remade into a transit boulevard for more public space along the bridge across the Mississippi River. Credit: Open Streets
“Boston, for instance, has worse traffic today than before the Big Dig,” he said. “Would it be worse had they never done the Big Dig? Probably, but the models were still wrong on both ends. So from my perspective, we are usually asking the wrong questions when we use these models regardless of whether they are static or dynamic.”
When asked to comment on the differing modeling capabilities, MnDOT’s Lopez told me: “MnDOT is following established requirements and guidelines related to the traffic modeling. [We are] confident we are using the best practices in our evaluation of alternatives.”
Is I-94 model flawed?
The crux of the matter is the potential for change. A lot depends on whether or not, if the highway were reduced in size, traffic would dissipate into the networked grid of streets that would make travel more disbursed, efficient and predictable. That’s something that the current model seemingly cannot answer, but there’s a big difference between knowing you don’t know something and being unaware of one’s ignorance.
Last week, local journalist John Edwards, who publishes Wedge Live out of South Minneapolis, leaked part of a draft results analysis of the Rethinking I-94 project. The analysis shows how “mobility in people for motorized vehicles” fares under the 16 potential changes to the freeway. According to the rankings, the reduced and boulevard options fare poorly. Freeway reductions score yellow (“concerns”) and red (“does not meet need”) for the crucial driver mobility category.
That news comes as no surprise to members of the consultant team, who argue that the model itself is the problem. Because it fundamentally misunderstands traffic dynamics, it operates like a one-way ratchet, always predicting the need for more highway capacity.
“Well, it’s the way we’ve always done it,” said Norm Marshall. “[Engineers] get good fees for doing it this way, and it always justifies the [expansion] project.”
So what would really happen to all the traffic on I-94?
The truth seems to be that the agency hasn’t yet studied the possibilities, and the existing model, static and disconnected, cannot tell us. Instead, we can only make educated guesses by looking at other examples of changes to freeways from around the world. If you do so, it turns out that the answer is much more dynamic than we might think. It’s quite possible that reducing freeway can decrease some impacts of congestion.
“My rule of thumb in a downsizing is that the new facility will carry maybe half of the traffic, [but] it depends on how you design it,” explained Norm Marshall. “A quarter of the traffic will be diverted to roughly parallel facilities, and a quarter of the traffic, we’ve seen this all around the country, appears to disappear. That’s just because people decide, ‘If I can’t go there at 60 miles an hour, I’ll go somewhere else.’”
This is why, when people ask me “where would the traffic go,” I often demur. It’s simply hard to say. We don’t know how to precisely guess what might happen.
But if history is any guide, freeway reductions usually work out, leading to real improvements for urban neighborhoods. On top of that, the COVID pandemic upended long-standing assumptions about driving patterns, proving that our society and its travel demands are more flexible than anyone thought.
If the Rethinking I-94 effort were to live up to its name, it would be nice to figure out what might happen if we changed the freeway for the better. The jury is still out on the next step of the planning process, but I hope that changes that truly “rethink” the status quo will remain on the table.
Bill Lindeke
Bill Lindeke is a lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography, Environment and Society. He is the author of multiple books on Twin Cities culture and history, most recently St. Paul: an Urban Biography. Follow Bill on Twitter: @BillLindeke.
