I know! I’m sorry! But listen, I just read this Tod Robberson post, the one titled “I-345 Demolition Idea Spells Disaster for Southern Dallas Commuters.” In it, he writes:
I’ve been studying commuting patterns from southern Dallas ever since we launched our Bridging Dallas’ North-South Gap project more than six years ago. The maps on the next page show the commuting times from several years ago for people who live in South Dallas, Red Bird, Pleasant Grove, Oak Cliff and West Dallas. Some residents have had to commute 45 minutes each way, each day between their residences and their jobs, and highway-use statistics show unequivocally that these commuters need daily access to I-345.
This is fantastic news! And I’ll tell you why. Today I had a meeting with Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins. Jenkins told me that he is right now waiting for TxDOT to tell him how long it will take to conduct a study to learn who uses I-345 and how they use it. Are there a lot of trucks coming through town that have no business here? Are people from South Dallas using that highway to get to North Dallas? Judge Jenkins wants answers to those questions. But now we know that Tod Robberson already has those answers. And they are unequivocal.
Tod Robberson can save Dallas a lot of time and money if he’d share his highway-use statistics with the county judge. If he can’t email those statistics over to the judge — maybe the Excel doc is a monster — I’d suggest an FTP site or a thumb drive or a CD or a DVD. The county, I’m pretty sure, can accept any of those formats.
Once again, though, I’m sorry. This highway thing has taken over our lives. Or, to borrow a phrase from Tod Robberson, it has taken over our “tidy urban lives.”
UPDATE (4/5/14) For some real fun, read Mark Lamster’s take on the recent discussion. He calls Steve Blow’s column a “condescending dismissal.” He calls Rodger Jones “desperate” and says he has “issued forth with a series of red herrings and straw men in the hopes of derailing discussion.” He points out that Michael Morris has played the race card. As for Tod Robberson’s post, the one I’ve addressed here, Lamster writes:
Morris’ line of argument has been picked up in a new column by Tod Robberson, who concludes that the tearout plan would “make life nice and convenient for a special class of people at the expense of Dallas’s poorest and most inconvenienced.” This fallacious supposition is accompanied by an analogy to a freeway in Washington DC that is not comparable to 345 (straw man alert!), assertions regarding “unequivocally” revealing statistics, and unfounded assumptions about what a 345 tearout would actually mean for commuters.
