Too close for comfort?
Corps questions proximity of roads, parks in Trinity plan
The Dallas Morning News
February 27, 2000
Author: Victoria Loe Hicks


It's a beautiful spring day. You're taking your first stroll along the shore of Dallas' new downtown lake.

Nearby, children squeal as they throw bread crumbs to the ducks. Couples launch rented canoes.

And 250 feet away - less than the length of a football field - cars stream by on the four northbound lanes of the Trinity Tollway, the new highway perched on the 28-foot-high levee. The tollway's four southbound lanes are a quarter-mile away, on the river's westward levee.

Behind you, the dramatic new Woodall Rodgers Freeway bridge carries eight lanes of traffic, including rumbling trucks, over the lake. Ahead, the Commerce, Interstate 30, Houston and Jefferson bridges leap the lake, conveying another 20 lanes of traffic.

So here's the question: Will you come back? Will the allure of water, open space and well-manicured greenery outweigh the annoyance of noise and vehicle exhaust?

Maybe not, says the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

"The overall appeal of the floodway as an escape from the urban fabric would be lost by the intrusion of high-volume, high-speed traffic into the open space," the agency said in a recent draft report.

Supporters of Dallas' plan to put a highway and a park within the levees say the pavement won't spoil the playground.

"There are plenty of recreational facilities next to LBJ Freeway where people enjoy themselves - and the parkway is in no way like LBJ," said Jose Novoa, chairman of Halff Associates, the engineering firm the North Texas Tollway Authority has hired to gauge the proposed highway's environmental impact.

Backers of the highway call the corps' assessment, issued in a December draft report, knee-jerk.

"I know that somewhere in the corps is someone who doesn't want the parkway within their levees," said Craig Holcomb, an adviser to Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk and chairman of the Trinity River Corridor Citizens Committee, a forum for discussion of the river's fate.

The highway need not be a noisy nuisance, he said.

"It all depends on how we design it," he said.

Not so, say critics who argue that a highway is a barrier, period.

"The roadway is off-putting in the extreme," said Dick Rigby, co-director of the nonprofit Waterfront Center in Washington, which studies waterfront development around the world. Mr. Rigby came to Dallas last fall for a conference on the Trinity.

"That plan seems driven by highway engineers," he said. "They are messing up any chance to have a publicly enjoyable riverfront."

In May 1998, Dallas voters approved the sale of $246 million in bonds for Trinity improvements. Included were $31.5 million for the lakeside park and $84 million for the city's share of the almost $400 million Trinity Parkway. Halff's environmental assessment, to be completed late this year, will compare four possible alignments for the road, including two that would put it outside the levees.

In 1997, based on data available then, the City Council designated as the "locally preferred alternative" an option calling for a split roadway within the levees.

That is the alignment described in the Trinity River Corridor Master Implementation Plan, also produced by Halff and delivered to the council last month. Sometime this spring, council members are scheduled to vote on that plan - without the benefit of the definitive environmental data that Halff's separate environmental assessment should provide.

"Ideally, I think I would have tried to figure out some parallel process where you sit down and mesh those two [the environmental study and the city's plan] and make your decision," council member Lois Finkelman said.

But, she said, a council vote won't lock the highway into an alignment. The final decision will be made in conjunction with state and federal authorities.

The highway is intended to serve as an alternative to Stemmons Freeway, relieving bottlenecks in the downtown mixmaster, where Stemmons intersects I-30, and the "canyon," where I-30 approaches the mixmaster. It would carry northbound and southbound traffic around, rather than through, those two all-too-familiar downtown labyrinths.

Over time, the form the road might take has evolved significantly.

Range of options

One early suggestion, double-decking Stemmons, was discarded as unworkable. A Halff study for the Texas Department of Transportation narrowed more than three dozen alternatives to four.

One would replace Industrial Boulevard with a highway. The other three align the new highway along the Trinity levees: eight lanes on the inside of the east levee; four lanes on the outside of each levee; or four lanes on the inside of each levee, the option the City Council endorsed.

Each route has a downside. Building the road on the outer slopes of the levees or along Industrial Boulevard would be more expensive and disrupt neighborhoods and businesses. The costs of the alternative, putting the road beside the park, are, according to the Corps of Engineers, "aesthetic." They are threefold:

* Noise. How much racket - on top of existing traffic noise - would the highway generate, and what could be done to buffer park-goers?

* Air quality. Would emissions collect between the levees, making the air unpleasant or unsafe? If so, could anything be done about it?

* Access. How would people get past the highway and into the park? Who - the city or the transportation department - would pay for ramps over the highway? Would pedestrians be willing to traverse footbridges over a four-lane road to reach the greenbelt?

Earlier studies have touched on those questions, but detailed answers won't be available until Halff completes its environmental-impact statement later in the year.

The transportation department's analysis did not address the issue of air quality inside the park. Over the entire region, it said, the new highway would reduce pollution slightly by easing congestion downtown.

By banning heavy trucks from the new roadway, the study estimated, noise in the park could be kept below the level at which federal regulations require "mitigation," such as a sound wall. (In any case, highway supporters note, the design would include sound buffers. Trees would be planted every 40 or 50 feet along the road, and wherever it dipped under a bridge, it would be behind a flood wall.)

Change in plans

When the roadway bond proposal was put to voters in 1998, the parkway was to be a 45-mph road with left-turn lanes allowing motorists to exit directly into the park.

But the state, which was to foot most of the highway bill, said it couldn't tackle the project for at least a decade. So the city asked the tollway authority to consider building the road as a tollway.

A few months later, the tollway agency gave its answer: The road might generate enough revenue to justify building it, but only if the speed limit was 55 or 60 mph. At 45 mph, analysts said, the time a motorist would save by avoiding Stemmons would be negligible, meaning few would choose to pay the toll.

Thus, a low-speed parkway became a high-speed, limited-access highway with freeway-style entrance and exit ramps. Motorists could look down into the park but could not exit directly into it.

When the Corps of Engineers weighed in, raising questions about a freeway inside the levees, it gave aid and comfort to those who oppose the plan.

"It's just insane," said Joanne Hill, an environmental advocate who serves on an advisory panel for the latest Halff study. "They're stealing from the citizens of Dallas. They're stealing their park land."

Mr. Rigby of the Waterfront Center said putting the tollway inside the levees would be following "the path of least resistance. It seems that the reason . . . [the highway builders] are going down the river is there's no constituency."

Addressing complaints

However, project advocates say it's romantic nonsense to paint the floodway as some untouchable gem of nature.

"The park facilities envisioned along the floodway are more of an urban nature than a secluded park," the tollway authority said in response to the Corps of Engineers' study. "After all, everything that we now see in the floodway is man-made."

Highway foes underestimate the hardiness of would-be park-goers, Mr. Holcomb said.

"People put up with traffic all the time," he said. And anyone who doubts it, he said, should go to Bachman Lake, where throngs gather not only within spitting distance of Northwest Highway but directly under the flight path of Love Field.

The highway along the Trinity "is going to be one of those things like DART and Central Expressway," he said. "It's controversial, but when it's there and people can actually use it, everybody's going to be glad."

Glad or not, Mr. Rigby of the Waterfront Center said, the outcome will tell Dallas something about itself.

"It's a great clash of values," he said. "It's up to the people to sort it out."