The answers to the questions around I-345—the freeway that connects two freeways and divides two neighborhoods—will be what determines its future. But where can the public ask those questions?

Earlier this month, the Texas Department of Transportation launched a two-year study that will produce what it calls its “preferred alternative,” the state’s preference for what to do with the aging highway as it nears the end of its lifespan. But the public meetings that kicked off this process have been criticized by some as lacking context about the potential impact of what’s actually being considered. And partly, that is by design. TxDOT has said it is only beginning its research and isn’t comfortable detailing anything that isn’t complete. Which includes detailed traffic counts, capacity, total cost, and the way in which the plans for the highway—including everything from removal to rehab—will affect the residents who live nearby.

Last Thursday, D Magazine hosted a happy hour panel that acted as a sort of primer on these meetings, the process, and why TxDOT is analyzing the options it is analyzing: a standard upgrade to the existing thoroughfare, the removal of some ramps, burying and decking the highway a la Woodall Rodgers, and the highway’s outright removal.

Panelists included Miguel Solis, the executive director of the Coalition for a New Dallas, which was created by D founder Wick Allison and advocates for removal (D Magazine and the Coalition are independent, separate entities); Amber Sims, the founder of the nonprofit Imagine Freedom Institute who lives next to 345 and has worked extensively in South Dallas; and Patrick Kennedy, the Space Between Design Studio urban planner who got the city talking about tearing out the highway. D senior editor Peter Simek moderated. You can watch it below. Or read on. (Or both.)

The stage was pro-removal, but the focus was on detailing the process of I-345, from how it got built, how it affected the community, and why we’re talking about it today. The tension over its future exists because of its land use: the 1.4-mile elevated highway connects Central Expressway with I-45 but physically separates downtown from Deep Ellum. Removing it, advocates say, will free up an amount of land that’s about the size of Fair Park. But who owns the land? Where will the traffic go? How will it impact the surrounding community?

During the public meetings, the public had those questions but did not get those answers, Solis contended. As for the first part: the state owns the land, but the city controls it. Meaning the city could purchase that land from TxDOT, establish priorities for the land use, and encourage development that would meet its goals. Like adding affordable housing. It’s Sim City come to life, an opportunity to create a neighborhood that most municipalities don’t get.

Anga Sanders didn’t understand why it required a nonprofit to make fresh food available in her underserved neighborhood of South Oak Cliff. She’d consider the question while assembling a salad at the Uptown Albertson’s. Where were all the salad bars on Kiest?

The introverted human resources CEO is the founder of Feed Oak Cliff, a nonprofit that does what its name suggests: it offers fresh produce and healthy options to a neighborhood that needs it. Sanders, who was one of the first black students at SMU, isn’t blind to how the deep divides between northern and southern Dallas play out in terms of nutrition. She was willing to drive 12 miles each way to Uptown because, while there were other grocers in between, the variety of fresh produce and extensive salad bar couldn’t be found near her house.

She thinks the lack of fresh groceries in southern Dallas is about more than profit. “We have a lot of isms in this country: racism, classism, but this is place-ism,” she says. “[People in southern Dallas] eat chips, Cheetos, and honey buns, but why? Because that is what they have access to.”

Other areas of town have the opposite problem. Drive from the Snider Plaza Tom Thumb in Highland Park toward Mockingbird Station, a distance of just under two miles. There is a Kroger grocery store at Mockingbird and Greenville. Now, drive less than a mile down Mockingbird and you’ll find another Tom Thumb. A left on Greenville is just a mile away from yet another Tom Thumb and a Central Market, which is just across Lovers Lane.

In the wealthier and whiter segments of Dallas, residents drive past big box grocery stores full of fresh produce and affordable food so that they can get to another big box grocery store that they prefer. But in large swaths of Dallas, this is not the case. In 2018 the Department of Agriculture identified 88 separate food deserts in Dallas County. Over half of them were in three southern portions of Dallas. In these areas, the best option for food is often a corner or dollar store, which are both more expensive and less nutritious than the grocery stores that are on every other block in North and East Dallas.

Access to nutritious food is part of a larger problem around those areas’ social determinants of health, which include education, transportation, housing and healthcare deficits. A study by the University of Texas system found that residents in a South Dallas ZIP code had a life expectancy of 26 years fewer than those who lived in East Dallas. Those ZIP codes are just two miles apart.

“When your ZIP code can literally determine your life span, that’s a problem,” Sanders says.

High crime, low income, and a lack of other retailers are often cited as reasons for grocery stores avoiding food deserts. But soon-to-be-published research from University of North Texas professor Dr. Chetan Tiwari and market research expert Ed Rincón is dismantling pre-conceived notions about how these communities spend their money. Their report provides objective evidence that grocery stores are missing an opportunity to make money and improve the health of a city along the way.

A couple weeks ago, we passed along video of a head-scratcher of a pedestrian scenario under Beckley Avenue in West Dallas, where the sidewalk disappears into a sliver of dirt as cars race around a corner. See photo above. Today, an update in two parts.

Part one: That land sitting below the railroad crossing is actually owned by the Union Pacific Railroad. The city has an easement for 40 feet of roadway and, on the side we’re talking about here, another five feet of sidewalk. But UPRR gets to approve any work within it. Until then, the city tells me, there will now be signage letting walkers know the sidewalk is closed at the underpass. I’m not sure how much that will deter walkers who’ve already pot-committed to their route from Trinity Groves back to Commerce—as I laid out in the last post, there aren’t many other options—but hey, it’s a start.

So let’s say you’re a major municipality that contains a part of your downtown that attracts something like 7 million tourists a year, according to the district’s own data. Do you do this?

Seems counter-intuitive to me. Especially considering this photo was taken on December 6. The special event starts on December 14. Have fun walking on the sidewalk in the West End until then.

There is a subtext to Texas A&M Transportation Institute’s latest ranking of the most congested highways in Texas: roads don’t solve traffic problems. With a few exceptions, the study’s rankings change little from year to year—the same Texas roads are always the most crowded. A complicated set of metrics helps to put a number on the total numbers of wasted hours (529 million) and wasted fuel (204 million gallons) to help come up with a cost related to congestion (roughly $11 billion).

Those are big numbers, and they make road congestion sound like a big problem. But what do these numbers actually mean?

The photo you see above this post and the three below were taken over the course of about six months in downtown Dallas by an alert FrontBurnervian and pedestrian lover who would prefer to remain anonymous. They are of vehicles parked on sidewalks downtown. As someone who has to move his car from meter to meter every two hours because he refuses to pay $160 or something for a parking spot in a garage, this is frustrating to see. However, I will not go so far as to say I am jealous of the DART officer, the Parks and Recreation employees, or the water softener folks working at the Mercantile building who are so important that they feel they can park on the sidewalk. I know better. Cars are not for sidewalks. They are for people.

Here, some photos: