Dallas dreams of walkability

I spent a few days in the Dallas area earlier this month. It was my first time in Dallas since February 1997. On that earlier trip, I’d found the city deeply depressing. Dallas’s downtown, once apparently a lively place, had hardly any pedestrians. It was as if the city were trying to discourage strolling.  Most of the low structures that had once contained ground-floor shops had been replaced by high-rise office buildings, many of which had blank walls rising thirty or forty feet.

Even the famous flagship branch of Neiman Marcus felt dingy and deserted. It wasn’t clear that Neiman Marcus wanted people to shop there.

A peculiar feature of downtown Dallas was that it was surrounded in part by huge surface and midrise parking facilities.

Bridges and tunnels connected some of these to the office buildings, but the odd thing was that there were few pedestrians even in these off-street links, perhaps in part because there was little commerce along them. It was hard to believe that Dallas’s bridge and tunnel system had been designed in part by Vincent Ponte, who was also responsible for downtown Montreal’s much livelier underground tunnel system.

Even the neighborhoods surrounding downtown seemed pretty dead. There were hardly even any dog walkers, and the narrow pedestrian path I discovered along Turtle Creek just north of downtown had no users.

I acknowledge, of course, that people who find it normal to interact with the world only through the windows of an automobile might not have shared my opinion.

The one feature of Dallas that made a positive impression in 1997 was the just-opened first line of its light-rail system, run by DART, the local transit agency. This new line connected Lovers Lane, a mostly commercial district perhaps six miles (10 km) north of the CBD, with modest neighborhoods southwest of the CBD. The line passed through downtown along a surface street reserved for light-rail vehicles.  The system’s most distinctive component was a mile-long subway section northeast of downtown, which included a station more than a hundred feet (30 m) below the surface. In a country where new transit lines were typically built as cheaply as possible, this segment seemed especially impressive. But it was clear even in 1997 that DART’s light-rail system wasn’t functioning quite as it was supposed to.  There were a large number of people going for joy rides on Sunday afternoon. On weekdays DART’s initial light-rail line had few riders.

I didn’t know it at the time, but it turns out that in Dallas, as in many Sunbelt cities, there was at least the beginning of a movement to change the city’s autocentric form. This movement has had many causes. Among them has been a widespread realization that, in having no dense, healthy inner-city neighborhoods, Dallas and other Sunbelt cities were missing something important. There is also the fact that large automobile-oriented urban places inevitably inspire a certain amount of revulsion as levels of congestion and pollution mount and as travel other than by car becomes more and more difficult.

The decision to build the DART light-rail system was an early result of this movement. As has been true everywhere in the United States when new rail lines are proposed, discussions about whether and what to build went on for many years, but, in the end, the voters of Dallas and many of its suburbs elected to tax themselves to construct the largest light-rail system in the United States, and, in the years since 1997, most of the originally planned lines (with a few changes and a great many federal dollars) have actually been constructed. The current system has 93 route miles (150 km); there are also approximately six route miles (10 km) of streetcar lines and something like 82 route miles (132 km) of “commuter” rail lines consisting of two separate routes, both located to a large extent in the neighboring Fort Worth urban area (these lines, despite the use of the term “commuter,” run all day, although with longer headways than the light-rail lines). The light-rail and streetcar lines radiate from downtown in eight or nine directions, reaching points as far as twenty miles (32 km) out.

Everything now existing (except for one infill station) was built between 1996 and 2016. In other words, while the system wasn’t assembled with Chinese-level speed, construction was pretty rapid by North American standards. Dallas’s light-rail system covers the Dallas area (although not the neighboring Fort Worth area) at least as well as BART, MARTA, and Washington Metrorail (all “heavy-rail” systems) cover their urban areas. And it’s somewhat faster than most new light-rail systems. Stations outside of downtown are spaced fairly far apart (1.4 miles—2.2 km—on average), and there are hardly any places where red lights force trains to stop for cross-traffic (as happens frequently on some light-rail lines in Los Angeles and elsewhere). One reason for this is that a high proportion of track is elevated. There are hundreds of level crossings, but these are mostly protected by formidable crossing gates, and trains generally whiz through them.

The fly in the ointment is that DART has struggled to attract passengers. Only approximately 100,000 people a day have been riding DART’s trains; something like the same number have been taking buses. The figures have fluctuated during the last twenty-five years, but it can’t really be claimed that the trend has been up despite the growth of the system (and, as everywhere, ridership during the Pandemic has plummeted).¹ Census figures confirm that Dallas has remained an automobile-oriented place. According to the 2015/2019 American Community Survey, only 3.8% of workers 16 and over in the city of Dallas used public transit for their journey to work. In the Dallas-Fort Worth urbanized area, the comparable figure was only 1.58%.²

DART’s relative failure to attract riders is rooted in a fundamental geometric problem. Virtually all of Dallas’s growth has occurred during a period when most movement in the area was by automobile. Automobiles work least well when you try to squeeze a large number of them into the same area, and so, as in all automobile-oriented cities, important destinations in the Dallas area are spread widely. Train lines, in contrast, work most efficiently when many people using them are going to the same places. Without changing the geography of destinations, train lines fit the automobile city awkwardly; they just don’t go to as large a proportion of significant places as one might like. There’s also inevitably a difficulty simply in getting people to stations in an automobile-oriented city. Walking to the stations through an environment hostile to pedestrians is unattractive for most people. Outlying stations in the DART system do mostly have parking lots, but not everyone has access to a car, and, even if they do, many people find the idea of shifting from car to train mid-trip unappealing. I can’t resist adding that the twenty-minute headways on all the outer branches probably don’t encourage ridership either.³

Despite DART’s failure to attract crowds, there seems still to be considerable support for the agency, and additional lines—a downtown subway and a circumferential line in the northern suburbs—are in the works.

One factor here is, again, surely the major change in Dallas’s attitude toward itself that I mentioned above. Many people in Dallas would like the place to be more like big eastern (or European) cities. In addition to stimulating support for public transit, this desire has led to a substantial and growing interest in making Dallas a bit more “walkable.” According to a survey reported by Strong Towns,⁴ 68% of the people of Dallas would like to live in a walkable neighborhood even though hardly any of them actually do. The absence of walkability in Dallas has become something of an obsession among a certain class of people there. There have been frequent articles in local magazines and newspapers lamenting Dallas’s autocentricity and ranking the walkability of Dallas neighborhoods. If you Google “Dallas” and “walkable,” you get hundreds of hits.⁵

On my recent trip to Dallas, I spent much of my time in Uptown, which is ranked in most surveys as the most walkable of Dallas’s neighborhoods. Uptown is just north of downtown and can easily be reached from downtown on foot (or on the free McKinney Avenue streetcar; it’s also the site of the DART rail system’s only subway stop).

Much of Uptown has indeed been built up with somewhat dense housing. This is particularly true of the part of Uptown known as the West Village, where the buildings come right to the sidewalk and include ground-floor shops.⁶

There are also sidewalk shops and restaurants in the parts of Uptown that are a little less dense, for example along McKinney Avenue south of the West Village area—where they’re still mixed with strip malls! But even here and on minor streets, sidewalks are universal. There are traffic lights at most busy corners that give pedestrians a chance to cross streets. Drivers of turning vehicles seem to respect pedestrians adequately. Walk scores are high by Dallas standards. It’s not easy to define walkability, but, however you do so, Uptown would surely pass muster.

How parts of cities get to be the way they are is always complicated, but it appears that the physical geography of Uptown is largely the creation of real-estate developers and city officials who, for the last thirty or so years, have been pushing to create a walkable neighborhood that would be attractive both to younger professionals and (perhaps) to older “empty-nesters” as well. Except on its eastern and western edges, Uptown is mostly not a neighborhood that underwent more or less simultaneous gentrification and historic preservation, as better-off newcomers fixed up the existing housing stock. Instead, most of the original modest housing was completely obliterated and replaced by apartment buildings.⁷

Central control didn’t disappear when Uptown matured. As in many other successful neighborhoods, Uptown has an active group of business representatives who try to maintain the brand by keeping the streets in good shape and posting consistent signage. Uptown Dallas Inc. is the (appropriate) name of this group in Uptown.

It’s unprovable, but it seems likely that active work by real-estate agents has been another factor in supporting the market for Uptown housing units. There are several storefront real-estate shops on or close to McKinney Avenue.

Whatever the causes, Uptown has been extraordinarily successful in attracting well-off buyers and tenants. According to the 2015/2019 American Community Survey, per capita income in the tracts whose boundaries approximately coincide with Uptown’s vague boundaries was $91,806 a year.⁸ An astonishing 72.9% of the inhabitants of these tracts were between 21 and 39 years old. Median contract rent was $1726, high for Dallas. Uptown is most definitely not an ordinary Dallas neighborhood that happens to be somewhat walkable. It is overwhelmingly a place for relatively privileged, mostly younger professionals.

I was struck when I was there, however, by the fact that, while there certainly are pedestrians in Uptown, the place is not exactly teeming with people on foot. One factor is that, for much of the day, there are a lot of cars around. In fact, there are rivers of traffic on many of the neighborhood’s streets, some of which at any moment are likely to have several dozen cars for every pedestrian. Furthermore, most shops offer plentiful parking, although it can be behind rather than in front of buildings. Dallas’s West Village and the rest of Uptown are not as traffic-ridden as some other parts of Dallas, but they still don’t feel anything like the West Village.

Uptown  reminded me in some ways of Atlanta’s Midtown, which also advertises its walkability but has huge amounts of traffic—and few pedestrians. Some of the other recently-built pockets of dense, “new urbanist” housing I’ve come across in the Sunbelt and in northern-city suburbs in recent years also seem to have ended up quite automobile-oriented despite being marketed as walkable places.

This appears to be true as well of other inner-city Dallas areas that get put on lists of walkable Dallas neighborhoods. Examples include the Bishop Arts district, which lies at the end of the Dallas streetcar line; Knox-Henderson, the neighborhood just north of Uptown; and parts of Oak Lawn that lie to its west.⁹ There are new mid-rise or even (in places) high-rise apartment buildings in these generally prosperous areas. Walking is possible. It’s just that, in so far as I can see, there aren’t a huge number of people who take advantage of the possibility. The same can probably be said of Deep Ellum, a much grittier neighborhood more or less east of downtown that also makes the walkable lists.

Inventories of walkable neighborhoods in Dallas also typically include many suburban downtowns, some of which are accessible by DART light-rail lines. Most of these are rather small. Irving’s Las Colinas (where there’s even a 1989 people mover) is something of an exception in being quite substantial.¹⁰  There are also numerous apartment complexes—many brand-new—being located near train stations in the Dallas area. I haven’t explored outer Dallas very much at all, and so I hesitate to say a word about the outer-city islands of density. What isn’t in doubt is that walkability in Dallas is perceived by many to be a good thing and that this fact has encouraged real-estate developers to construct denser housing in many places. How much these new construction styles have changed people’s transportation habits isn’t quite clear. I’m inclined to be cynical.

Downtown Dallas is a special case. The blank walls and humongous parking facilities that I noted in 1997 are still there, but there are definitely a few more pedestrians these days than there had been then even though many office workers are presumably still staying home because of the Covid-19 Pandemic. One reason for the greater number of pedestrians than in the past is that there are now quite a number of apartments for rent or sale both in the heart of downtown and along its northern edge. Some of these were carved out of older office buildings and warehouses. But the most visible apartments are in tall (and expensive) buildings that have been constructed recently in and around the Arts District, notably the Museum Tower and Atelier. This area has gotten quite a boost from a major public investment. Two blocks of freeway in a culvert have been covered over, and the freeway’s roof has become Klyde-Warner Park. On nice weekends food trucks flock to this park, and so do people.

But hardly anyone was using the park when I passed by on weekdays, and, in general, I wouldn’t say that downtown Dallas was exactly a bustling place. No one would mistake anywhere in downtown Dallas for, say, Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan or North Michigan Avenue in Chicago. There are people around, including a trickle of shoppers and tourists on Main Street and, sometimes, elsewhere. There are also a few dogwalkers, who were definitely not present in 1997. But downtown Dallas still struck me for the most part as a somewhat empty place much of the time. The new apartment buildings come with plenty of parking, so it’s perfectly possible for their inhabitants to go in and out without setting foot on city streets, and I suspect that’s mostly what they do.

There is one place in central Dallas with a huge number of pedestrians, and that’s the Katy Trail,¹¹ a 3.5 mile (5.6 km) rail trail between Victory Park (northwest of downtown’s West End) and the northern end of Knox-Henderson, just south of Southern Methodist University. I’ve rarely seen a recreational trail as crowded as the Katy Trail was late on a couple of warm afternoons when I was in Dallas. While there were plenty of runners and cyclists, more than half the users whenever I was there were walking. I’ve noted the same thing elsewhere in the Sunbelt. It’s possible that this is a function of the fact that neighborhood walking in Sunbelt cities is so difficult.

For most of its length the Katy Trail consists of two separate paths: a (generally narrower) recycled-rubber track for pedestrians and a (wider) mostly concrete right-of-way open to everyone. Because of this split—and also perhaps because of 10 mph speed limit—there doesn’t appear to be too great a problem having cyclists on the same path as pedestrians.

Users of the Katy Trail can feel surprisingly distant from the (automobile-oriented) city around them. Most cross-streets are bridged. There are only two level crossings, both near the north end of the trail, where substantial signs seem to be quite successful at forcing drivers to cede to pedestrians. The trail has been professionally landscaped, and admiring the vegetation is one of the things many users of the trail do. There’s also usually enough tree cover along the trail to provide some shade during the warm season (the shade, unfortunately, makes it hard to photograph the trail on sunny days). Just beyond the trees are the backs of generally upscale housing, separated from the trail by fences. Adding to the ambience, there are a couple of cafés right next to the Trail. The Katy Trail seems to be perceived in Dallas as being a completely agreeable and utterly safe place. It’s even mentioned in official tourist literature.

There are also other recreational trails in central Dallas, but they get much less use, for various reasons. There are trails, for example, in the Trinity River Valley, which borders downtown, but they aren’t quite continuous, and in places there is little shade. They’re also subject to flooding. The Santa Fe Trail, built like the Katy Trail in a disused railroad right-of-way but much longer, lies to the east and northeast of downtown. It has many more level crossings than the Katy Trail and generally passes through non-upscale neighborhoods, so (fairly or not) it’s not perceived as being completely safe. It attracts users nonetheless. Parallel to the southern end of the Katy Trail, there’s also Turtle Creek Trail, which wanders through an older, more or less traditional city park. The Turtle Creek Trail these days definitely doesn’t receive the same level of maintenance, love, or use as the Katy Trail. There are also numerous recreational trails in northern Dallas, some along waterways, and some built when DART’s rail lines were being constructed.

Dallas has elaborate plans to join its various recreational trails into a more coherent network.¹² Both the city and the county have taken the creation of pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure with admirable seriousness. As in some other automobile-oriented cities (Atlanta, for example), there are many people in Dallas who see recreational-trail construction as a way to mitigate some of the negative aspects of its post-World-War-II car-centric morphology. The catch of course is that so many trail users end up having to drive to the trails.

There’s no doubt that Dallas really has changed in some ways since 1997. The creation of DART’s rail lines has made moving around by public transit in the Dallas region faster and more comfortable for thousands of people, and the construction of new recreational trails in the area has enriched the lives of tens and probably hundreds of thousands of people. It would be nice to think that rail-transit and recreational-trail construction and the increasing walkability of a few neighborhoods in the Dallas area had led to an actual decline in the use of automobiles in the region. But it sure doesn’t look to me that there’s much evidence that anything of the sort has actually happened. I acknowledge that a visit of a few days isn’t sufficient to allow anyone to draw completely persuasive conclusions.