the city of big oil ends its love affair with the car?

The emblem of Dallas, Pegasus rising, is borrowed from the logo of the former Mobil Oil Corporation. Big oil and JR Ewing oil tycoons are stereotypical Dallas icons. The city once had an impressive downtown core, with a ring of convenient streetcar suburbs. A celebration of the freedom and independence of private vehicles gave birth to a ring of highways that throttled the downtown, cut off the inner suburbs, and generated an almost incomprehensible scale of sprawling development across the vast spaces of the North Texas prairies. Downtown was very densely compact, never very large in area. This was possible because the buildings had very little associated parking, as people rode streetcars into town. As automobiles replaced streetcars, parking lots ate away the civic body like a cancer. It still looks like a war zone in places, with solitary buildings standing in a vacant wasteland.



Although the damage is vast and possibly beyond repair, Dallas is changing. They have in place a successful light rail system, Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) which feeds from suburban cities through the downtown core. It is successful enough that it has captured a major share of federal transit funds for expansion.

 

This transit revolution includes revival of the streetcar suburbs. When McKinney Avenue was being resurfaced in the 1980s, the original streetcar tracks down the center were uncovered. A hobbyist and enthusiast started the McKinney Avenue Transit Authority, which in 1989 brought back a trolley system with vintage cars to this original alignment. The historic State Thomas streetcar suburb, which had been decimated through decay and neglect after being cut off from the downtown by highways, experienced a renaissance of compact transit oriented development. I lived in this neighborhood for a time, worked for the company that had planned it, and lived in a building designed by the architects I worked with. Talk about immersion. I would ride the trolley to work downtown, or often walk, which meant crossing the Woodall Rogers Freeway. A plan for a highway lid park to reconnect the Downtown to the State Thomas neighborhood, now part of a larger area of intense, and intensely popular redevelopment called Uptown, has been under discussion. Will the city learn to walk again? Already people fill the suburban DART park and ride lots to capacity, and walk across a quarter mile of parking to get to the station. The next step is to condense walkable development in that quarter mile.