TxDOT's Secret Plan to Destroy Downtown Dallas

[TexasTowelie]

You can say this about Texas’ highway engineers: they’re tenacious and relentless. Even though in 2016 TxDOT drafted CityMAP, one of the most forward-thinking transportation studies to deal with the tangle of downtown highways that have plagued Dallas’ urban core for more than half a century, engineers at the agency have designed an I-30 expansion that doubles down on the same city-destroying mistakes of the past.

A draft engineering plan submitted to Dallas city staff this month for comment and review depicts a redesigned Interstate 30 that extends the road’s shelf life as a monstrous, development-killing behemoth. Perhaps as catastrophic, the plans forgo the guidance of the CityMAP study, which was the product of a painstaking period of research, analysis, and community and stakeholder input. CityMAP is a national model in how urban areas can deal with the challenge of inner-city highways in the context of neighborhood revitalization, urban connectivity, and economic development. TxDOT, with its latest draft engineering plan, tossed those lessons out the window.

Here are the worst aspects of the designs drawn up by TxDOT’s engineers:

The added or expanded frontage roads, widened overpasses, exit ramps, and surface streets will increase the speed of traffic through the neighborhoods adjacent to the highway, which impedes CityMAP’s central goal of reconnecting the neighborhoods within the urban core, and will negatively impact potential economic development.

The design expands the number of highway lanes and frontage road lanes beyond the largest options presented by CityMAP, thus doubling down on a failed and wasteful strategy of dealing with congestion by adding traffic capacity.

Although the design extends a below-grade freeway through Exposition Park, the road re-surfaces at Munger Boulevard, disrupting another central goal of CityMAP to reconnect East Dallas and Samuell-Grand Park to the neighborhoods around Fair Park.

The highway, frontage roads, exit ramps, and adjacent street redesigns exceed the existing footprint of I-30, requiring the seizing of property—commercial sites as well as single family homes—by eminent domain.

Read more: https://www.dmagazine.com/frontburner/2018/05/txdots-secret-plan-to-destroy-downtown-dallas/?ref=mpw

[msongs]

1. could it be designs favor private contractors who will be getting taxpayer money?

[Me.]

2. Sounds Like A Robert Moses Plan

He who did his best to destroy NYC, the Bronx, and Queens with his misguided transportation plans