TRP: The Trinity River Spans

**bloodandpopcorn** · 06 June 2003, 11:23 AM

Wow, I'm surprised! This is a great move, and one that is absolutely necessary... I hope it speeds tings up significantly!

**rantanamo** · 06 June 2003, 11:55 AM

Actually, dirt is flying, and the first small steps have been made. Contracts are actually going up for bid and going out. I think what this committee can do is get the roadway and Woodall Bridge underway more quickly. Otherwise the other parts such as the park and waterway designs have scheduled bids that go up soon. The small infrastructural steps that are going on are just so excruciating that I imagine the Anti-Miller wants to see the bigger decisions ready to go once the smaller projects are nearing completion.

**chiboi** · 06 June 2003, 03:01 PM

This is so exciting that something is actually going to happen with this project

**TexasStar** · 19 June 2003, 03:22 PM

Let's all plan on being there...

Trinity River Urban Design & Transportation
Community Workshops
We want to hear from YOU! This is your opportunity to see the exciting new vision for the Trinity River Corridor!
Attend one or all of the workshops. Schedule for each:
Open House/View maps-- 6:00pm - 6:30pm
Presentation -- 6:30 pm - 7:00 pm
Q/A - 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
· Tues. 6-24 - Yvonne Ewell Townview Ctr. 1201 E. 8th St., Cafeteria lower level -- Mapsco 55B
· Thurs. 6-26 - Hillcrest Church, 12123 Hillcrest -- Mapsco 15Z
· Mon. 6-30 - Dallas City Hall, 1500 Marilla, L1FN Conference Center 45Q
Tell your friends! Help shape this major Dallas project!

The Dallas Plan - www.thedallasplan.com - 214-670-1200

**CTroyMathis** · 19 June 2003, 04:22 PM

Take photos! If they don't let you?

Take sneaky, discreet photos!

**TexasStar** · 19 June 2003, 05:51 PM

We should all plan to attend....

Trinity River Urban Design & Transportation
Community Workshops

We want to hear from YOU! This is your opportunity to see the exciting new vision for the Trinity River Corridor!
Attend one or all of the workshops. Schedule for each:
Open House/View maps-- 6:00pm - 6:30pm
Presentation -- 6:30 pm - 7:00 pm
Q/A - 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
· Tues. 6-24 - Yvonne Ewell Townview Ctr. 1201 E. 8th St., Cafeteria lower level -- Mapsco 55B
· Thurs. 6-26 - Hillcrest Church, 12123 Hillcrest -- Mapsco 15Z
· Mon. 6-30 - Dallas City Hall, 1500 Marilla, L1FN Conference Center 45Q

Tell your friends! Help shape this major Dallas project!

The Dallas Plan - www.thedallasplan.com - 214-670-1200

**jsoto3** · 22 June 2003, 08:47 PM

I am defintiely going! Probably next monday at city hall. I hope to see (and finally meet) others there.

**jsoto3** · 22 June 2003, 08:49 PM

Trinity Parkway design to be unveiled Monday
Road plan is similar to Central Expressway

06/22/2003

By VICTORIA LOE HICKS / The Dallas Morning News

Dallas drivers could experience dèjá vu when they see the re-redesigned Trinity Parkway, which will be unveiled Monday to the City Council. In the crucial downtown stretch, it's close kin to Central Expressway.

The road surface – four lanes at that point – would be sunk deeply into the inner slope of the river levee, with a pedestrian promenade cantilevered over it, screening it from the view of people above.

On the other side, a floodwall concealed by a landscaped 10-foot earthen berm would hide the road from people in the city's planned riverside park.

A large, elaborately landscaped plaza at Reunion Boulevard would span the highway, linking downtown to the river, lakes, wetlands and other recreational features. The plan also calls for a second "pedestrian plaza deck," but does not specify a location.

"I am very happy with this solution. I hope and pray that the council will be happy," said Mayor Laura Miller, who instigated hiring an urban design team to rethink the park and highway.

The revised design represents two months of furious number crunching, negotiation, and design changes shepherded by Michael Morris, director of transportation for the North Central Texas Council of Governments.

On one side was the city's team, which wanted to minimize the road's effect on the Trinity greenbelt; on the other were state and regional transportation planners, who wanted to be sure the new road shoulders a sufficient share of the traffic burden.

"The urban design and transportation partnership has reached consensus," proclaims the presentation prepared for Monday. Residents can see and comment on the plan at three public meetings over the next week.

The plan is the work of urban designer Alex Krieger, transportation planner William Eager and landscape architect George Hargreaves, hired with private funds raised by Ms. Miller. In its latest – and, Ms. Miller hopes, final – version, the road would:

• Be a 55-mph tollway from its northern junction with State Highway 183 to its southern junction with Interstate 45 and U.S. Highway 175.

• Be built solely on the downtown side of the river, rather than split, with some lanes running along the Oak Cliff levee.

• Be six lanes north of Continental Avenue and four lanes south of it.

• Use an improved Industrial Boulevard as a "collector-distributor" road to funnel downtown traffic to and from the parkway between Wycliff Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

• Include a levee-top road on the Oak Cliff side running from Commerce Street to I-35, enhancing the likelihood of high-dollar redevelopment.

• Allow S.M. Wright Freeway to be converted back to a boulevard, reconnecting neighborhoods in South Dallas.

• Use tolls and other mechanisms to keep trucks off the road.

• Be partially funded and fully operated and maintained by the North Texas Tollway Authority.

Scrutiny

The council will be asked to formally approve the design in August, once a more detailed written report, including cost estimates, is completed. Then it must pass muster with the Federal Highway Administration, which has been scrutinizing an environmental analysis of road alternatives developed before Ms. Miller began the urban design review.

The city and highway agencies will argue to federal officials that the design is not a new alternative but merely a variation of one presented earlier, said Karen Walz, executive director of the Dallas Plan, which has been at the center of the redesign process.

That is a crucial point; to be forced to undertake a fresh environmental review at this stage would have far-reaching ramifications. Plans for the Trinity highway are intertwined with plans to rebuild the clogged mixmaster interchange and the I-30 canyon downtown.

Big investment

Also Monday, the council will review the findings of an economic development study, commissioned three years ago, long before Mr. Krieger's and Mr. Hargreaves' firms revamped not only the road but the park.

Among the key findings is that new development spurred by the park and road – or even the park alone – would generate tens of millions of dollars in new tax revenue for the city, county and public schools. Those gains will be more than enough to cover the project's operating costs.

Even so, the city, which would pay the local share of the initial construction costs, would not recoup its investment for more than 30 years.

Dallas Independent School District "will be the major beneficiary ... largely through increases in the commercial property tax base," conclude the analysts, headed by the engineering and urban planning firm HNTB.

That being so, they suggest, Dallas must to look to the big picture – such as easing traffic congestion – rather than the tax impact of new development next to the river, in deciding how to shape the project.

In addition, the report says the city might look to the school district or the county to share some of the tax bounty. In 1998, city voters approved selling $246 million in bonds for the river project. Roughly $115 million of that is earmarked for the park and road.

Among the five road alignments analyzed in the study, the most conducive to development is the one tentatively selected by the council in 1997 but later rejected by Ms. Miller. It would put half the lanes on the downtown side and half on the Oak Cliff side.

On the other hand, the park alone with no highway, because of the lower construction costs, would come closest to generating city tax revenue equal to its costs.

The gap between the alternatives is relatively small. Spread over 30 years, the total difference is no more than $1.7 million a year.

the study projects substantial economic benefits for the community at large. HNTB forecasts 15,000 to 20,000 new permanent jobs by year 30 that would not exist without the project. It forecasts 200,000 overnight visitors and 960,000 day-trip visitors a year who would not come otherwise.

E-mail vloe@dallasnews.com

**jsoto3** · 22 June 2003, 11:35 PM

The Dallas City Council will hold a "special" Council Briefing meeting on Monday, June 23, 2003.

The session will be held at Dallas City Hall (1500 Marilla) in Room 6ES beginning at 10 a.m.

The following briefings have been placed on the meeting agenda:

Report on the Great Trinity Forest Park (17.8 Mb Adobe pdf)

Comparative Analysis of the Trinity River Project Options Considering Land Use, Urban Design and Economic Factors (6.3 Mb Adobe pdf)

Trinity River Corridor Vision Plan

http://www.trinityrivercorridor.org/html/briefings.html

**boozo** · 23 June 2003, 08:18 AM

On the channel 8 news last night, they said the latest plan has a depressed roadway like Central.

**jsoto3** · 24 June 2003, 12:48 AM

i went to the "special" council briefing today. i am disappointed with the direction this project is taking. they claim to have reached a "grand compromise" plan, but in my opinion it is now a grand plan compromised. everything hinges on the damn "parkway" (tollway). one of the council members made her strong opinion known to the consultants and planning team that the tollway should be called what it is: a tollway, not spun as a "parkway." and i have to agree. the new tollway alignment is entirely along the downtown side levee. immediately adjacent to downtown the highway narrows to four lanes and is cut into the levee, bounded on one side by a wall with a pedestrian promenade cantilevered over, much like the frontage roads on central. the mayor and all of the consultants and council members were horrified that the new design was compared to central. but infact, that is pretty much what is on the plate here. just imagine half of central plunked down onto the levee. there are to be atleast two pedestrian decks (of undetermined width) over the highway. industrial functions as the distibutor/collector on the downtown side and a new levee-top street is proposed on the west levee, but only for a miniscule length between I-35 and corinth, with no connection to the tollway. this was of major concern to several of the council members. anyhow, rather than a refined evolution of the previous plans, the new plan is an entirely compromised muddle of disparate elements. everything will be on view and open to public comment on three occasions during the next week as noted in a post above. i encourage everyone to check it out, you will most likely be disappointed. it was very interesting to see the political dynamics between the council and the planning team. the whole project hinges on the damned highway, which according to the senior NTTA planner, will start construction in late '05 at best, most likely later. i got the impression that the project is teetering on a fine line between implementation and yet another fizzling-out, more likely the latter. on another more positive note, while i was at city hall i stopped in at the trinity river corridor office on the north side of the sixth floor and saw the woodall rogers model. it was amazing. everyone should go check it out. in the briefing, it was duly noted that construction of the bridge cannot and will not start until the tollway receives its environmental approval (again, not until late '05 at best). there was also mention that an I-30 calatrava bridge is almost completely funded.

**rantanamo** · 24 June 2003, 03:04 AM

Someone please remind me again; why does there have to be a road there? IS there some special demand to get from South Dallas to 183? Or just politics because it was in the original package?

and is the alignment you mention in the pdf briefing. If it's the one I'm thinking it is, what an injustice. What a frustration. Why does a freeway(that's what it is) have to be on or along the levee? I'm just lost on why this just HAS to be there.

**JaeTex** · 24 June 2003, 05:23 PM

Isn't it because alot of the funding is to come from the state and feds and they are way more interested in speedings suburbanites through downtown than in the welfare of the city of Dallas. They don't care if DT Dallas is strangled to death by highways.

But is this current plan better than NO plan? Realistically doesn't this represent the best chance for a step forward that we are likely to see for 20 years.

**jsoto3** · 25 June 2003, 01:43 AM

the alignment is indicated in the newest pdf. i personally believe that additional highway capacity for the future should be accommodated in additional lanes on I-35, not in a new tollway along the river. i believe the current plan to be better than no plan, but worse than previous plans, and there is no reason that with little effort it could be actually transformed into a grand vision (without a tollway, but with a true levee-top parkway on both sides along the entire length of the river) and not a compromised devolution of previous plans.

**jsoto3** · 25 June 2003, 01:48 AM

i don't understand why there hasn't been an open international competition for trinity river corridor visions. does anyone suppose that it is not too late to suggest this to the mayor?

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcont...way.c76b6.html

gc · 25 June 2003, 10:31 AM

I feel your pain jsoto.

I am sure that nothing is set in stone yet....assuming anything actually happens.

It probably is way too late for an international competition now, especially if we ever want to see anything happen.

**mikedsjr** · 25 June 2003, 12:01 PM

Ok, This was in the Great Trinity Forest Park Report on the page labeled Wetland Cell A,B,C and D.

The majority of trees sampled do not meet criteria for a protected tree under the City of Dallas Tree Ordinance

I trust the enviromental groups to help do what is best. Im just not sure about the City of Dallas.

I haven't seen this area. So i really don't know how accessible or how much of a dumb idiots of Dallas have made this look.

Can anyone give me some feedback about its current shape its in?

Also, How close to the Trinity river could they build skyscrapers? That seems in some ways a really neat way to bring people to the DTD. Go to lunch outside by the river at one of the parks.

**boozo** · 25 June 2003, 01:21 PM

I went to the meeting last night.

This is only another idea. The other options are still on the table. They said the council will vote on the alignment of the road soon(I forget exactly when she said,) so I imagine the council will vote according to what their constituents tell them.

I hope everyone here has written the mayor and the council members, otherwise we will be stuck with whatever they choose.

An interesting part of this plan was restoring the meadering curves to the river.

And for the first time I noticed that the Woodall Rogers bridge intersects the Continental bridge at Singleton. Perhaps that is why Calatrava changed the design of the bridge.

**jsoto3** · 25 June 2003, 01:35 PM

mike,

at the "special" council briefing on monday, the first presentation was given by bryan kilburn on the great trinity forest (he compiled the report you are speaking of). i was very impressed. i don't know if you read his credentials in the report, but i trust he knows what he is talking about. he has a bachelors in forestry and he did his GIS masters thesis at UT on the great trinity forest. he started with the city as a transportation GIS analyst and eventually became part of the trinity river corridor office where he begaon to systematically sample the forest and continue the outstanding GIS mappings from his thesis. what he was saying in your quote was not to suggest that the trees found are not of value, simply that technically, they do not meet the size/age requirements to be protected by city code, enabling the corps of engineer to legally remove most of the trees needed in the proposed wetland cells. most of the larger hard wood trees will be preserved within the wetland cells. the corps drew their boundaries to have the least negative impact (removal of special trees) on the forest. bryan did show many pictures within the areas and it appeared to be very densely filled with very young small trees; alot of the area sits in standing water and is swamp-like, relatively inaccessible. trails are planned throughout the forest and wetland areas in order to provide easy access. he seemed to have no quarrel with removing most of the smaller trees he is referring to in your quote, based mostly on the aesthetic value as a forest, but also because for the most part, these new growth areas in the forest have become vulnerable monocultures relatively devoid of wildlife that would not be there naturally had we not disturbed the land so much in the recent past. he prefers to see a more diverse wetland ecosystem in their place which draws more wildlife. he alo feels this way (more diverse forest habitat) about many other parts of the forest, not just the wetland cells. i'm very excited about him being involved in the project. it seems that he is now the city's head guy on the great forest, which is good.

also, as for your comment on skyscrapers being developed close to the river, that is one of the main ideas for the whole project, to bring development (not necessarily skyscrapers) right to the river's edge (the levees) so that people can easily access it and help bring it into the greater dallas consciousness.

**jsoto3** · 25 June 2003, 01:51 PM

boozo,

i agree with you. but i do know that the mayor favors this most recent plan and i fear that most of the council does as well. as for the bridge, i don't know why the design changed. my guess is economics. the new design has far less structure than the previous design, and probably simpler to build. according to the 1999 trinity river corridor master implementation plan by halff associates, the woodall bridge was always meant to land right where continental meets the levee in order to connect to singleton. the plan called for continental to be converted to pedetrian use only so that an overly-complicated vehicular intersection would not be needed. i am not sure what the status of that idea is now. i hope continental remains a vehicular bridge, but with enhanced pedestrian access.

**mikedsjr** · 25 June 2003, 02:17 PM

jsoto,

I noticed the information about red foxes. You may know that they have been extirpated from Texas. I was wondering if they would try to reintroduce them there into that forest when the ecosystem is right?

**Horn96** · 26 June 2003, 12:00 PM

Great column from Jacquielynn Floyd today that pretty much sums up my feelings on the Trinity River plan.

http://www.dallasnews.com/localnews/...oyd.1c9f9.html

There is no way to please everybody with this plan and it's time to start moving foward rather than bickering. If Dallas really wants to be a "can do" city it's time to (excuse my language) but shit or get off the pot.

gc · 26 June 2003, 12:09 PM

Hey Horn96,
I moved your post to this current thread.

I think she summed up a lot of people's feelings on the Trinity River Project. I would like to see progress on this matter.

**jsoto3** · 28 June 2003, 02:52 AM

the presentation given at the city council briefing last monday is now available online in pdf format in 12 parts:

http://www.thedallasplan.com/cac/default.htm

**tamtagon** · 28 June 2003, 11:54 PM

The levees should be replaced.

**jsoto3** · 29 June 2003, 12:09 PM

Tamtagon,

What exactly do you mean? Could you be more specific? They should be replaced: with what? how? where? why? This could be very interesting . . . .

**tamtagon** · 29 June 2003, 03:28 PM

I'm thinking the best way to maintain traffic flow during the highway replacement addressed through Project Pegasus is to just build a new roads and interchanges. When the new highway is finished, redevelop present highway surface areas like Stemmons and The Canyon into boulevards offering speedy local access capable of handling high volume.

The new highway could built into the side of the current levee. As the highway is build, the entire northern edge of the Trinity through downtown Dallas (from just south of Hwy 183 to as far east as I-45) receives concrete embankment. Essentially "waterproffing" the northern edge of the levees through downtown. The highway is build as double decker - enclosed on the south side.

As the mind wanders: the anticipated downtown Dallas Trinity river bridges could be build into the the cantileivered upper deck (building a bigger, better landmark), more green space would be available to downtown workers and visitors, Turtle Creek Park could be extended to Trinity Park, a lake could be build, the river could flow naturally.

**mikedsjr** · 30 June 2003, 12:15 PM

Horn96,

That's all well and good, but in the governmental structure of Dallas, things are not going to get done in a quick manner.

**mikedsjr** · 30 June 2003, 12:54 PM

Maybe its the envirormental side of me that is concerned about this project. And i am sure that there are many people here who want to see Dallas become a world class city. I want to be balanced, but i would rather take out the tollway all together. And if they say they will not do this plan without the tollway, then fine. Its better to keep it is.

I will get back on some emails issued to enviromental groups that the plans say the study says they asked for input from.

I've only recieved an email from the Sierra Club so far, and they weren't really happy with the project direction. They mention that there were "less destructive and less costly approaches which should be pursued". They went on to list a few ideas they had, and i can add them later if interested.

**jsoto3** · 02 July 2003, 11:32 PM

Pointless Exercise
How they got the media to miss the point on the Trinity River
BY JIM SCHUTZE
jimschutze@mindspring.com

If we really want to get those guys we've captured in Iraq to crack, the way to do it is with very long PowerPoint presentations. Or, as I have come to think of them, What's the Point presentations.
I sat through more than four hours of PowerPoint on the Trinity River plan last week at City Hall--the things with the home-movie screen and the laptop computer where the guy talks, and then what he says is printed out in big block letters on the movie screen, and he points to his own words with a laser pointer while he speaks them. The only way they could possibly make it more like a root canal would be to have a mime troupe acting out the letters of the words.

The big news last week? The Trinity River project will cost way more than any new tax base it will supposedly create. But you didn't see that in The Dallas Morning News, did you? And long before they ever got to that point in the presentation, the TV people had all fallen over in a dead faint, packed up their gizmos and left, so you didn't see it on TV, either. I fainted for a while, too, but I had nowhere else to go.

Costs more than any new tax base it will create in the next 30 years!

The purpose of What's the Point presentations is to make you forget what the point is so that when it's finally your turn to ask questions, you'll be so wacked out you'll ask things like, "Where do birds come from?" Oh, my goodness. At City Hall I thought I was going to die.

Way in the back of my mind I kept thinking: "Hey, wait a minute. They're showing pictures of this exciting new plan to rebuild the Trinity River where it runs through downtown Dallas, and it's got a big fat stinko expressway on top of the river."

I thought that was the point of the last five years of battle over this dumb deal. In 1998, they said they wanted to put a stinko expressway on top of the river. We got rid of the gang who were running City Hall. We elected this big scary bomb-thrower named Laura Miller for mayor, because mainly we just wanted City Hall to shut up and fix the damn potholes.

So now she's the mayor. She raised private money to bring in all these guys from Harvard to study how to do the river the right way. Finally they're showing us their What's the Point presentation. And it's still got this big stinko highway on top of the river.

I'm sitting there thinking, "It cannot be. Laura Miller is not up there proposing a big fat highway on top of the river."

Finally, four hours into it, the council members started getting a chance to respond. Sandy Greyson represents the nosebleed district, No. 12, so far north that everybody in it speaks with a Yankee accent. She pushed up her sleeves and balled her fists and went right to that big fat expressway thing.

First Greyson asked for--and did not receive--a guarantee that the highway being presented by the Harvard team, once it's on the ground and a fact of life, won't be fattened up and turned into even more of a road hog by adding lanes. She said she really wanted to get that information as soon as possible. Otherwise, she said, "We have spent a great deal of time, energy, effort and money to go from an eight-lane high-speed toll road to a six-lane high-speed toll road. I don't believe that's what the public wants."

Greyson objected to the way the whole stinko expressway thing was being touted: "The background material continually refers to it as a 'parkway,'" she said. "This is a toll road. It's not a parkway. It's a toll road, and it's a high-speed toll road. It's not a low-speed parkway. And that may be OK with this council. And that may be OK with the public. But I would at least like to call it what it is. Let's not spin it right away.

"Let's call it what it is, and let's see if the public indeed wants it and if this is what they voted for and this is what they want to see in that corridor."

Lois Finkelman represents District 11, mainly north of Forest Lane. Think of a crazy ex-hippie earth mother. Now turn around four times, squint your eyes, stamp your foot and concentrate on the exact opposite. I think you're getting Lois Finkelman.

But Finkelman was like Greyson: She waded into it kickin' butt and takin' names: "I have to tell you I was very disappointed with today's briefing," she said. "I appreciated the materials. I appreciated the pretty pictures. I appreciated some of the information. But I was very frustrated, because there were not any hard numbers."

She said she had sent a memo to the responsible city staff members months ago asking for exactly the kind of numbers she did not see in the presentation. "I was disappointed that this wasn't a more complete picture."

Finkelman pointed out that the pictures of lakes with sailboats on them that were part of the presentation left a raft of very important underlying issues unanswered: "What's missing in terms of the analysis of that is the hydrology of those lakes."

In fact, the way the proposed lakes actually work is extremely important in terms of what it will cost the taxpayers of Dallas to own and operate them--all missing from the presentation.

"What kind of sediment will or won't occur?" Finkelman asked. "How long will or will not those lakes be flooded, at what level of flood? How often do they have to be dredged?"

A huge irony for me is that I know Laura Miller went through exactly this exercise herself when she first went on the council and started trying to get a handle on the Trinity River project. She called Rob Allyn, the PR guy who'd produced the original television commercials in 1998 for the Trinity River bond election, and asked him where he'd gotten the data to support images of people sailing on a big lake downtown. She said Allyn laughed. He didn't have any data. His graphics people just got on their Macs and whomped up a pretty picture.

Now Miller's the mayor. Allyn works for her now. She's showing the council pretty pictures of lakes with sailboats on them with no hydrological data to back them up. And I'm in the back of the room half-dazed, talking obstreperously to myself.

Part of the presentation of the What's the Point guys from Harvard was a series of bar graphs, yellow bars and purple bars and blue bars, which they shuffled through kind of quickly: Here we see a lot of purple bars poking down, and now we see a lot of blue bars poking up, and white bars poking sideways, and the little red dot from the laser pointer is going 'round and 'round, and the glazed eyes of the council members are going 'round and 'round as if they are 13 cats watching the same butterfly.

I was sure I couldn't be seeing what I seemed to be seeing. Later at my desk I spent a good many hours poring over copies of the bar charts. Finally I did a conference call with the city's consultant in Dallas and the economist in Boston who had devised the charts, and who was kind enough to put up with my very considerable economic shortcomings.

But the point was exactly what I had thought the point might be when I was losing the point in the What's the Point presentation: All of the freeway and roadway alternatives being considered at City Hall will have very serious negative financial impacts on City Hall. All of them. For 30 years. And that's taking into account what seem to be fairly aggressive assumptions about development and new tax base that will be spurred by the road project.

Now, pause with me. You know how they always tell us that if we borrow money through huge bond issues for huge public works projects, the projects will "grow the tax base" by spurring development, and by George we'll get rich. And you know how we always wonder why, if we're so rich, we can't fix the potholes?

This is it. This was the answer, buried in the What's the Point presentation. And I'm not sure that any of the council people saw it, not even old Mitchell Rasansky who thinks he's so smart.

According to the study presented to the council: 1) You take all of the new development that will be spurred by the new highway and all of the new taxes that will be collected. 2) You subtract out the cost of building the road. 3) Over 30 years, the city comes out $35 million to $65 million in the hole, depending on which road we build.

The very best fiscal impact on the city is from building the park with no road at all--a negative hit of only $15 million over 30 years.

Sure, new freeways are great for the people who get to redevelop the land on their borders. They make out like bandits. Their land goes from zero to 60 in 10 seconds, with our gasoline.

But we lose. To say nothing of the fact that the road ruins the one thing we might have gotten out of this--the damn park.

This is why they can't fill the potholes. They keep giving away the store. And the worst news is that Laura Miller, the bomb-thrower we sent in there to clean it up, is already dancing the mad fandango with the big boys, showing us sailboat pictures and telling us a big old stinko highway is a garden path.

What's the point?

dallasobserver.com | originally published: July 3, 2003

**mikedsjr** · 03 July 2003, 09:13 AM

Great article!

And I hope that they don't build this highway. Oops. I meant "Parkway that people drive 80 miles an hour on". If they don't listen to the enviromental groups and their proposals, then I will laugh my head off at the Dallasites because their still complaining about potholes.

Nothing like sitting on a beautiful river listening to high speed car chases on the highway think, "This is the life".

gc · 03 July 2003, 09:28 AM

That was a good article. I think this topic promises to be interesting over the next couple of years.

**Gen5Dallas** · 03 July 2003, 10:28 AM

Beautiful river?

**psukhu** · 03 July 2003, 10:40 AM

They want to build the parkway to improve traffic flow from 183 to I-45.

Instead of fighting for the parkway, why don't they just improve the existing highways and speed up contruction of the Northwest/Southeast DART lines?

The streets and developments in and around the new Trinity development should look like State-Thomas.

**jsoto3** · 03 July 2003, 12:53 PM

Psukhu, I completely agree.

As for the highway, I don't understand why no one (particularly the city council) has questioned how a 55mph speed limit would be enforced. Probably because it wouldn't. There is no way to.

I don't know how the idea for this highway started, but it seems to me that the problem is NTTA. I wonder, can they just decide to build anything they when they want and where they want it? Can the city just say, "hey, we don't need or want your stinking highway, shove it . . . . "?

I don't if any of you have seen the latest Project Pegasus plans (phase 3) for the Mixmaster, but it is getting worse and worse. The proposed size and complexity of the I-35/I-30 intersection blows away the 'High Five.' We can just forget about any potential for development in the area, and hence any meaningful connection to the Trinity. I am beginning to think we should 'Big Dig' its ass: have the mainlanes and their connections in mined tunnels beneath the river (they plan to do it with LBJ afterall); have all local traffic exit and cross the river on signature bridges (with fewer lanes, more pedestrian oriented) and flow onto a major boulevard which replaces the existing at-grade highway intersection. And most imprtantly, NO Trinity highway!!

**JaeTex** · 03 July 2003, 02:33 PM

jsoto love your plan. Why does LBJ rate being partially buried and the the roads strangling DT do not?

Personally,
I would vote for a ton of money to just do the Trinity parks and river stuff, with the only roads being designed to allow access, whether or not it increases the tax base to pay for it. Skip the tollway/parkway etc. and tell the 'burbs and the state to go f* themselves on the roads and let them solve their problem about having to slow down as they zoom past DT on their own without touching our lovely new urban jewel.

I know it's unlikely, and I probably will calm down, but while I want to reduce the cost let's not forget to see the forest for the trees. The primary goal is to turn the Trinity from a forgotten piece of land to our biggest asset after DFW(because it can be).

**Quiz03** · 03 July 2003, 02:42 PM

the tunneled LBJ lanes will be HOV/Managed lanes meaning that tolls will be charged if there aren't enough people in the car. TxDOT is really doing this as a demonstrator to show that managed lanes can work. All future urban freeway expansions will include some sort of toll element just because it is another source of revenue and TxDOT can't build all the highway mileage that is supposedly needed. The only way to do some tunneling for I-35 would be to charge tolls, but politically that is a disaster and the federal government would have to approve that.

**Gen5Dallas** · 03 July 2003, 08:44 PM

During any of these presentations, or in any of the pretty brochures, has anyone seen a proposal to relocate the Lew Sterrett County Jail and the State Jail across the street?

No matter how nice the view, how delicious the eggs benedict, I can't see the ambience of Sunday brunch at the sidewalk cafe being enhanced by..

"Yo, dude, I just got outta jail. And the cops, they took my money, man! I just need two dollar, two dollar for the bus to get back home..."
___
___
___

And not just at brunch. When you bond out, you wait until they've collected a group. The county jail by itself coughs out clusters of defendants who've made bail at least every hour, 24x/day, 7 days/week.

**214** · 03 July 2003, 08:52 PM

why dont they just lower the speed limit on the "parkway" to like 30-35mph like anyother street 55mph is to much its going to scare away pedestrians

**boozo** · 06 July 2003, 09:15 AM

At the meeting I went to on the newest proposal, I mentioned the tunnels under LBJ and asked why we couldn't do the same for the highway or even put them under stemmons.

Her reply was that they evaluated over 30 alignments for the road and determined that underground would be too expenisive.

I then asked well how much would people pay as a toll? She ignored me and moved on.

The more I think about it, I wish I could have asked what their criteria was for evaluating the 30 different alignments because every consulting firm seems to endorse the plan with the biggest flaws. For example, take the the latest plan. They put the road inside the levee and CONSTRUCT a wall to hide it from the river. Does this make sense when the levee is a natural wall that could seperate the river and road? How much to build a new wall?

Take a look of the area outside the east levee from Commerce to Inwood. It's a swampy ditch bordered by the back walls of the many warehouses. They are perserving the worst part while destroying the most beautiful!

Obviously, these many consulting firms are influenced by the many landowners that pay for these studies (one of the first few pages of the powerpoint). They are all promoting 'inside the levee' because the city already owns that property and won't have to take their golden goose.

**boozo** · 10 July 2003, 02:04 PM

Idiot's Highway
That toll road they want for the Trinity is a loser
BY JIM SCHUTZE
jimschutze@mindspring.com

This schematic is supposed to show how you could use the proposed Trinity River toll road to get around downtown. If you can figure it out, you may qualify for a Nobel Prize or something.

Just try this one little fact on for size: The expressway they want to build on top of the Trinity River will make the traffic worse on Central Expressway.
Not better. Worse. And it will make traffic worse on parts of Interstate 30, too.

The amount of improvement it will deliver to the "mixmaster," our horrible highway interchange at the foot of downtown, is much less than you've been imagining--marginal, at best.

So you figured--because we all figured--that at least building an expressway on top of the river would take some of the heat out of the mixmaster and make the downtown expressways viable at rush hour. That's why they said we had to build it: to relieve the traffic downtown.

What I'm telling you, based on engineering studies done for the city and for the North Texas Tollway Authority, is that it's not at all clear the new expressway will do any of what its promoters want us to believe. It may even make things worse. For us.

Next month the Dallas City Council will make a major decision on whether to commit to this road--an irrevocable life-or-death verdict for the river as a natural space at the heart of our city. And I don't get the sense that any of them is really tuned in to the stakes.

Let me digress to offer a little metaphor: There's a wonderful short story by Robert Traver, a Michigan lawyer and judge who wrote in the 1960s about trout fishing. In it he tells how his father--a well-off bar-owner in Michigan's Upper Peninsula at the turn of the century, who was sort of a blow-hard small-town drunk and semi-lousy parent--got angry because the pond he owned had no trout in it and a neighboring body of water did. Traver's father hired a gang of workmen with picks and dynamite to dig a canal through solid granite from the neighboring pond to his, so that the trout would swim over where he could catch them. But his father didn't think about elevations.

With the whole town out in the middle of the woods watching--band playing, free whiskey--Traver's father ordered the last plug of granite blown from the canal. The blast! A moment of silence. Then a huge scary sucking noise like the devil's toilet as all the water in Traver's father's pond rushed out down the canal and into the neighboring pond, leaving him with an empty hole and a very red face.

You have to do all the measurements before you push the plunger. All the measurements.

Let me give you a few other clues in the toll-road mystery: Dallas taxpayers voted in 1998 to approve $79 million in bond money for a new road along the river downtown. The toll-road alternatives the city council is looking at now will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $530 million to $660 million. The toll-road agency will be able to kick in between $90 million and $150 million.

Depending on the configuration, that leaves red ink to the tune of $370 million to $430 million for this road.

So far, no one is talking about the city having to chip in any of that amount. But the toll-road builders are limited in what they can contribute: Whatever they put in they have to be able to cash back out in tolls at some point. They don't just hand out their money for free.

So we need several hundreds of millions from somebody to do this road. The big cash cow everybody keeps looking to is the Texas Department of Transportation. And, in fact, there's a chance they might kick in.

But the state is not exactly allowed to give money away for free, either, sadly enough, or we could all just put in for the cash. The state, whose money is pooled with federal funds, has to get a certain bang for its buck.

This brings us to a very key figure in all of this Trinity River road talk: Michael Morris, transportation director of the North Central Texas Council of Governments. Morris is a great champion of this road, as was former Dallas County Judge Lee Jackson. Morris was instrumental last March in getting an important planning delegation from our area to go to Austin and tell TxDOT this road needs to be high on the agency's list of must-do's.

So what does Morris like about this road? He talks in terms of what he calls "radial improvements."

"If you don't provide additional capacity downtown," he told me, "we cannot make radial improvements."

What are radial improvements? Well, it's all about taking traffic that's way out on the periphery of the city and helping it get through the city. That's the only reason the state would consider contributing hundreds of millions still needed for this road--because the state sees the road helping people move from one far-flung portion of the metro area to another, not around downtown.

Last week I spent some time poring over a study commissioned by the North Texas Tollway Authority in 2000 to predict the effect that a new toll road along the river would have on surrounding traffic patterns. It was here I noticed traffic getting worse on Central, I-30 and Woodall Rodgers Freeway if the new toll road is built, according to this study. But what's even more striking are the very modest amounts of improvement the study predicts for the mixmaster and for all of the freeways downtown with the new road.

The mixmaster looks like it comes in for about a 4 percent drop in traffic, fewer than 7,000 cars a day out of 202,000. The very best bang for the buck is along Stemmons Freeway northwest of downtown, where you get a drop of about 23,000 cars a day, but that's still only a 7 percent relief from the 313,400 cars a day you'd have on Stemmons without the new toll road.

And again, several key segments of the freeway system downtown show actual increases in traffic with the new toll road built--more congestion--as opposed to what would be there if the new road were not built at all.

But here is the other amazing and intriguing piece of the puzzle: The NTTA study shows some very stiff traffic volumes on the new toll road, predicted the minute it opens, if it opens in 2007. They're predicting about 40,000 to 65,000 cars a day along most of the new road.

So what is that all about? If this new road is taking as many as 65,000 cars out of the existing road system, why is traffic going to be worse on Central, and why are the benefits so minuscule in the mixmaster and elsewhere?

Isn't it possible that the new road, far from pushing traffic out of the core of the city, is sucking it in? Isn't that what Morris' philosophy of radialism is really all about? And do we want more traffic and more pollution and more automobile congestion downtown? Do we want holes in our heads?

You can bet bringing more cars downtown is what the developers along the proposed route want. They keep marching around City Hall chanting "Access is success." Sure it is. For them.

But why would we let the people who happen to own land along the river run our future? Even the people in Forney are too smart to turn over all of the planning and public investment policy for their town to the four guys who own fireworks stands out on Highway 80.

There is a real possibility that building this road will blow out the plug in the canal and suck in all kinds of suburban traffic. Big traffic is like big water: If we don't make sure we know what all of the measurements are, we could drown.

I also spent some time studying the connections they propose to tie the road into the rest of the city. I was thinking about how you and I could use the new road to get from other parts of the city to downtown. This is what I came up with, based on the way they have it laid out. Let's say you were in the Park Cities, and you wanted to use it to get downtown. Here's how you would go:

Take Mockingbird Lane all the way across town past Love Field to the intersection of Stemmons Freeway and 183. Get on the service road for the new toll road going southeast to Hampton-Inwood Road, where you will get on the new toll road for 1.5 miles. Get off just before Continental Avenue, divert to Industrial Boulevard for a little less than a mile, then take Commerce Street into downtown under the triple underpass. Or you could stay on the toll road to I-35E, but then you could only get off to go south across the river into Oak Cliff, where you would get off at Colorado Boulevard, loop back under and onto the freeway, come back across the river, take I-35E north and get off at Reunion.

Sure. Or you could stay on the toll road all the way into South Dallas, take Martin Luther King Boulevard to I-45 north and then drive back up to downtown. But you'd have to be an idiot first.

This road is designed to get people from somewhere around the D/FW airport to Seagoville. It won't be built entirely with our money, but it will entirely ruin the one enormous asset in this picture that is ours alone--the Trinity River where it runs through the heart of the city. All of the supposed benefits of the road--so dubious, anyway, the closer we look--have to be balanced against this one devastating cost.

What if we took our $79 million and built parks and fountains downtown instead? Maybe it's time we act like a city and not let a bunch of suburban regional-schmegionals run all over our backs and churn our downtown to mush.Idiot's Highway Idiot's Highway

**boozo** · 10 July 2003, 02:08 PM

Jim SCHUTZE says the vote on the road alignment will be next month.

Does anyone know the exact date of the vote?

**JaeTex** · 10 July 2003, 06:49 PM

I really want to like the whole Trinity project and was talked into liking the road plans because it would mean we would get the parks.

But if the state, or whoever, is on record as saying that the justification is improving flow for the burbs and therefore increasing DT pollution as soccer mom SUVs zoom around with no one in any of the 9 passenger seats then I am out.

Let's shell out the money to build the parks alone, and just build access roads and laugh at the burbs. I may be motivated to write my council person.