A couple of weeks ago, Mayor Mike Rawlings announced at a rather strange-sounding event at Babb Bros BBQ that he had put together a task force of experts who would look at the Trinity Roll Road and make sure it was “special” and of the “highest quality.” Afterwards, there was speculation about what the move meant. Tim wrote that the entire ordeal may be part of a political charade set up to cover the mayor, who quietly wants to kill the toll road. After all, as architect Larry Good says in Tim’s post, none of the experts chosen for the panel are the types of urban thinkers likely to recommend a high-speed, six-lane toll road with limited access points. If the experts say the road is too big, the mayor could throw up his hands and back off slowly.
In the comments of Tim’s post, Angela Hunt disagreed. She pointed out that too many longtime toll road stalwarts were funding the task force to assume that they all suddenly jumped on the anti-toll road bandwagon. Instead, Hunt supposed that the strategy was two-fold: 1) dampen the conversation about the road and remove it as a litmus test for city council candidates next May by giving pro-road candidates a way out (“I’m with the smart urban guys on the task force”); and 2) to rally the toll road lovers’ troops by saying the design can still be tweaked — it can still be a really “special” toll road if we just get the smart urban guys to do charrettes.
Mark Lamster simply asked the experts to stand up Dallas. For his part, Jim Schutze saw the charade as yet another instance of Dallas’ out-of-touch elite turning to outside experts to endorse top-down solutions to urban problems, the city’s trusty, age-old way of going about getting things wrong, adding that: “The mayor’s ‘redesign’ effort is only the most recent of a series of clumsy attempts from the very beginning by the coiffed heads to change the topic to bells and whistles in order to head off any discussion of not building it.”
I was left wondering about the smart urban guys. Sure, they’re all likely getting a nice pay check for their efforts, which may be motivation enough to stick their noses into all this business. And they all have deep experience parachuting into controversy and knowing how to blast their way back out of town. But what are their marching orders? What – or how much – are they were expected to do in Dallas? Would they join a task force that was little more than a political charade or which couldn’t actually suggest any changes that were meaningful?
I set about trying to reach them to find out and, not terribly surprising, discovered that none of them wanted to talk about the Dallas project. For details, the three (of the six) task force members who responded to me said I should talk not to the mayor, but to former City Manager Mary Suhm. Turns out this is really Suhm’s task force on the Trinity Toll Road. There was one planner who would talk, Jeff Tumlin. I interviewed Tumlin for our issue on turning urban highways to boulevards, and I met him when he was in town not too long ago for the AIA Dallas/ Greater Dallas Planning Council’s Transportation Summit. Tumlin’s remarks at that event and his track record don’t exactly paint him as a guy you’d expect to advocate for adding a highway in a flood plain. So I asked him if what he believed his or the task force’s role would be in Dallas.
“I have no idea,” Tumlin said. “I know we are doing something.”
Tumlin does think they can do something. Much of the skepticism over whether or not the task force can actually make meaningful suggestions revolves around the fact that the engineering studies that have been submitted to the federal government for environmental review already spell out the size and scope of the proposed road. However, Tumlin says the feds are only meant to approve the “biggest or most impactful thing” that can be built.
“You don’t have to build the thing that was cleared,” he said. “It just can’t be more impactful than the thing that was cleared.”
He also believes that when it comes to the toll way — as well as the I-345 debate — he believes that Dallas is, “asking overly simplistic questions” about transportation issues.
“I’m seeing some of the same over simplification here: ‘Should we build it or do nothing at all?’” he said. “One of the reasons why I think I’m being asked to help is that we take a more systematic approach. What are all of the goals and objectives, and is there another design solution that fits those goals and objects better?”
Fair enough, but the task force hasn’t been picked to take a comprehensive look at Dallas transportation system, but rather to focus on one specific road. So will Tumlin even have leverage to take the systematic approach he believes is necessary? He said he would have more ideas after the task force meets for the first time this month. So, still curious about specifics, I decided to follow everyone’s advice and reach out to Suhm.
Here are a few things to know about Mary Suhm. She says she’s an optimist. She says she believes in the potential of getting creative people in a room to tackle difficult challenges in the city. She says she’s still involved in this fight because she cares about her community. She says she’s not a traffic expert, and she reminded me that I’m not either. She also said that the task force wasn’t dreamed up because of the huge amount of public sentiment that has swelled against the toll road of late. Instead, she said, seeing that the federal environmental impact study is about to be complete, it seemed like a good time to “just look at it one more time.” In other words, this is all just business as usual. Pay no attention to the doubts about how we’re going to afford to build this thing, or questions regarding the NTTA’s contract with the city, or the many former toll road backers jumping ship, or efforts underway to effectively turn the May city council elections into a referendum on the toll road by fielding slates of anti-toll road candidates. Suhm says it is just the right time to roll in the national experts again to look at the Trinity Toll Road.
But why is a task force of urban experts coming to Dallas to redesign a road that is essentially designed? Like Tumlin, Suhm argued that there is wiggle room within the plans that have already been sent to the feds for completion of the Environmental impact Study (the EIS). In fact, she said one of the things that she liked about Tumlin’s approach to urban and transportation problems was his insistence on taking a “systematic” approach. That’s why she wanted him on the team. But, she added, the team will have to stay in line with the Balanced Vision Plan and the EIS. What does that mean? Well, she said, the road would have to provide capacity for moving 100,000 cars per day. I was confused.
How could the task force suggest anything meaningful if there are already so many parameters and stipulations set for the overall design, scale, scope, and capacity of the road? What could change? The number of exits? The lanes? Tolling? How would changes affect the tenuous plans for funding the road? Would funding considerations be a part of the design team’s prerogatives for redesign? Suhm said I was making too many assumptions. We don’t know what the experts are going to suggest. We have to wait and see what they say. But we do know one thing the task force won’t suggest: not building the road. That option, Suhm says, is not on the table. I also couldn’t get Suhm to speak about funding. She said she wouldn’t address it until we find out what the experts think about re-jiggering our road.
So, we know this much about the task force: we must wait for the task force. Backers of the road can now wait for the task force. Even the members of the task force are waiting on the task force to find out what the task force can do.
I can agree with Suhm about this: I do like the idea of bringing in a slate of the best minds in urban planning and letting them lose on rethinking the city. Sure, historically that approach hasn’t really worked for Dallas. George Kessler’s plan was half-heartedly implemented; Vincent Ponte’s plan ravaged downtown. We have an archive of plans that are the product of name brand thinkers, lots of private investment, some good ideas, hazy policy outcomes, and little to show in terms of progress and improved urban form. But when it comes to transportation, theories and methodology have shifted significantly in recent decades, and we’re still making important decisions about the future based on bad traffic modeling projections, erroneous assumptions about growth and mobility, and tepid attitudes towards what it really takes to reverse 60 years of sprawl-driven infrastructure policy. Dallas – the region, really – could really use a broad-based, systematic rethinking of our transportation system.
But what we really need is to bring these thinkers in with a clean slate and a full scope. Forget the toll road, for a second. Forget I-345. Forget burying and building, decking and toll lane managing. Forget Michael Morris and the NCTCOG and TxDOT and the RTC and the NTTA and the EIS and BVP and whatever else. What this city needs right now is a real conversation about how to completely rethink how our transportation works. Because Tumlin is right, we can’t talk about a single road when the solution has to fit into a system.
But this task force has been created to address a single road issue and it will it consider that road within the confines of some pretty fundamental constraints. And so, it seems that, perhaps even more depressing than being a part of some sort of complicated political charade, this whole ordeal is simply setting up yet another rigged compromise of the kind that has continually dogged the Trinity River Project — and so many others like it in Dallas. We bring in experts and tie their hands.
I suppose we could hope that these experts will say that bells and whistles are not enough; that the toll road doesn’t respect or maximize the value of Dallas’ precious green space; that the road is designed as a traffic corridor and so it creates yet another barrier between downtown and the river. Based on what many of these experts have written and advocate for, they may very well say that even if the road provides a short-term way to move cars from South Dallas homes to North Dallas jobs, it simultaneously works against long term solution of shoring up Dallas job exportation by reversing the effects of sprawl.
In other words, all we can hope for from this task force is that the experts come to town and tell us what we already know. That hardly seems worth waiting for.
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