Chances are that, although you are probably not from Dallas, Texas, you know a few things about it. You might know it’s hot. You might have heard the theme song from the eponymous 1980s television show. And you might even know that Dallas is built strictly for the car. You probably assume, for that matter, that Texans love cars. The fact is, however, that the love affair is more akin to Stockholm syndrome. Texans love cars because they simply have no other choice.

More than 30,000 Americans die each year in automobile accidents. A sane society might call that an epidemic. We call it freedom. Dallas shares with Detroit the honour of being one of the two most car-dependent major metropolitan areas in the US, by percentage of trips by car. Dallas has some of the biggest highways around its downtown of any city. These elevated expressways cut different parts of the city off from each other, constricting growth and investment. Pedestrians in Dallas are a rare breed.



Yet most cities around the world, particularly the beloved ones, lack such heavy automobile infrastructure in their core and still work just fine. Real estate value in even semi-walkable Dallas areas is shooting through the roof, suggesting severe pent-up demand for places where you can actually, you know, walk. Even here in Texas, the land of the free and the free to be run over, bike sharing systems have sprouted, and a new bullet train may be the first of its kind in the country.



So why not remove some of the elevated highways and start rebuilding what was once there – places to live, work, shop and play? Everything we wish to recreate without actually having to go to the difficult steps of reversing the inertia of sprawl and the infrastructure that allows it? According to US department of commerce census data, Dallas County has lost 266,000 jobs over a 10-year span. Not all of Texas booms.

The Dallas skyline from the Klyde Warren Park arts district. Photograph: Alamy Photograph: Alamy

A group of people, myself included, therefore proposed a project called anewdallas.com, to remove the oldest freeway bounding downtown Dallas, the technocratically named IH-345. This is the second most famous road in Dallas, behind one that doesn’t even exist: a proposed toll highway through the Trinity river floodplain, a patch of green we hope to someday be our central park.



You might have thought proposing to remove a 40-year-old hulking husk of infrastructure already crumbling on its own accord – a bad investment in the first place – would be easy. Not so. Having since been called everything from an egoist to a socialist to a greedy friend-of-developers communist, I know that reversing the grinding gears of inertia rarely is.



The change in political discourse, however, has been rapid. The Dallas Morning News posted about it nearly every day, twice putting it on the cover of the print edition; D Magazine made it the centrepiece of an issue. The Dallas Observer bumped it off the cover at the last minute in favour of an S&M convention. You win some, you lose some.

Highways over people: is it time to fight back? Photograph: Alamy Photograph: Alamy

Our biggest problem, however, remains our lack of self-determination. We’ve empowered traffic engineers to make all of our most important decisions for us. How will the city look and operate? “Well, let’s consult the manual. Ah yes, this road must operate at level of service ‘A’.” What does that mean? “It means the road must be improved – widened.”

We are behind the learning curve. We are not yet fully aware of what walkable cities can do for us or what we can do for walkable cities. We need a real public discourse about what is the best way to apply our public dollars to maximise both public and private good. What is best for our city’s long-term health, wealth and resilience? At the very least, that dialogue has begun.



Highway and cities: people haven’t taken this much concern in such a tedious topic since the Cowboys’ last 8-8 season. They just needed to know they had a voice. If Dallas citizens were to be successful in killing off one proposed highway and removing a second, it would be a true Texas miracle indeed.

Patrick Kennedy of Car Free in Big D is an urban designer and planner who runs the campaign A New Dallas

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