Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner might be the one talking about a “paradigm shift” in Texas transportation, but it’s Dallas lawmakers and planners who drove it home on Friday.

North Texas officials unveiled a “master assessment process,” called CityMAP, on Friday morning, compiled after conversations with various interests. Led by the Dallas district of the Texas Department of Transportation and engineering firm Howard, Needles, Tammen & Bergendoff, the plan is a big concession to traffic congestion relief through more options and not more asphalt.

In one of the most striking suggestions, TxDOT -- yes, the same people many still call the “highway department” – is considering eliminating Interstate 345 – the connection between Interstate 45 and spur 366 that separates Deep Ellum from downtown.

In addition to being a rather notorious bottleneck, the freeway has also been a barrier between thriving economic centers and low-income communities that have felt cut off by road expansions. That’s been a source of frustration is places like southern Dallas, which hasn’t enjoyed fully in Dallas’ economic gains since 2000.

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings told Brandon Formby of the Dallas Morning News it was a bold statement from TxDOT officials to concede their role in the development disparity.

“I appreciate their intellectual courage to make that point,” Rawlings said. “It shows the progressiveness of this state agency.”

In addition to wholesale freeway changes and a change in perspective, CityMAP also makes a case for using some underutilized streets in Dallas differently, such as expanding bicycle lanes on them or dedicating some of the street to bus-only use. The plan also details and describes desirable locations for elevated parks and public spaces.

The benefit isn’t just one for the pro-biking set, however, or a nouveau set of urban residents seeking to turn Dallas into San Francisco. The plan establishes that burying or removing freeways and replacing them with varied transportation options opens up scores of acres for redevelopment, steps from some of the city’s most prized properties.

The redevelopment, in turn, could create thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in investment in Dallas.

Houston’s overall plan is less defined than the new one in Dallas, but both cities are moving in a similar direction favoring removing freeways in the urban core. Plans for Interstate 45 in downtown Houston, part of a more than $6 billion widening and redesign from the Sam Houston Tollway southward through downtown, call for re-routing the freeway and removing the Pierce Elevated so downtown and Midtown are more connected.

Officials in Houston are also focusing on efforts to interconnect major job centers in the area via things other than general use freeways, ranging from tollways to high-capacity transit such as commuter rail or bus rapid transit.

Along Texas 288, work is scheduled to start later this year or early 2017 on a tollway from the Brazoria County line to U.S. 59 in Houston. The $2.1 billion project is a public-private partnership that joins TxDOT and Blueridge Transportation Group, the builder, for 50 years.

In Uptown, work continues on a $192 million dedicated bus lane meant to link transit centers in Bellaire and north of Interstate 10 via Post Oak. The project, which has faced opposition from skeptics who fear it will deteriorate traffic and amenities on Post Oak, is championed by Uptown officials and Turner, who has continued ex-Houston Mayor Annise Parker’s support of the project.

“We must encourage well-connected urban centers,” Turner told a crowd May 17, extolling the need for more transit and expanded HOV lanes on area freeways.

Proponents of more transit, bicycling and walking and the developments that cater to them point to established neighborhoods surging in popularity with younger residents and recent data that suggests the trend isn’t a blip.

A recent nationwide survey from HNTB, which helped Dallas-area officials with CityMAP plan, found that 55 percent of Americans would be willing to pay a higher mortgage or rent to live in an area where they could get to places for work and play without using a vehicle.