Are you scared of downtown Dallas? I get it if you are.
The streets can seem lonely, especially at night. Drivers treat traffic laws as optional, and that’s when they’re not using the streets as a drag-racing strip. Crossing one of the downtown’s potholed thoroughfares on foot can feel like a real-life version of the arcade game Frogger. Homelessness remains a problem, with many of those individuals experiencing mental health issues. Last year saw a disturbing uptick in violent crime in the city’s core.
Those real troubles are exacerbated by rhetoric that characterizes cities as veritable dens of criminality and iniquity. It is a brand of anti-urban sentiment that has been an unfortunate part of the American character from the earliest days of independence: In one of his more lamentable pronouncements, no less than Thomas Jefferson declared cities to be “pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man.”
Countering centuries-old perceptions is a tall order, but the recently unveiled Safe in the City initiative is an irable response to the conditions in the Dallas core. A t project led by Downtown Dallas Inc. (DDI) and the city, the plan combines increased police presence with a sustained effort to provide services and shelter to the unhoused (and not simply arrest them for vagrancy or move them to less visible places).
Judging by the early statistics, it is having a positive impact. According to DDI, crime in the core has fallen by 29% from last year, with an even greater drop in violent assaults. More than 200 people who had been living on downtown streets have been rehoused.
It’s nice to see the city addressing the core’s troubles pro-actively, albeit with a healthy push from the downtown business community represented by DDI. (Grant Moise, CEO of DallasNews Corporation and publisher of The Dallas Morning News, has been an organizing voice in the initiative.) But public safety requires something more than an absence of criminality. Statistically, the greatest threat to life and limb is not physical assault but automotive collision. Speeding cars and trucks are a constant menace to the well-being of anyone downtown (not to mention the rest of the city).
While the promise of increased traffic enforcement — a component of the Safe in the City plan — is a most welcome development, it is a Band-Aid and not a cure for a disease designed into the fabric of the city. Elongated blocks with radiused corners, for example, encourage drivers to speed. More broadly, they signal the city’s continuing propensity to privilege automobiles over pedestrians and cyclists.
If Dallas is serious about improving safety, it needs to take steps to calm traffic, especially at critical intersections. The city could, for instance, turn certain streets into what the Dutch refer to as woonerfs, streets where automobiles are forced to slow down and share space with pedestrians and cyclists. The city might also consider closing Main Street to automotive traffic, transforming it into a pedestrian mall linking Dealey Plaza to Deep Ellum.
More immediately, it must address the broken and obstructed sidewalks that are a persistent hindrance and safety hazard, forcing walkers into traffic. Protected lanes for cyclists barely exist, though a new bike plan, approved by the City Council this week, would improve conditions.
Better public transit is probably the best way to get people out of their cars, which means fighting efforts to reduce funding for DART.
Though younger generations might find it hard to believe, there was a time when downtown Dallas was a bustling place that lured rather than spurned pedestrians. The 1955 film Report to Dallas offers a telling depiction of that lost city, with footage showing waves of people making their respective ways across streets filled with trolleys and buses in a ballet of syncopated movement.
That film was produced by the Dallas Citizens Traffic Commission, an independent advocacy group, and in its worldview, those clogged streets were a problem, an impediment to the free flow of traffic.
The condition of downtown streets today is very much a product of that mindset, which dominated planning in the city for more than a half century and remains deeply embedded in the city’s collective psyche.
Dallas, thankfully, is moving beyond that outdated thinking. An increasing residential population is a welcome testament to that shift. Indeed, there is nothing that would make the city more safe than having more people out and about and enjoying the many amenities — parks, restaurants, shops, cultural institutions — downtown has to offer.
As the late D Magazine writer and advocate for Dallas pedestrians Zac Crain put it, “You should go for a walk.” Just be sure to look both ways, and mind the broken sidewalks.
