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With something for everyone, time to begin long-delayed project
03/30/2003 - By DAVUD DILLON / The Dallas Morning News

There's something for everyone in the latest Trinity River Plan: parks, roads, lakes, levees, playing fields, perhaps an esplanade or two. It could not have been otherwise. When Alex Krieger, William Eager and the other consultants were hired last September, the $1.2 billion Trinity project was in deep muck. The engineers weren't talking to the environmentalists; citizen groups had little good to say about City Hall, which was scrambling to find common ground, any common ground, on which all parties could stand.

The instructions to the consultants, therefore, were to produce a plan that everybody could live with – an old-fashioned political compromise, in other words, that neither repackaged the over-engineered, under-designed Halff Plan nor offered such a radically new alternative that the project would have had to start over.

"We expect the consultants to be realistic and not come up with a proposal that is impossible to fund," says Karen Walz, director of the Dallas Plan, the organization that coordinated the review. "Nobody is interested in a dream scheme."

"Compromise" can be a code word for no nerve or vision, but not in this case. The old plan focused on an eight-lane tollway, four on each side of the river, plus a pair of off-channel lakes. The new version is significantly better – because a parkway is preferable to a tollway, meadows and wetlands more appealing than monolithic lakes. It is more varied, more environmentally sensitive and in the long run better for the city.

At the same time, it includes a lot of roads, leaves many public access problems unresolved and sidesteps key economic development issues. If it is no longer a highway plan masquerading as a park plan, it is still a bypass for the suburbs that slices through Dallas' most valuable natural resource at a time when many American cities are fighting to get highways out of parks and greenways altogether.

To their credit, the consultants have tried to soften the road's impact by splitting it into a six-lane tollway north of Continental, a four-lane, 45-mph parkway next to downtown and possibly only a simple landscaped boulevard along Lamar. A four-lane collector road would run along the top of the east levee, connected to the downtown grid on one side and the river parkway on the other.

The consultants insist that they are only refining what has already been proposed. "We don't think that we're smarter than the people who have been working on this for years or that they were wrong," Mr. Eager, the transportation planner, told the City Council on March 5.

A parkway is certainly what the public thought it was voting for in the 1998 bond election; a version of the levee road was published in the Dallas Plan's 1994 final report. Yet the new proposal also recognizes, as the previous ones did not, that traffic volume is not uniform, that it is possible and desirable to tailor the road to the demand. Mr. Eager says that if he had his druthers, the entire road would be a parkway, without tolls.

"My main fear is that if we don't do a portion of the reliever road, we'd have a lot of trouble carrying the project forward."

Translation: The tollway portion is as much about politics as traffic. Without tolls, the North Texas Tollway Authority couldn't come up with its share of the road construction costs, estimated at between $535 million and $658 million. Bond holders would balk, the Texas Department of Transportation and other agencies might pull out, and the entire project could crater.

Much depends on how sensitively the proposed tollway/parkway is designed. Preliminary sketches show the road tucked into the side of the downtown levee, which would be raised and widened. (Previously, the levees were considered untouchable.) This would reduce noise pollution and visual blight, without necessarily solving the access problem to the park. Pedestrians would have to cross the parkway on bridges, then descend staircases to the water.

In his public presentations, Mr. Krieger, a Harvard University urban designer, often referred to Memorial and Storrow drives in Boston and Cambridge, Mass., to show how roads and rivers can coexist. Yet there are no levees on the Charles River. Moreover, Memorial Drive is a four-lane road that can be crossed, cautiously, on foot, while Storrow Drive is a four- to six-lane, divided roadway crossable mainly by overhead bridges. It effectively severs Back Bay from the Charles River; the fact that so many Bostonians end up there anyway is a tribute to their determination, or desperation, rather than enlightened urban design.

The park portion of the Trinity Plan seems less problematic. The original chain-of-lakes concept was a product of bottom-line engineering rather than good planning. The new version, by Hargreaves Associates of Cambridge, proposes a sequence of terraced lakes linked to meadows and wetlands and fed by treated groundwater and sewage. The river channel would meander from side to side and have mostly soft, natural edges. This alignment would improve water quality and be more appealing to visitors.

The big unknown is flooding, which could pose serious maintenance problems and in extreme high water threaten structures. The landscape architects insist that these problems can be avoided by properly contouring the lakes and surrounding wetlands.

At the March 5 council briefing, Dallas Mayor Laura Miller cautioned that the new Trinity Plan is still only a concept. "Nothing is finalized, nothing cast in stone," she noted. During the next 12 months the plan will be examined by city, state and federal agencies, debated by community groups, scrutinized by budgeteers. Changes and refinements are inevitable.

A few other topics may not be on the table but should be:

• If the Trinity River is truly Dallas' most precious natural resource, attach a value to it, a dollar figure even, instead of thinking about it as just so much free land. Road builders have no incentive to do this, but the city has every reason to calculate its worth and incorporate that into its comprehensive land-use plan.

• It is time – beyond time, really – to create a Trinity River Development Corp. to coordinate the future of the riverfront before the best sites are lost. The city and county have already built a crime theme park along the Commerce Street levee, and Jerry Jones is talking about a football theme park farther downriver, on land that would be perfect for housing.

• Such strategic planning requires an aggressive and involved planning department. The city planning staff has been largely shut out of the Trinity discussions, as though it were just another big public works project instead of a key to the city's economic future. When the consultants go home, Dallas will have to manage this vast resource on its own. It helps to have some practice.

In any case, it's time to move on, vigilantly. If earlier Trinity discussions had been smarter and the designs better, Dallas might have gotten its dream scheme after all. But they weren't, and it didn't. The current plan is a mix of good new ideas and residual mistakes. Even so, it is better than anyone could have expected six months ago.

03-30-2003, 09:25 PM	#36
gc Administrator Join Date: Mar 2002 Posts: 8,578	Set sail with the latest Trinity River plan With something for everyone, time to begin long-delayed project 03/30/2003 - By DAVUD DILLON / The Dallas Morning News There's something for everyone in the latest Trinity River Plan: parks, roads, lakes, levees, playing fields, perhaps an esplanade or two. It could not have been otherwise. When Alex Krieger, William Eager and the other consultants were hired last September, the $1.2 billion Trinity project was in deep muck. The engineers weren't talking to the environmentalists; citizen groups had little good to say about City Hall, which was scrambling to find common ground, any common ground, on which all parties could stand. The instructions to the consultants, therefore, were to produce a plan that everybody could live with – an old-fashioned political compromise, in other words, that neither repackaged the over-engineered, under-designed Halff Plan nor offered such a radically new alternative that the project would have had to start over. "We expect the consultants to be realistic and not come up with a proposal that is impossible to fund," says Karen Walz, director of the Dallas Plan, the organization that coordinated the review. "Nobody is interested in a dream scheme." "Compromise" can be a code word for no nerve or vision, but not in this case. The old plan focused on an eight-lane tollway, four on each side of the river, plus a pair of off-channel lakes. The new version is significantly better – because a parkway is preferable to a tollway, meadows and wetlands more appealing than monolithic lakes. It is more varied, more environmentally sensitive and in the long run better for the city. At the same time, it includes a lot of roads, leaves many public access problems unresolved and sidesteps key economic development issues. If it is no longer a highway plan masquerading as a park plan, it is still a bypass for the suburbs that slices through Dallas' most valuable natural resource at a time when many American cities are fighting to get highways out of parks and greenways altogether. To their credit, the consultants have tried to soften the road's impact by splitting it into a six-lane tollway north of Continental, a four-lane, 45-mph parkway next to downtown and possibly only a simple landscaped boulevard along Lamar. A four-lane collector road would run along the top of the east levee, connected to the downtown grid on one side and the river parkway on the other. The consultants insist that they are only refining what has already been proposed. "We don't think that we're smarter than the people who have been working on this for years or that they were wrong," Mr. Eager, the transportation planner, told the City Council on March 5. A parkway is certainly what the public thought it was voting for in the 1998 bond election; a version of the levee road was published in the Dallas Plan's 1994 final report. Yet the new proposal also recognizes, as the previous ones did not, that traffic volume is not uniform, that it is possible and desirable to tailor the road to the demand. Mr. Eager says that if he had his druthers, the entire road would be a parkway, without tolls. "My main fear is that if we don't do a portion of the reliever road, we'd have a lot of trouble carrying the project forward." Translation: The tollway portion is as much about politics as traffic. Without tolls, the North Texas Tollway Authority couldn't come up with its share of the road construction costs, estimated at between $535 million and $658 million. Bond holders would balk, the Texas Department of Transportation and other agencies might pull out, and the entire project could crater. Much depends on how sensitively the proposed tollway/parkway is designed. Preliminary sketches show the road tucked into the side of the downtown levee, which would be raised and widened. (Previously, the levees were considered untouchable.) This would reduce noise pollution and visual blight, without necessarily solving the access problem to the park. Pedestrians would have to cross the parkway on bridges, then descend staircases to the water. In his public presentations, Mr. Krieger, a Harvard University urban designer, often referred to Memorial and Storrow drives in Boston and Cambridge, Mass., to show how roads and rivers can coexist. Yet there are no levees on the Charles River. Moreover, Memorial Drive is a four-lane road that can be crossed, cautiously, on foot, while Storrow Drive is a four- to six-lane, divided roadway crossable mainly by overhead bridges. It effectively severs Back Bay from the Charles River; the fact that so many Bostonians end up there anyway is a tribute to their determination, or desperation, rather than enlightened urban design. The park portion of the Trinity Plan seems less problematic. The original chain-of-lakes concept was a product of bottom-line engineering rather than good planning. The new version, by Hargreaves Associates of Cambridge, proposes a sequence of terraced lakes linked to meadows and wetlands and fed by treated groundwater and sewage. The river channel would meander from side to side and have mostly soft, natural edges. This alignment would improve water quality and be more appealing to visitors. The big unknown is flooding, which could pose serious maintenance problems and in extreme high water threaten structures. The landscape architects insist that these problems can be avoided by properly contouring the lakes and surrounding wetlands. At the March 5 council briefing, Dallas Mayor Laura Miller cautioned that the new Trinity Plan is still only a concept. "Nothing is finalized, nothing cast in stone," she noted. During the next 12 months the plan will be examined by city, state and federal agencies, debated by community groups, scrutinized by budgeteers. Changes and refinements are inevitable. A few other topics may not be on the table but should be: • If the Trinity River is truly Dallas' most precious natural resource, attach a value to it, a dollar figure even, instead of thinking about it as just so much free land. Road builders have no incentive to do this, but the city has every reason to calculate its worth and incorporate that into its comprehensive land-use plan. • It is time – beyond time, really – to create a Trinity River Development Corp. to coordinate the future of the riverfront before the best sites are lost. The city and county have already built a crime theme park along the Commerce Street levee, and Jerry Jones is talking about a football theme park farther downriver, on land that would be perfect for housing. • Such strategic planning requires an aggressive and involved planning department. The city planning staff has been largely shut out of the Trinity discussions, as though it were just another big public works project instead of a key to the city's economic future. When the consultants go home, Dallas will have to manage this vast resource on its own. It helps to have some practice. In any case, it's time to move on, vigilantly. If earlier Trinity discussions had been smarter and the designs better, Dallas might have gotten its dream scheme after all. But they weren't, and it didn't. The current plan is a mix of good new ideas and residual mistakes. Even so, it is better than anyone could have expected six months ago. __________________ “We shape our Cities, thereafter they shape us.”