When Highways Are Barriers to Opportunity

Looking at a map of commute times, Patrick Kennedy at Walkable Dallas-Fort Worth finds that people who live in census tracts with some of that region’s lowest household incomes spend the most time traveling to and from work. Many commutes are more than an hour each way.

Kennedy says this is what happens when road-building guides private investment — and it’s a vicious circle. As Dallas sprawls northward away from the urban core, he writes, places of employment become less and less accessible for those who can least afford “to get cars and get on the road.”

The darker the purple, the longer the drive. The poorest residents of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro region have some of the longest commute times. Image: Walkable DFW
The darker the purple, the longer the drive. The poorest residents of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro region have some of the longest commute times. Image: Walkable DFW

With swaths of the city losing jobs and population, Kennedy says all those highways built to connect are, in reality, serving as barriers.

We have cut off opportunity from entire parts of the city, specifically with the notion of trying to connect people with highways. We’ve done the opposite. It’s obvious that highways disconnect across them, but the constant job and population creep northward is indicative of a deeper, systemic, and more pernicious form of disconnection: distance. Traversing that distance is not the answer, particularly when our solutions to traversing that distance, more highways, only serves to exacerbate the problem, by moving things further and further away.

The highway builders, thinking they’re serving populations as they exist, don’t realize that they themselves are the scientist with their finger in the petri dish stirring it around and affecting the very results they’re supposedly objective about.

Elsewhere on the Network: Bicycle Transportation Alliance discovers that Daimler employees in Portland are very much into biking to work. Second Avenue Sagas comments on the gondola fad in NYC. And Greater Greater Washington reports on a Washington Post columnist and his war on traffic enforcement.

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

The Grassroots Campaign for a Highway Teardown in Dallas

|
Three years ago, Dallas-based planning consultant Patrick Kennedy and his friend, developer Brandon Hancock, started wondering why you couldn’t do a highway teardown in the Big D. They picked a highway: IH345, an elevated connector route between downtown and the Deep Ellum neighborhood. Then they thought, “Why not? Let’s do a study.” Between the two […]

Dallas Advocates Launch a PAC to Tear Down a Highway

|
The movement for a more livable, less car-clogged Dallas has legs. A group of reformers advocating for the teardown of Dallas’s Interstate 345 has set out to reshape the political landscape — and they’re off to a blazing start. The Dallas Morning News reported this week that the group, A New Dallas, has launched a […]

Dallas Highway Teardown PAC Snags Two Council Seats. Next Up: Runoff

|
A coalition of Dallas residents trying to build a more walkable, people-friendly city gained some momentum in Tuesday’s election, picking up at least two City Council seats. At stake is the potential replacement of a downtown highway segment with mixed-use development and parks. The balance of power in the council now comes down to a June runoff. There were six […]

The Fiscal Insanity of Highway Building

|
To peer inside the minds of highway builders, take a look at what’s happening in Dallas. Patrick Kennedy at Network blog Walkable Dallas Fort Worth has been poring over a 2007 document produced by regional planners at the North Central Texas Council of Governments. Interestingly, this seven-year-old document proclaimed an urgent need for the as-yet-unbuilt Trinity Toll […]

The Case for a Highway Teardown in Dallas

|
IH-345 in Dallas looks like a perfect candidate for a highway teardown. The 39-year-old, 1.4-mile elevated highway is nearing the end of its useful life, and it’s taking up valuable real estate just outside downtown. Patrick Kennedy at Network blog Walkable Dallas Fort Worth estimates the teardown would cost as little as $60 million, while […]