We are leading the freeways without futures tour and so we're heading over to go look at 3:45
Which is the highway segment we're trying to remove at a downtown Dallas?
And instead of actually going all the way to the freeway because it's unsafe
It's nasty there's not even sidewalks in some of these areas
We're actually gonna go to a skyscraper up above the city and look down on the highway and see the whole highway network I guess
the story of
345 and the New Dallas tall this
Started about 12 years ago or so when I moved here to dallas I've never even been to Texas and I lived on one side
of the freeway in the deep ellum neighborhood and would walk under that highway every single day a huge thing as you can see and
every single day
I would just imagine like what else could this be you know it could be anything you seeing highway tear outs happening around the country
and around the world and
Maybe we could do that someday fast forward to 2008 2009 City of Dallas was going through a downtown master plan and that master plan
It explicitly said the highway a loop the inner loop is a problem, but there's nothing we can do about it
So we decided well, let's test that this highway was built in about
1973 when we started looking into this highway and researching it further
We realized that the thing had been structurally failing for about ten years at that point in time
Textile had been fixing the columns if we were actually down under you can see how a lot of the column structure is asymmetric
They're not like parallel
holding up two sides of it because of the way it winds through the city grid the thing is is in bad shape and
We decided before text adI you wouldn't come and show up and start saying hey
we need to move these cars and keep this thing standing and
You know keep going for the next twenty years and they have since come by and said it's going to cost two hundred fifty million
Dollars to do that for 20 years. We said you know let's explore with different priorities in mind. What if we focused on economic development?
Quality of life and just you know restoring the urban fabric so right given the choice
I don't think very many neighborhoods would choose to have a freeway cut through them like you any of you live in a town where
Folks would like the freeway to come through the neighborhood
It's a preposterous notion
It's just a failed experiment all right. We tried. It hadn't been done anything like this before
magnificent effort awesome fail
So let's maybe do something else for a hundred 150 million. We could remove this thing and all of a sudden
We've got land to play with and we can do all sorts of stuff and that in the sense would
Reposition the market so demand would be high and everything else would work outside of that and so we decided let's just do a study
You know let's hypothetically tear the thing out ree stitch all the grids and just see what that gives us
You know how much land could we could we play with how many housing units would that create how many jobs?
What would the park acre inch be that we can create instead of all that and you look alongside of it because the highway is
Not even the major issue. It's like look at everything around it surface parking lots. It's boarded up buildings. There's storage facility
I mean like storage facility in the middle of downtown Dallas so every time we're working on one of these projects
we have this litmus test in mind and the litmus test is does the change reward the short trip or the
Transit trip and if the answer is yes, it's probably a good idea
So we're moving the highway reward short trips and transit trips the construction or widening of a highway
rewards the long Trip and the car trip
So it's kind of anti City by spreading
Cities out lowering their densities that reduces exchange and by almost the very definition of the purpose of cities
It's it's anti a city. There's not a single case where a freeway came out of a city and
It didn't get better
But there's also not a single neighborhood that got better when the freeway went in
So it's actually fairly simple to understand we started playing around with it and found that about 4 billion in Private investment
could be could happen all along in our study boundary includes all that vacant land and service parking loss so for a cost of
What we're looking at 200 million or so. Maybe that escalates other improvements that we want to do
How far do we want to take it South you know we're leveraging
For building and private investment the property tax is generated per year in that areas only about 3 million
We would tame to change that to about one hundred and ten a year right the kind of money that actually could be put towards
Extending the streetcars you know all sorts of other improvements that he wants to do also
It allows us to the the new tax base we could leverage against and build the second downtown dart line
You know we walked along the dart line all four lines
Orange Red blue and Green all come together in that one line and so we can't fit any more trains on the tracks
We can't fit any more lines in the system until we have a second dart line through downtown