The Robert Moses of Dallas

From Welcome to Dallas: Paradox City:

"One of the more vexing problems with this scenario, as residents throughout the region are learning, is that they have too little franchise in this conversation. In The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s  magisterial examination of the life and career of New York planner Robert Moses, Caro painstakingly illustrates how Moses, the preeminent urban highway builder of his era, consolidated a bureaucratic empire with vast financial resources that remained virtually unaccountable to voters for decades. Dallas has its own Robert Moses, if on a somewhat reduced scale. Michael Morris has served as the Director of Transportation for the North Texas Council of Governments (NTCOG) since, if you can believe it, 1990.

It is through Morris that many of the region’s transportation decisions are made. Because the board that oversees those decisions at NTCOG is comprised of representatives with divergent imperatives from across the region, it is a body particularly susceptible to arguments made from the “neutral” perspective of the traffic engineer. But decisions about where highways should go  (nevermind how to regulate services like Uber and Lyft) are neither neutral nor objective.

Whose priorities are to be favored? The makeup of the NTCOG’s transportation board is dominated by suburban representatives. Should the suburbs be driving transportation planning in downtown Dallas? If that seems backwards and profoundly undemocratic, that’s because it is—another Dallas paradox. Yet even suburban voters are finding that their own prerogatives are secondary to the will of a government body with little accountability. And so residents of Collin were recently outraged to find that they were about to be entirely hemmed in by toll roads. “We probably haven’t done a good enough job of keeping new elected officials informed in regards to this item,” said Morris, in response. When threatened, he has a habit of resorting to the kind of cheap tactics that were a Moses trademark: inaccurately dismissing proponents of the plan to raze 345 as “all white” and “very wealthy”; spuriously claiming that managed toll lanes were proven necessary when emergency service vehicles could not reach a catastrophic airline crash at DFW in 1985—simply untrue.

As any addiction recovery expert will tell you, the first step to health is admitting your problem. For Dallas that means a new development paradigm, one that is not dependent on the continual construction of highways nobody wants to pay for, to facilitate ever longer commutes that are in themselves cost inefficient. The proposal to tear-out I-345 is an example of that kind of thinking, its goal being to spur development downtown: to bring jobs and housing closer to South Dallas. The proposals for the decking of I-30 and the development of Fair Park into a year-round community lynchpin and economic engine are also promising.

Instead of building those highways that are so expensive, Dallas might fix its own streets and signals, which are in such disgraceful condition, to make those streets more amenable to entrepreneurs of all scales. As the urban planner Jeffrey Tumlin recently told a rapt audience of concerned Dallasites at atransportation summit organized by the American Institute of Architects and the Greater Dallas Planning Council, these kind of street repairs actually create more jobs and local economic impact than large highway building projects, in which so much money goes for heavy machinery. And yet, when I asked Dallas City Councilman Lee Kleinman when the city would get its streets repaired, this was his response: “Not in our lifetime.” Perhaps he would change the city’s tag line to “Big Things Don’t Happen Here.”

But that’s not really Dallas. And unfortunately that can’t-do spirit does not seem to apply to the building of the Trinity Toll Road, which stands as the acme of Dallas’s circular, self-defeating logic. At the same time that the city is spending millions to develop the space between the levees into an urban playground, it is moving forward with a plan to drive a massive highway through that space, cutting the city off from the very amenity it is building.   This at a time when cities around the globe are seeking to remove the infrastructural barriers between their centers and their riverfronts. The new exhibition of the work of British design sensation Thomas Heatherwick at the Nasher Sculpture Center features a bridgedesigned specifically to ameliorate a legacy embankment road in London. When informed that Dallas was, in 2014, considering the imposition of just such a barrier, his response was bewildered and appalled shock.

Not surprisingly, the toll road has been losing influential supporters at a considerable rate, a growing roster of individuals and institutions that now recognize that it is the product of a discredited planning philosophy. The for-it-before-they-were-against-it contingent also recognize that the road they had been promised as a part of the voter-approved Balanced Vision Plan—which was intended to be a picturesque urban parkway—in no way resembles the road that is now on the table: a massive tolled highway. There is no balance in this vision. It’s the urban planning equivalent of the Iraq War: a bad idea managed behind closed doors into something far uglier than was sold to the public, and with potentially devastating long-term consequences."