After a 2016 Texas Department of Transportation plan put forward a vision for a more walkable and dense city, TxDOT is still looking to expand I-30, a project that contradicts many of the forward-thinking ideas in that plan.
In a piece for D Magazine, Peter Simek argues that Dallas is a victim of overbuilt freeways that stratified the city and trapped many of its citizens in traffic. Simek writes, "Engineers at the agency have designed an I-30 expansion that doubles down on the same city-destroying mistakes of the past." In particular, the added capacity would pull people out of the city center and East Dallas. "The added or expanded frontage roads, widened overpasses, exit ramps, and surface streets will increase the speed of traffic through the neighborhoods adjacent to the highway," Simek writes.
Simek posits that the whole project is out of step with the internal goals of TxDOT. A 2016 plan called CityMAP outlined ways to make the city denser and more walkable. "If this newly engineered I-30 were constructed, many of the potential benefits laid out by the CityMAP study would be squandered," Simek writes.
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