Why is the man who apologized for the Trinity River toll road coming back to give it another shot?
Alex Krieger, the urban design professor at Harvard who co-authored Dallas’ decade-old Balanced Vision Plan for the Trinity River, confirms: He will be part of Mayor Mike Rawlings’ “time-out” intended to tweak the Trinity River toll road Krieger apologized for in September. And if you’re not exactly clear what this means yet, well, you’re not alone.
“I don’t know what will come of this,” Krieger said from his Boston offices Tuesday morning. “I do not know. I am glad to come. I am pleased to be invited. I am not sure I have very high expectations. But I am eager to come. I am hopeful something will come out of it.”
In Trinity Groves tomorrow morning Rawlings will detail that Trinity Parkway plan intended to make the long-promised, long-debated road less “divisive.” It will have something to do with the maybe-could-be-who-knows redesign of the nearly nine-mile-long, six-lane-wide high-speed toll road between the levees. Rawlings and former Dallas City Manager Mary Suhm insist it’s possible to make over the path approved by the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, the so-called Alternative 3C. Toll road opponents say this exercise is nothing more than more of the same — a shiny distraction intended to keep the naysayers at bay.
“I hope that it’s not a distraction,” said Krieger. “I think the whole Balanced Vision Plan was a bit of a distraction, as it turned out. Not intentionally so, given [then-Dallas Mayor] Laura Miller’s intentions at the time, and not in the mind of the city council, but to the extent the highway folks were continuing to design their highway, which is why I felt duplicitous 10 years later. We felt we were involved in a process that would be sensitive to the context of the road, but the whole time the highway builders were nodding at us: ‘Parkway, sure, fine, whatever.’”
And in the end, the highway builders got what they wanted, at least on paper. There’s still no money to pay for the road guesstimated to cost upwards of $1.5 billion, and studies have shown a toll road’s not financially viable at four lanes. But in a matter of months, federal and state agencies will OK building the massive toll road along east levee. And in his invite to tomorrow’s meeting, Rawlings wrote that “if the schedule goes as planned, work on the Trinity Parkway will begin in early 2015.”
Krieger, of course, came back to Dallas in September to apologize for his role in planting a high-speed toll road between the levees. And he’ll return in early December for a four-day charrette accompanied by other out-of-towners who’ve been invited to look — yet again — at the toll road. Suhm said invitations have been extended to “transportation engineers, urban designers, economic development people” whose names have not yet been publicly revealed.
“The three, four of us invited are talking heads,” says Krieger. When asked what they’ll be doing, he said that has yet to be determined. “I am not sure we’re going to be sitting there with pencils in hands and drawing the parkway. Or it might be a greater power of persuasion — four, five figures with national reputations all coming to presumably challenge the efficacy of a very big highway to be built within the Trinity Corridor. Maybe that’s one possibility.”
So … we shall see?
But this much is clear: Krieger still supports the idea of a slow-speed, four-lane road along the east levee. He points to Storrow Drive in Boston, along the Charles River, as a possible model for the Trinity Parkway.
“Go back to the time-out of a decade ago,” he said, referring to the Balanced Vision Plan. “A lot of people did not think any road should be inside the levees, that a road would mar the natural wonders of the Trinity. The reason I felt squeamish about all of this, the reason I apologized, was I was a proponent for a road. An awful lot of people at the time said, ‘No road, no road.’ I actually think the wonders of the Trinity depend on having access to it. I often use the example of the Storrow Drive parkway. There’s lot of traffic on it — 60,00 or 70,000 cars a day — and sometimes there are traffic jams, but your’e always part of the river. Your’re aware of the river. You remember its charms. You may think about going back and sitting on the law. The Trinity is just something behind walls we can wax poetic about but has no use to the citizens of Dallas. A road would be a good thing.
“But to the extent my supporting such a thing advances the cause of the highway guys who say, ‘Let’s built a whopper road,’ I felt used. But I still feel a road that could accommodate traffic could be a long-term asset for the citizens of Dallas as long as it’s not involved with the maximum number of lanes and all the on- and off-ramps. I am hoping it will be trimmed back some through this process and the ones that follows. Is it still playing with the devil? That’s what some folks think. Nevertheless, a properly designed road would be good thing long term.”
Oh — and if you weren’t invited to tomorrow’s breakfast meeting, there’s another Trinity Parkway town hall on December 3. Only, this one’s being held by state Rep. Rafael Anchia, who says 93 percent of the Dallasites he recently surveyed want the road to die. Says Anchia this morning via press release, he’s heard nothing but “a constant message of dissatisfaction with the proposed road” from his constituents. And Alex Krieger.
