Dallas gets only a passing mention in this extensive New York Times dive into the cities around the country that are trying to remove urban highways. If you’ve been following this debate over the years — and you should have been — you’ll know much of the top-line info in the piece.

• Cities “basically destroyed themselves,” says UCONN professor Norman Garric, by smashing neighborhoods to build roads.
• The building of the federal interstate highway system often targeted Black neighborhoods. “There is racism physically built into some of our highways,” says DOT chief Pete Buttigieg, slightly understating the point. (If you want to know where Dallas’ freedmen’s towns were, run your finger along a map of the city’s highway network.)
• Regarding Dallas’ effort to remove I-345, which runs between downtown and Deep Ellum, the Times reports that this city is “facing pressure from local residents and activists to address the pollution, noise, and safety hazards brought by the mega-roads.” That’s fair statement, but I would add to the motivations the desire to create a new, equitably minded downtown neighborhood while re-stitching the urban street grid; generate a once-in-a-lifetime economic boost to the inner city; and reverse the outward spread of economic growth by bringing jobs back to the urban core.

The news hook for Times interest in highway teardowns is the Biden Administration’s infrastructure plan. The version of the plan released in March proposed $20 billion for highway removal. The bill that is being hashed-out by Democrats in Congress translates that proposal into new federal funding for highway teardowns over five years. The Department of Transportation has also created grants for cities to kick-start the process. In other words, new federal policy may create an accelerant that could make longterm highway removal plans more imminent.

Collin Yarbrough spent 8 years working as a pipeline engineer for Atmos Energy before he quit to focus on Full Circle Bakery, the community service-minded cookie-making operation he had founded with his mother—its proceeds go entirely to nonprofits like CitySquare. Around the same time, in 2019, he went into seminary at SMU’s Perkins School of Theology. It’s a background that in many ways made the Lake Highlands native uniquely prepared to write a book about how years of infrastructure development shaped by racist public policy turned Dallas into one of the most unequal cities in the U.S.

Paved A Way: Infrastructure, Policy and Racism in an American City, is available now on Amazon and coming soon to a Dallas bookstore near you. In the book, Yarbrough tells the stories of neighborhoods like Little Mexico, whose erasure began with the construction of the Dallas North Tollway, although there are still some remnants of the once-thriving Hispanic community in what is today Uptown. There’s Deep Ellum, split by I-345. And Fair Park, where Black neighborhoods were seized by eminent domain and paved over with parking lots to bring more White people to the State Fair of Texas.

Paved A Way shares some DNA with books like The Accommodation and White Metropolis, which similarly cover how a history of racism and inequality shaped the Dallas of today. Yarbrough’s book is also a call to action.

“These communities are still fighting,” he says. “Little Mexico may be gone, but West Dallas is having to face concrete batch plants coming in and trying to grapple with Trinity Groves. It’s the same thing, just in a different location with different names and different actors. An engaged coalition of community members is, by and large, one of the most powerful things that I’ve seen in Dallas and in other cities that can really make an impact on keeping this kind of injustice from repeating.”

I got Yarbrough on the phone this week to talk about Paved A Way and the story behind every highway. This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.

The 50-mile Loop Trail is one council vote away from beginning construction. The Park and Recreation Board last week approved a $5.7 million construction bid for the first phase of the project, which will pave a new trail just below White Rock Lake through what is now the Tenison Glen golf course. That course, as you’ll recall, will soon be reduced from 18 holes to 9 and turned into a nature preserve to follow the findings of the Samuell Grand Master Plan. The trail will run through it. (The county will pay for $3.5 million, while the city’s bond program covers the rest.)

The Loop connects 39 miles of existing trail and creates a new stretch that will extend south into the Trinity Forest from near White Rock Lake. This is called the Trinity Forest Spine Trail, and the first phase splits off from the Santa Fe Trail, goes through Tenison, and concludes at Samuell Boulevard. The first construction piece will also include a spur at Highland Road just east of Tenison Park. The city has spent nearly $4 million on reconstructing Highland Road near the Forest Hills neighborhood, and the spur will tie into new cycling infrastructure there. The Dallas City Council is scheduled to vote on approving the construction bid during its June 9 meeting. (The county will pay for $3.5 million, while the city’s bond program covers the rest.)

Philip Hiatt Haigh, the executive director of the Circuit Trail Conservancy, says construction on the first phase will begin by July, pending council approval.

From a colleague, the scene on Bonita Avenue in East Dallas:

By the usual unhappy standards of Dallas hating pedestrians, this doesn’t rank as too egregious. At a glance, it looks like these sections are blocked off for what I would assume is necessary work on below-ground utilities or on the sidewalk itself. The holes are clearly marked, so you’re not falling in without some warning. And this residential street, while close to a good deal of activity on Henderson, may not be getting that much traffic. Assuming you’re not in a wheelchair or on crutches—a big assumption that shouldn’t really be made as it relates to these things—you could probably detour into the roadway without too much risk to your person.

But still, even with those caveats, come on. And with the city taking a closer look at its many miles of busted or nonexistent sidewalk, it’s worth keeping an eye on where our sidewalks end.

Send your photo evidence of Dallas hating pedestrians to [email protected]. For more in this series, go here.

Don’t call it a comeback. Not yet. But electric rental scooters—banned from the streets of Dallas last fall after two wild years that saw them both hailed as an important mobility option in a city freeing itself from a car-centric past and decried as a menace to law-abiding citizens everywhere—could be returning sooner rather than later.

“We’ve heard a lot from community groups and locals who want scooters back in Dallas,” says Alex April, the head of government partnerships for Spin, a Ford Motor Co. subsidiary that pitched its scooter service at City Hall last week. “Spin wants this to be done in a responsible manner to make sure this program is successful long-term.”

I couldn’t get anybody from the city’s transportation department on the phone, and as of Friday morning hadn’t heard back from spokespeople for Lime and Bird, operators whose names should be familiar to those who recall Dallas’ last scooter heyday. However, Councilman David Blewett told Channel 4 that next month the city will ask scooter companies to make their respective cases for a return to Dallas. He predicted scooters would be back “in a safe and efficient manner” at some point this year.

“There is no way this goes well,” sneered The Dallas Morning News’ editorial board.

Well, not with that attitude it won’t.

Amy Meadows is the CEO of Parks for Downtown Dallas, the nonprofit foundation that has partnered with Dallas and its parks department to create more greenspace in the city’s urban core. The foundation has been tasked with developing four downtown parks, which will be owned by the city.

Two of those parks have opened in the last several years. The Dallas Morning News‘ architecture critic hailed the technology-oriented West End Square as “a model for how the delicate relationship between the urban landscape and our connected way of living might be navigated,” and Pacific Plaza beautifully replaced one of downtown’s many unnecessary parking lots with a lawn, pavilion, and ample shade from the Texas sun. Carpenter Park, in the works now on the east side of downtown, will be the largest downtown park. Its 5.6 acres are set to include rescued public art plus a basketball court and dog park, along with other amenities. Harwood Park, where crews will break ground later this year, is on deck.

The development of these parks, combined with the success of Klyde Warren Park (owned by the city and privately managed by a separate foundation), have accompanied and helped spur a transformation of the city’s urban core. Downtown boosters say the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t thrown that revitalization—originating in part from Boeing’s 2001 snub of our then-dreary downtown—off track. Parks for Downtown Dallas is thinking long-term, anyway. “We were trying to design and build parks that are 100-year parks,” Meadows says. “They’re going to be here for a very long time.”

If anything, the pandemic made clear just how necessary parks are to making downtown more walkable, more liveable, greener and much cooler—literally. “We’ve heard from a lot of people living in high-rises downtown that these parks were really wonderful respites during COVID,” Meadows says. “These parks are more desired now than they were before.”

I got on the phone with Meadows to talk about, among other things, how to judge whether a park is “working” and how the fate of downtown’s largest greenspace is tied to the future of I-345. This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.