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I was in the Dallas-Ft Worth area for the second time, and I have to say that metro Dallas is way way way too car-centric. Last time I stayed in the Galleria Mall area and went to downtown Dallas. This time I was in the Las Colinas area of Irving (a pretty little planned community, mind you).
The idea of having to drive everywhere in Dallas to do anything is just sickening... Doesn't it make people in Dallas mad? It seems appropriate for a small metro, but for a major top-10 metro in the country, Dallas may be the absolute worst in their love of the automobile. Maybe after Detroit.
The major roads in metro Dallas outside of downtown are on the same kind of mile-by-mile type grid you see up in Detroit and pretty much all looks the same throughout metro Dallas... Drive-up type restaurants and shops in strip mall after strip mall on the main roads, houses in-between. Occasional areas where things go verticals at interchanges of highways. There's really no true sense of place... All artificial by city name. But compare Coppell to Frisco to Grapevine to Plano... What's different? The name? It all looks so much the same it's maddening. If I plopped you into an area blind-folded let you pull down the blindfold for a second and put it back on, and repeated that about 10 times in a close area, you'd have no clue where you were. You'd probably guess Plano when you were in Irving. It all looks the same!
The flyovers of the dozens and dozens of highway interchanges litter the sky like some shrine to cars.
People are used to flying around in cars. There's no consideration for walk-ability anywhere but downtown Dallas. It's as if the metro is a giant monument to cars, cars moving fast. If they can't move fast enough - heck build some more flyovers! There are hardly any sidewalks anywhere. They often abruptly end, and even where there are sidewalks, things are obnoxiously laid out for cars.
And highways... I've never seen a metro so in love with highways. It's a grid of highways. It's extremely annoying hitting interchange after interchange, even for drivers. So, hey, more flyovers, eh?
I've ridden the red line of DART up to Plano and the orange line up to Las Colinas and I have to say that it is an attempt to fix the problem. It may end up some day in the distant future with walkable strips along these lines. For now, it's just causing disjointed mid-rise apartment development in "walking" proximity of the stations (for people that don't mind dodging speeding cars). However, metro Atlanta had heavy rail transit already from the 70s and has already built a streetcar off it, and more are on the way.
For the rest of the metro, I don't think it'll ever happen. Nor do I think it'll go vertical... People seem perfectly happy just moving out to the next development when an area gets too congested instead of building up.
Dallas makes me think of what Detroit / Southfield / Ann Arbor would look like if it kept growing and built more highways.
Atlanta
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Compared to most cities, metro Atlanta has a pretty good road system. However, for the amount of development in the North metro, it's inadequate.
For the most part, North metro Atlanta has accepted it isn't going to get better. We don't try to race everywhere and build flyovers everywhere.. Instead, we've embraced "smart growth" and build vertical now. Areas in outer metro being developed are really being re-developed. There isn't much open land getting developed for the first time like you see in metro Dallas. It's just tearing down what's there and putting in denser developments.
Communities in metro Atlanta, unlike Dallas, have realized the car isn't the solution to everything, and are making strides to be walkable. From Marietta's new roadside trails to Smyrna's existing ones, to the Silver Comet Trail, to the new 400 trail, and the Chattahoochee river trail, to the trail network being built way out in the outer suburbs in Cherokee county and North Cobb. Trails trails trails. Then there's the beltline in Atlanta. MARTA already exists - heavy rail and not light rail like DART. Cobb county is eyeing BRT and Atlanta is gearing up to build its streetcar grid, starting with the streetcar it has already built downtown to connect to MARTA.
Along the I-285 North perimeter, from Atlanta to Doraville, up and down I-75 and I-85, Atlanta is making use of existing infrastructure rather than frantically building more roads, adding more lanes everywhere, and is focusing development on key areas that have always been high density: Kennesaw Town Center, Cumberland, Perimeter Center, Doraville, Windward/Northpointe, Buckhead, midtown, downtown, airport. If you went back 20 years, that's where office was being built, and where it's being built now. Just more and more vertical.
Mixed-use developments: It seems Texas-style "mixed-use" is stripmalls next to apartments where you have to drive from the apartments to the strip-malls because they are too darned far away to walk to even if they are right next door, since they don't actually connect (save the cute little development in metro Dallas going up in Coppell). Metro Atlanta has hundreds of true mixed-use developments. There are over a dozen alone in the general area of Smyrna, outside the perimeter mind you. These are connected up by trails along roads, but people can actually shop and play right next to where they work.
Trees
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Metro Atlanta has a treeline and hills. It's just beautiful, naturally. It's amazing with the density it has (not too much less than metro Dallas) that you can fly over it and see almost nothing but trees. Dallas only has beauty when it's artificial.
Las Colinas is one of the few exceptions. It has a lake and hills. Sure, the lake was made from a drained swamp, though Lake Lanier and Lake Allatoona were created by a dam, so can't completely fault that. But once you leave the little enclaves like Las Colinas, it's pretty dismal. It's just a lot of new stuff. But nothing stays new forever.
The future
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As I've said, Dallas people seem content to just keep sprawling out. I don't see it going much more vertical, or walkable, maybe until it gets to L.A.'s size.
Metro Atlanta, on the other hand, has realized there's a limit to what cars can do. Metro Atlanta residents have just given up getting anywhere too far during rush-hour. Dallas commuters seem to still act like it's the good 'ol days where the car is all ya' need.
Both have horrible traffic. Both in the worst 5 of the nation. It just seems Atlanta has done a lot more with less highways, less lanes and less interchanges than Dallas, and will continue to do so, simply because building up always beats building out. If you don't believe it, look at Detroit and see the ultimate pinnacle of building out and what it does...
What's really ironic is that with all the highway miles being built in metro Dallas, Atlanta has almost matched it in growth and this could speed up since metro Atlanta is increasingly building vertical. The latest hotspot to start building vertical is the NW metro of Atlanta.
Last edited by netdragon; 02-24-2016 at 10:18 PM..
Dallas, and the other Texas cities have been investing in their urban cores as well, and densifying with good street-level retail. Maybe you need to get your facts straight.
Dallas, and the other Texas cities have been investing in their urban cores as well, and densifying with good street-level retail. Maybe you need to get your facts straight.
I already mentioned the tiny little blip of downtown Dallas being walkable. This is a very very very small area. That doesn't make up for the fact that when you go past downtown Dallas, it becomes an unwalkable monument to cars. Even most of incorporated Dallas isn't walkable.
I was there in 2014 and 2016. Absolutely NO CHANGE other than more gum stuck to the sidewalk in the West End of Dallas and more flyovers under construction.
You can't have little tiny walkable enclaves and consider an area walkable. It has to be done at the metro planning level, in how you build out the road system. Metro Dallas's road system was built for cars with absolutely no consideration for walkability. The urban core looks pretty much like Plano and Frisco, just older on average. How can you connect up all the strips? How can you make the roads not completely intimidating for pedestrians? What do you do about the pedestrian that has to walk 1/2 mile in each direction alongside speeding cars just to get directly across the six-lane road ALL OVER metro Dallas? Where are the planned HAWK crossings? Oh, sorry, they'd slow down cars...
I already mentioned the tiny little blip of downtown Dallas being walkable. This is a very very very small area. That doesn't make up for the fact that when you go past downtown Dallas, it becomes an unwalkable monument to cars. Even most of incorporated Dallas isn't walkable.
I was there in 2014 and 2016. Absolutely NO CHANGE other than more gum stuck to the sidewalk in the West End of Dallas and more flyovers under construction.
You can't have little tiny walkable enclaves and consider an area walkable. It has to be done at the metro planning level, in how you build out the road system. Metro Dallas's road system was built for cars with absolutely no consideration for walkability. The urban core looks pretty much like Plano and Frisco, just older on average. How can you connect up all the strips? How can you make the roads not completely intimidating for pedestrians? What do you do about the pedestrian that has to walk 1/2 mile in each direction alongside speeding cars just to get directly across the six-lane road ALL OVER metro Dallas?
Yes, Dallas certainly has plenty of work to be done in regards to urbanity, but Atlanta honestly isn't that much better in that field.
I have been impressed with Dallas the handful of times I've been there. Oak Cliff, West End, West Village, Deep Ellum, Lower Greenville, and of course Uptown all had cool vibes and decent walkability.
Really? Atlanta as the epitome of anti car urban? Come on now
Okay? This is rich coming from someone who lives in Vinings, which is right in the heart of one of the more anti-transit counties in the Atlanta area. A lot of people in the Atlanta suburbs are virulently anti-transit because they do not want their tax dollars going towards a system that would bring "those people" from Atlanta to their precious suburbs. Atlanta is just about as car-hungry as Dallas is. Say what you will about Dallas, but their road system is a lot better planned to acommodate the cars on the road than Atlanta's winding, twisting, often narrow roads are in many places. They never really have been able to deal with all of the growth they've experienced throughout Metro Atlanta. If this was say, Dallas vs. DC, I'd see where the OP was coming from, but Dallas vs. Atlanta and this inaccurate, whiny diatribe? I needed this laugh this morning.
If anything, Dallas has a much better road system than Atlanta. Atlanta looks the same everywhere as well.
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