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.

We know it’s been a while since you’ve seen this feature. And we also know that the perambulating difficulties across the city of Dallas haven’t let up. So we’re re-launching Dallas Hates Pedestrians, starting in Deep Ellum. This is a classic example of what this feature has tried to raise awareness of: sidewalks are not meant to be rental space for construction. This image was taken at Good Latimer and Elm Street last month, but it has been under construction for a while. The construction has swallowed the sidewalks, with the Epic on the north side of the block and the smaller storefronts on the south. Here is how Google Maps captured it in February of 2020:

The Texas Department of Transportation believes its redevelopment of Interstate 30 near downtown aligns with how President Joe Biden plans to spend the federal government’s mobility money. So the state is going after a lot of it.

The federal Infrastructure for Rebuilding America Grant, or INFRA, is a $900 million grant program targeted at projects that will boost the economy and create jobs. In past administrations, that has meant highway expansions. But after his confirmation, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg reshaped the program’s criteria to prioritize projects that featured components to improve racial equity and the environment, favoring those that took comprehensive, collaborative approaches to inform their plans.

TxDOT believes its vision for the Canyon checks a lot of the boxes the feds are looking for. It attempts to restore the street grid the freeway tore apart when it opened to traffic in 1965, giving the Cedars more direct connections with downtown. (TxDOT’s argument: “While the CBD and areas north of I-30 have enjoyed decades of growth and dense commercial development, the area south of I-30 has struggled to thrive, with a fragmented mix of underutilized and underdeveloped parcels, falling far short of the potential that its centralized location would support.”)

The plan features bridge crossings at Lamar/Botham Jean Blvd., Griffin, Akard, Browder, Ervay, Harwood, and Cesar Chavez. Those are planned to include Complete Street elements like wide sidewalks, protected bike lanes, and greenspace. The overhaul frees up about 14 acres of land for private redevelopment, mostly by removing ramps and surplus frontage roads. There are plans for connections to DART’s light rail as well as the planned high-speed rail; that station will be built on the western end of the Canyon. The state is also leaning on its plans for pedestrian-friendly infrastructure and green space to lessen the environmental impact of the freeway.

Too, TxDOT is leaving open the possibility of up to four deck parks to connect downtown with the edge of South Dallas; that money will have to come from other sources. While the design will vary somewhat, Klyde Warren Park and the deck park over Interstate 35 in Oak Cliff cost about $60 million total; the infrastructure itself was $47 million while the park additions added another $13 million.

The state is asking for $146 million from the INFRA program, which would pay for about a quarter of the entire project. The feds haven’t released the full list of applications from other states, but that ask is more than all but two applications submitted for the program in 2020. (California wanted $220 million for a port upgrade and Louisiana requested $185 million for the second phase of its expansion of Highway 1, which extends diagonally across the entire state. Louisiana got $135 million, but California wasn’t awarded the grant for the port.)

Tearing down highways is long and difficult work, particularly in a city with a culture that is so wedded to the automobile. Consider this: it has been five years since the Texas Department of Transportation released the CityMAP study, which analyzed the implications and logistics around tearing down Interstate 345, that little strip of connective concrete that cuts off Deep Ellum from downtown. D Magazine devoted an issue of the magazine to the I-345 removal idea way back in 2014. And can you believe it has been nearly eight years since urban planner Patrick Kennedy proposed the then-radical concept in a column in D? Since then, highway removal efforts have gone mainstream. The country’s new transportation secretary is even using them as policy talking points.

Enter a new study that attempts to kick Dallas’ highway removal project into a new gear. It refines some of the plans outlined in CityMAP. This 90-plus page report is being called the I-345/45 Framework Plan (admittedly not as catchy a title as CityMAP), and it was developed by the Toole Design Group, LLC, an engineering and urban design firm that helped plan the I-375 highway removal in Detroit. It attracted an extensive list of partner organizations and individuals and produced the report following a substantial amount of public input. This plan refines the CityMAP study in three key ways:

1. It provides a more holistic view of the reasons for removing I-345.
2. It dives more deeply into how such a removal would affect mobility, including a fascinating analysis of how a reconstituted street grid could handle traffic.
3. It offers a land use vision for how to maximize the potential benefits of the highway removal.

Now, full disclosure: the report is also dedicated to the memory of the late Wick Allison, the founder of D Magazine, who had been a champion of the I-345 project since Kennedy first raised the possibility in our pages. The Coalition for a New Dallas, an organization co-founded by Wick, is also a driving force behind the completion of the “Framework Plan,” and tomorrow the Coalition is hosting an online symposium that will both present this new plan and outline its policy priorities heading into this May’s city council elections.

The timing of the report’s release is significant for another reason. There is a lot of transportation planning happening in and around downtown Dallas right now, and top city and regional planning officials want to plan all three major downtown projects—Dallas Area Rapid Transit’s D2 downtown subway connection, the I-30 canyon rebuild, and I-345—in tandem. At a recent council briefing, Michael Morris, the transportation director of the North Central Texas Council of Governments, said that TxDOT expects to complete a I-345 traffic study sometime soon.

The Toole study—which I will refer to as the Framework Plan for the rest of this piece—offers an important counterpoint to that TxDOT study. It provides broader vision and technical comparisons to help check whatever TxDOT’s assumptions turn out to be.

Let’s dive into some of the details:

Editor’s Note: The Dallas City Council unanimously approved the resolution on Wednesday afternoon, which frees DART to pursue the project’s federal funding. It has to work on other options for the project’s east side. You can read about that vote—and what it says about Dallas’ transit priorities—right here.

The Dallas City Council has a big decision to make today. Does it want a downtown subway or not?

The subway would double capacity while giving the light rail system a relief valve in the event of a derailment or some other disruption, as the current system bottlenecks on the single rail line through downtown. Dallas Area Rapid Transit says it needs a thumbs up or down during Wednesday’s meeting from Council to meet deadlines to pursue $800 million in federal funding to help pay for the project, which is known as D2. This is the resolution council will be voting on.

But DART will need $1.7 billion total, and the feds will pay for only half of it, which means it has to spend a lot of money to get those federal dollars. This project has been a key part of the transit agency’s capital plans since 2017, when the Dallas City Council passed a resolution supporting the below-ground alignment. It was a hard-fought battle. DART originally wanted the track to be at-grade through downtown, which would have required significant eminent domain and disruption.

Council and other groups fought for it to be built as a subway, which has more than doubled the price. It is a decision that will likely affect DART’s borrowing power through at least 2035. (But the agency will have enough to cover its other large projects, including the overhaul of the bus system, the Silver Line rail into Collin County, and continued maintenance.)

The D2 line would go from near Victory Park to the Perot Museum of Nature and Science south into downtown. It heads east along Commerce as it makes its way into Deep Ellum. There are four planned subway stops, which DART believes are significant development opportunities. It emerges as a surface line on Good Latimer. When it reaches Swiss Avenue, DART wants to put an above-ground “wye” junction, a Y-shaped confluence of the rail lines.

Most of the concern springs from interests on the east side of the alignment. The Deep Ellum Foundation, the group of business owners that operate the neighborhood’s Public Improvement District, hates how the subway emerges to join the street. Major landowners in Deep Ellum and the east side of downtown, particularly commercial and residential developer Westdale, have similar problems with it. They believe this will damage the urban fabric in a key neighborhood. Good Latimer is a main way in and out of the district, so how will having a surface rail line affect traffic? What about walkability? And the wye junction requires a fair amount of land. Will this eliminate future development? (They did get one win; the wye junction was originally planned for the denser Elm and Good Latimer intersection.)

“While we understand the regional importance of expanded core capacity and the need for a wye junction, the D2 project’s alignment and current plan to resurface to be at-grade along this corridor will disproportionately hamper area development, connectivity, and traffic,” wrote Stephanie Hudiberg, the executive director of the Deep Ellum Foundation, in a letter the organization sent to DART.

The west side is a different story. Developers in downtown proper are in favor of the project, as is Downtown Dallas Inc. But they need clarity. A subway changes how everything moves forward; they don’t want to plan for something that doesn’t materialize.

“My stakeholders want a decision,” said Councilman David Blewett, who represents downtown and Uptown. The vast majority of D2 is in his district. “If we’re not going to do it, let’s tell our people we’re not going to do it. We approved this in 2017, and we’re still screwing around with it. We’re harming the business community.”

Other concerns are more philosophical. This is a reliability project. While it does add capacity to DART’s line, it does not add new service areas or increase frequency under normal circumstances. It doesn’t pay for new trains or any other operational uses. The sorts of major disruptions that D2 would alleviate are rare. In the past year, there has been only one derailment, which backed the trains up about four hours. Meantime, there are still loud calls for improved service in southern Dallas, and this project to benefit the region will be housed in downtown Dallas.

We’re used to talking about red and blue states, and about neighborhood divides centered around income inequality and the lingering legacy of racial segregation. But to what extent do these two things overlap? Do social economic and demographic factors create red and blue neighborhoods? According to a new study by two Harvard researchers, the answers is they do.

Jacob Brown and Ryan Enos sorted information on 180 million U.S. voters and attempted to map their political divisions on a neighborhood scale, publishing the results in Nature. The researchers don’t know, of course, how people voted in the recent election, but they crunched the data by analyzing public data like demographic information, voter registration, and whether voters participated in party primaries. What they found is that the country’s political divides extend into neighborhoods, and, in some case, even manifest on a block-by-block basis.

In some ways, the broad outlines of the maps aren’t anything new. Hand a red and blue crayon to anyone who pays close attention to local politics and ask her to color in the the political affiliations of the neighborhoods, and you might end up with a map like the one of DFW pictured above. But this data drills gets so granular that it manages to quantify some eyebrow-raising results. For example, as  the New York Times reports: