What’s left to say?
As Tim pointed out yesterday, the mayor of Dallas unleashed a full-frontal attack on good sense and truthfulness over the weekend in the form of an op-ed on the Trinity Toll Road. Tim says someone with patience needs to break down the argument and feed the lies back to the mayor. I think Wylie H. – curiously anticipating the appearance of the op-ed in the DMN – already did that with his long post last week.
For my part, I’m baffled, but not by the mayor’s op-ed. It is largely what he has been saying throughout, simply regurgitating talking points that have long been presented by toll road backers as fact even if they have been systematically exposed as fiction on numerous occasions. He claims to have listened to everyone’s opinion on the topic and has come up with his own, yet he avoids defending any of his individual justifications for the road, merely trotting out the same disproved notions carte blanche. The tone of the op-ed attempts to preclude any further debate; it also suggests a cynical form of dismal, characterizing further disagreement as dissent. What confuses me is how the mayor can continue to be so persuaded by erroneous information and so dismissive of the many civic leaders who have flipped their position on the road.
I think the first clue is found in the op-ed’s tone. Frankly, the mayor sounds a little annoyed. The end of his piece is almost catty. There is his “beauty in the eye of the beholder” line that tries to confuse a civic debate about transportation by leveraging a cliché that reinforces a base aesthetic relativism. Or his “that’s what I’m working on” bit, a kind of whinny foot stomp that demands acknowledgement that he is the mayor and the one in the trenches, unlike his vocal opponents. And, of course, there’s his gratingly structured final sentence – the whole, “loud minority a majority does not make” dismount – which could be rewritten more simply and eloquently as, “and now I’m just going to stick my fingers in my ears until you shut up.”
It all suggests a man who is clearly frustrated by the topic. Perhaps he’s frustrated because this supposed minority of dissenters are suddenly everywhere around him. Civic leaders, neighborhood leaders, arts leaders, architects, former allies, State Representative Rafael Anchia, and even opinion writers at the newspaper that typically fawns over him (and doesn’t push back on supposed “facts” he trots out in his op-eds) have turned against the road. The Trinity Toll Road issue has invaded the council chambers, sparking impassioned debates during what should be rudimentary open microphone sessions. Heck, hatred of the Trinity Toll Road has even invaded the mayor’s office. Two of his former staff members resigned to run for council, and both of them are one is staunchly against the toll road. In fact, I’d love to see a poll of the remaining mayor’s staff to see if anyone in there still stands with him on the issue. [CORRECTION 3/18: For some reason I got it in my head that Adam McGough, the mayor’s former chief of staff, was anti-toll road. I haven’t been able to find his definitive position on the issue and have reached out for clarification. It was brought to my attention after posting this article yesterday that he is backed by pro-toll road incumbent Jerry Allen and he did not return a request by Wylie H. for a clarification on his toll road position. I’ll update when I learn more. The other former staff member is Sam Merten, who has been clear with regards to his anti-toll road stance.)
The mayor’s op-ed reads like the argument of a man who feels increasingly isolated on an issue and yet lacks the agency or ability to shift the focus of the debate or lessen its opposition. The importation of the so-called “Dream Team” of urban designers was the mayor’s attempt to shift the conversation, and he makes a last ditch attempt in his op-ed to use his posse of well-compensated mercenary experts, telling us we can’t have opinions about the Trinity Toll Road until we see more renderings. If only we see more pretty pictures of the road – smear more lipstick on the pig and not actually have a constructive debate about the facts and figures that are at play – we’ll somehow see that the Trinity Toll Road can be great for Dallas. As a public relations play, I don’t think it is a smart move. If anything, the citizens of Dallas are skeptical and distrustful of renderings. Renderings are the images used to cloak the lies (c.f. the juggler under the overpass).
Still, I believe the real source of his frustration has to do with the way his increasing isolation on this issue plays in opposition to his own essential optimism – and how that sense of optimism informs his understanding of the kind of mayor he is. He is Dallas’ (or DFW’s) salesman-in-chief. The mayor sincerely believes in this city, he loves this city, he is bullish about its future. He wants to unite Dallas. He understands firsthand what motivates the rich to invest in Dallas, and he is sensitive to the needs of the poor. He wants to solve the problem of urban blight in South Dallas, and is maybe even a little flabbergasted that southern Dallas is in such bad shape. He is a true believer in his Grow South initiative. He desires to lead from the center, with a spirit of partnership not of isolation. He works hard; he fights fights he doesn’t want to fight; he sweats it out in unfamiliar neighborhood trenches; he has listened to so many people who have so many different ideas about how he should do his job. And he still is doing his job. He is even going to run again for mayor, when, maybe, perhaps, he doesn’t really want to. He doesn’t particularly enjoy council politics, the combativeness of the horseshoe, how difficult it is to get projects and programs moving, the inefficiency of democracy, the duplicity of bureaucracy. And yet, here he is, day-in and day-out, still proclaiming the greatness of this city. Because he loves Dallas, and he has dedicated himself to being its champion.
But the problem with good salesmanship is that it often requires believing your own sales pitch. At the beginning of the mayor’s op-ed, he sells his optimism to us and to himself. He speaks about the boldness of his optimism. He is the mayor who “dares to dream.” And what he dreams about is a Dallas that can be all things to all people. There are people, he writes, who argue about conflicting visions of Dallas’ future, but the mayor is the kind of leader who sees these things not as conflicts but only as reconcilable options. If we believe in this city like the mayor does, then there is no reason to believe we can’t realize all of our dreams. Then he digs back into this time as CEO of Pizza Hut to offer a food industry metaphor. Dallas, he says, should be a “menu.” We should build a city of options. You want walkable? We got walkable. You want high speed roads that zip you around the region? We got that. Would you like extra cheese with that?
This is the “customer is always right” approach to public policy. If some people want a road, and some people want a park, and some people want bike lanes, why can’t we dare to dream that we can deliver all of these things? And when you are trying to build a city that can be everything to everyone at every time it is frustrating when some loud mouths start going off about how you should knock some items off your menu. Every good businessman knows that the way you serve your customers is by offering as many options as possible and letting them decide. Why would you oppose a mayor who is simply trying to serve all of his customers to the best of his ability? Who would oppose such a grand vision, such a bold and beautiful dream? Only a “minority” who wants to “distort,” of course.
The way this mayor thinks through the complications of public policy decision making frightens me. It isn’t just that the mayor uses fallacies to support his vision – though that does suggest a dangerous inability or willingness to on the mayor’s part to adequately grapple with the facts and data that should influence policy decisions. What is concerning is his faith in his own sales pitch, and his pitch – the city-as-menu – is a fantasy, an imaginary city. The real flaw in the mayor’s logic on the Trinity toll road is that it leverages optimism as an organizing rationale for pursuing an impossible, nonsensical dream.
The simplest way to demonstrate why the mayor’s city-as-menu is a fantasy is to scan across the op-ed page of Monday’s Dallas Morning News and read what State Representative Rafael Anchia writes about the Trinity Toll Road. Anchia bases his argument around a simple, clear logic. “If we say ‘yes’ to the toll road,” Anchia writes. “What are we saying ‘no’ to?”
In short, Anchia is analyzing the opportunity costs of pursuing the Trinity Toll Road. If we spend $1.5 billion on the road, it means we are not spending $1.5 billion on other projects. That’s because public resources are scarce, and Anchia understands that as an elected official, he has to listen to his constituents and draw from his own judgement and experience and decide the best and most effective way to allocate scarce resources. Anchia demonstrates an understanding that there is a distinction between public services and consumer products. When you think of the city as a “menu,” and the Trinity Toll Road as one “option” on that menu, you are reimagining urban infrastructure as a kind of consumer good that you develop, market, and sell to your citizens. According to this logic, a toll road is something that is used, perhaps enjoyed. And if you don’t want to use it, you can simple decide not to “purchase” that good. But public services like urban infrastructure are not products. Rather, they are investments in the fabrication of the built environment, shaping – economically, socially, politically, and aesthetically — the underlying ecosystem of civic society. The built environment contributes towards shaping the economic context of a place, it does not constitute an economy in and of itself. This is true simply because once a city is built, citizens no longer have the option of choosing the city in which they want to live – they simply have to live in it.
The mayor’s menu-logic implies that we can create a multiplicity of societies, and that each individual citizen can chose to participate in any number of built environments depending on the appetite of a given moment. It refuses to acknowledge what Anchia points to, namely, that choosing to build one kind of city precludes the construction or maintenance of another. It also ignores the fact that in an urban environment, various types of infrastructure work in conflict with each other. Rawlings doesn’t believe our bold visions compete with one another, but we don’t need to speak theoretically in order to see that they do. We know what the “menu” city looks like — it is what Dallas is today. We have roads, and greenspace, and wide streets, and bike paths. We have a little of everything, and we know that different kinds of infrastructure cancel or nullify the effect of each other. Here’s the one danger of the success of Klyde Warren Park, this impression that the degenerative effect of highways on an urban environment can be solved by putting a park on them. But Klyde Warren Park not only hides the fact that Woodall Rodgers Freeway should not be there in the first place, it is not a model that can be replicated (or afforded) in every instance where a highway tears apart a neighborhood. Similarly, running a highway exit ramp through the foot of a pedestrian bridge, as is the case for the planned Trinity toll road at the Commerce Street Bridge, doesn’t offer a choice between a pedestrian bridge and a highway. It simply destroys the full-effect of the pedestrian bridge.
There’s a popular saying among politicians at city hall who claim they want to run city hall like a business. What I’ve always wondered when hearing this is, “Well, what kind of business?” The kind of thinking the mayor applies to the Trinity Toll Road may work in the pizza industry. After all, when you run a food company, you can always roll out new products, new configurations of products, even when the core of your business is something as simple and enduring as pizza. You can put cheese in the crust, drizzle it with sriracha, make the crust out of a pretzel, launch a line of pastas, or package breadsticks with hot wings. But that’s not how cities work. Cities are the product of millions of complicated decisions of policy, the amalgamation of which create a single built environment that functions in a particular way.
Right now is the moment when we make the decision about what kind of city we will live in. Will we live in a city where we build a multi-lane, high-speed toll road that has been demonstrated to have negligible impact on the region’s overall mobility, a road that is grossly underfunded, that will rip through our precious urban green space, that will further disconnect downtown and adjacent neighborhoods from the river, as well as create new obstacles to stitching back together a fragmented street grid ravaged by a half-century of highway development? Will we continue to spend precious public resources on transportation infrastructure that has contributed to the economic diffusion of the region, exported value from southern Dallas, disconnected our neighborhoods, and retarded the growth and potential efficiency of the urban core? Will we build a road that incentivizes the exportation of labor from the south and forces our poorest citizens to rely on long, expensive commutes for employment, all because we are optimistic that somehow the realities of how this kind of transportation infrastructure shapes the economy no longer apply in a Dallas that possesses boldness of vision?
Or will we, as Rafael Anchia has done, look at the many costs of the toll road and realize that our public money is best spent elsewhere?
