A crescent made of orange marker trailed across the three southbound lanes of Cesar Chavez Boulevard, the wide street that extends from the I-345 exit and bisects the upscale East Quarter mixed-use development and the busy Farmers Market. The road leads drivers to the interstates that lasso downtown Dallas, shuttling about 11,000 drivers each day past thousands of apartments and condominiums.
A Dallas Police Department investigator drew orange markings on the asphalt on September 29, when a white Acura sedan lost control in a northbound lane, knocked into a person somewhere near the adjacent sidewalk, and came to rest on a townhome.
The owner of the townhome, Brad Kizzia, says he saw the pedestrian lying about 15 feet from the sidewalk when he came down to investigate the noise that rocked his building. He couldn’t say whether the person was launched after the wreck or crawled or was moved. That’s just where he found the victim.
The car’s trunk bounced off Kizzi’s house, after smashing through a pedestrian gate and a wooden fence, a path that sounds like an enormous spinning top. His home sits about 8 feet back from the sidewalk.
Eleven days after the wreck, there were still pieces of red and clear plastic from the vehicle’s headlights sitting in the bushes. Kizzia says he and his wife have been unable to open their front door and fear that the impact damaged the home’s foundation.
The crash remains under investigation, but the Dallas Police Department confirms a pedestrian was hit by the vehicle and taken to a hospital. The person’s identity and condition have not been released.
Residents who live along Cesar Chavez say this is what they’ve long been afraid of, particularly as their portion of downtown has tripled its population in the last decade, according to Downtown Dallas Inc. In 2013, 1,300 people lived in the area around the Farmers Market, mostly in the Camden Apartments. Nearly a decade later, 4,070 people live here, and two other residential buildings are under construction.
This road highlights a challenge seen across Dallas. As neighborhoods grow denser within its urban core, housing often goes up near old, aging infrastructure. The freeways that hug downtown Dallas rely on roads like Cesar Chavez to move cars, which means it’s big and wide and invites drivers to speed. Residents whose homes face the street, particularly near its southern connection with the highway, report a bevy of quality of life issues: feeling unsafe walking and being unable to sleep or watch TV because of the noise, even moving their beds to rooms near the back of the house.
Cesar Chavez is actually a highway with a different name, whose widest portion covers nine lanes. The crosswalks allow walkers 30 seconds to reach the other side; the pedestrian walk sign is only activated when someone hits the button to request the protection. At the southern end, the Texas Department of Transportation’s two-story signage directs drivers onto interstates 30 and 35 like a beacon.
“They wanted to create a walkable neighborhood in the Farmers Market, and I applaud that,” says Brad Sibley, a consultant who has lived in a condo facing Cesar Chavez since the complex was built in 2013. “I love my neighborhood. I love my community. They’ve done a fantastic job of investing in this area, but they did it around an expressway.”
Sibley is part of a small task force of residents who are fed up with the noise and speeding and are calling on the city to redesign the roadway to make it safer for the people who live in and visit this edge of downtown. They want a lane in either direction taken in by wider sidewalks, to give the homes more of a buffer, or an expanded median. They want curb bump-outs and flashing pedestrian lights. They want more signage and speed limit signs, protected left turns, and a right-turn only lane into the Farmers Market. They want the Texas Department of Transportation to yank out the looming highway signs, which the agency plans to do as part of its work on the adjacent “Canyon” portion of Interstate 30. That should begin at some point next year.
In short, they want a boulevard, not a freeway. Cesar Chavez Boulevard was known as South Central Expressway for decades, until it was renamed for the Latino civil rights leader in 2010. Trucks rumbled along the road to get to the Farmers Market, back when it was more market than food hall.
Three years after the street’s name change, the Dallas City Council approved a deal to privatize the Farmers Market. It has since thrived on foot traffic and a variety of local vendors. Rex’s Seafood is feet away from the artisanal jewelry and ceramics at Folklore Tradition Artisan Boutique. On weekends, rows of fresh produce await shoppers in the open-air shed. A few blocks north, Todd Interests’ $460 million East Quarter development has added housing, office, retail, and restaurants, largely centered in renovated old buildings. Harwood Park just opened around the corner, and Carpenter is only a five-minute walk. Both parks were previously surface parking lots.
Despite this positive infill development, Cesar Chavez still shoots drivers out of Deep Ellum and downtown and onto the surrounding freeways. It feels like an extended on-ramp.
“When are we getting the boulevard we were promised?” asked Sibley.
Well, it’s complicated.
Gus Khankarli, the city’s transportation director, joined the district’s councilman, Jesse Moreno, to walk the area on a recent Tuesday morning. They know its current conditions are less than ideal. Khankarli points out the inadequacies: how the placement of pedestrian buttons likely violates the Americans with Disabilities Act; how the old traffic signals have crushed conduits beneath the ground, which prevents the city from installing new wires to power left turn lights; how the Texas Department of Transportation won’t allow the city to remove the highway signage; how cars can slingshot onto Cesar Chavez by way of wide, protected right turn lanes.
These issues are hardly unique to the Farmers Market. Khankarli mentions that 68 percent of the transportation department’s existing infrastructure was 40 years or older when he became director, in 2021. He’s gotten that down to 48 percent, he says. And he notes, correctly, that “we’re inheriting something we all know,” that Cesar Chavez is no longer a puzzle piece that fits what is around it.
But: “We don’t want to piecemeal it,” he says. “We want to look at it holistically and generate what could be done short-term, medium-term, and long-term.”
That’s where the city and the residents, like Sibley, are at odds. Khankarli would prefer to engage in what he calls a “corridor study” that would identify solutions for the entire stretch of Cesar Chavez, from near the I-345 exit a mile south, through the area that touches the Farmers Market.
Such a study would require a consultant, a decision that would ultimately be considered by the Dallas City Council. After that is in motion, Khankarli said he expects it to take nine months to a year to complete. It’s possible that would make 2025 the earliest for any dirt to turn, which is obviously dispiriting to Sibley and his neighbors, who say they are so fed up they are ready to move.
“This is not something that can take forever,” says Sana Syed, a resident whose townhome fronts Cesar Chavez. (She also came in second in the 2021 City Council election, which was won by current Councilman Moreno.) “We literally are in danger. We cannot sleep in our own homes, we can’t cross our own streets.”
As they walk, Khankarli and Moreno point out bad drivers. A woman on her cell phone. A man in a truck speeds through a red light at Marilla Street. A driver of a sedan doesn’t yield or slow down as they whip onto Cesar Chavez from a protected right lane. Drivers, they contend, also have a responsibility to their surroundings.
The Dallas Police Department set up a trailer to record speeds. It found 4 percent of the drivers were speeding over a two-month period. It doesn’t sound like much. But that 4 percent amounted to over 9,000 instances of speeding, with one driver going as high as 90 mph. For residents, it is a losing bet to hope that drivers will improve their behavior. They want to see structural changes to the street, to minimize the damage when a driver screws up.
A few times each year, crashes along the street make the news. In 2021, three people were injured in a rollover crash. A driver ran a red light in a stolen truck in 2022, crashed into three cars, and fled the scene after his truck burst into flames. Those are just what TV and newspapers deem newsworthy. Residents like Karen Pierre have iPhone galleries full of fender benders and worse.
The speeding has also marred one of the city’s proudest developments in recent years: the work of the Downtown Dallas Parks Conservancy to transform parking lots into four downtown parks. Two of those, Carpenter and Harwood parks, exist along or adjacent to the Cesar Chavez corridor.
Carpenter is closer to where I-345 dumps traffic onto Cesar Chavez, near Deep Ellum and Old East Dallas. The park is named for John W. Carpenter, the businessman and parks booster who helped create the state’s first national park, in Big Bend. There is a statue of him near the entrance at the intersection of Live Oak and Pearl Street. Last October, a car hopped the plaza and drove into that statue, breaking it off from its plinth at the knee.
On the east side of the park, a car took out a pair of trees and a light pole in December 2022. The parks conservancy then put up seven bollards. It took less than a month for an 18-wheeler to flatten five of them on its way to knocking out a light pole. Eight days after that, a car drove through a tree in the park.
The conservancy hired engineers for a traffic study, which found 233 crashes near where Carpenter Park now sits. While the engineers could not differentiate how many of those accidents occurred on the freeway portion above the city surface streets, it stated that “the anecdotal information alone is compelling enough to comprehend the potential risk to pedestrians and park users.”
“We’ve just been really concerned about pedestrian safety,” says Amy Meadows, the CEO of the Downtown Dallas Parks Conservancy. “We’re willing to talk to anyone who will listen, because we don’t want to see someone killed or injured.” She was standing under I-345, at Live Oak and Cesar Chavez, and looked over toward the edge of Deep Ellum. “A lot of people are coming from these apartments with their dogs.”
Combined with support from Councilman Moreno and Khankarli at City Hall, there sure seems to be a lot of support lined up toward a solution. Completing that solution will likely take years.
“We reached out to the city to find out from a transportation standpoint about what they’re willing to look at, and fortunately they were all on board that it’s not designed the way it should be and needs to be updated,” says Evan Sheets, the vice president for planning and policy at Downtown Dallas Inc., which has been helping the residents. “The money becomes a concern at this point.”
Sheets says there is $1.5 million allotted for public investment as part of the Farmers Market tax increment financing district, or TIF, the very mechanism that helped turn empty lots into condominiums a decade ago. “This project meets all the goals of the program,” he says. He also believes the city could take the existing traffic study near Carpenter Park and augment with additions farther south.
“Most of the numbers and most of that study is close enough that you could utilize that information to make assumptions of the section we’re talking about at the Farmers Market,” he says.
Khankarli appears set on ordering a separate study for the whole corridor, which will take time and money. And money for big capital projects doesn’t always come from the city alone. It comes from its partners in the private sector. The Farmers Market’s neighbor, the East Quarter, is a prime example of what that takes. Todd Interests is responsible for that development, a sort of mini-neighborhood within downtown. It bought about 32 empty or lightly used buildings from the 1920s and 1930s and interspersed towers and denser, new developments among eight city blocks. It also spent millions of dollars on the cracked and aging public right of way.
Patrick Todd, the managing partner at Todd Interests, says the company also spent $2 million on those public improvements: wider and ADA-compliant sidewalks, extended medians, textured street surfaces to encourage slower driving, new painting, more signage, a protected bike path, the removal of three lanes of Jackson Street near Commerce, updated traffic signals, then planters and benches and other less intensive additions.
“We want it to feel like a district, where when you walk or drive you feel an immediate difference,” Todd says. “From lighting to the actual pavement to the ramps to the crosswalks, everything about it should tell you that you’re in a new neighborhood.”
Finding that sort of private investment after the Farmers Market area has already been built out is difficult. It is a challenge the city will need to predict in other parts of town. As Dallas grows denser, the public infrastructure must match the purpose the neighborhood will serve in the future. Otherwise, the city will be facing more and more people living along streets like Cesar Chavez, watching and hearing the cars drive quickly somewhere else.
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