Thanks to the DMN City Hall blog for pointing to this Bloomberg News article about the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge. While the writer has lots of nice things to say about the Santiago Calatrava design, he suggests that Large Marge may (because of Dallas’ “obsession with moving vehicles”) end up as nothing more than “an ornament on the skyline.”
And Calatrava himself doesn’t like how his bridge has been integrated into our road system:
On the other end, though, the road divides into a tangle of ramps that head in six directions to the intersection of two freeways. The ramps cost $100 million alone, half of which was land acquisition. This obsession with moving vehicles has filled Dallas and Fort Worth with a huge freeway landscape and epic traffic jams.
“I told them they didn’t need all those ramps,” Calatrava said when I spoke to him in his Park Avenue townhouse office after I returned to Manhattan. He said they could instead have sold the land next to the bridge and earned money on developments that feature bridge and parkland views.
But how practical is that viewpoint? Could we have gotten by without some of those interchanges? The primary objective of the bridge was always traffic relief, right? Once we decided to make Large Marge “world class,” should we have sacrificed some of that original aim?
