Photography by Kathy Tran
Let’s face it — aggressive driving is part of DFW culture.
We know the drill. There’s a driver in front of you who’s going too slow, and another one inches behind your bumper who thinks you’re not driving fast enough. We’ve all slipped past the speed limit at one point or another. We roll the dice on whether we have enough of a traffic gap to change lanes or make a turn at an unsignalized intersection.
We can laugh and joke about Dallas drivers being terrible all we want, but really, this behavior can have serious consequences. Dallas Department of Transportation and Public Works data shows that our city had the second highest rate of traffic deaths between 2015-2019 compared to the likes of Houston, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, all of which had lower rates.
Though multiple factors are involved in severe crashes, speed-related causes were found in most of the severe wrecks from 2015-2023, according to a Dallas City Council Vision Zero update from last year.
Bad driving habits on the highways are a given, but they also extend to our city streets, especially if you’re a busy person with places to be and things to do.
“When I was in my 30s and a commuter, and I had to be someplace at a certain time, I did drive kind of aggressively,” says William Robbins, who has lived in Dallas for about five years. “There’s a tendency for people to leave at the last moment or get tied up with something and (think), ‘Oh my god, I’m going to be late. Hey, I got this wide open road. Punch it!’”
Nowadays, when Robbins, 68, is driving the speed limit around Abrams Road in East Dallas, he’ll notice people speeding past him.
“People will fly past me. They’ll honk at me (and make) aggressive maneuvers,” he says. “I meet them at the next traffic light every time. So they’re not winning.”
Robbins and other neighbors who use Abrams Road and Skillman Street have noticed some issues on these roads and want them to be safer.
Abrams Road (from Richmond Avenue to Northwest Highway) and Skillman Street (from Live Oak Street to Abrams) may not be among the worst streets in Dallas, but they’re not perfect either. On Abrams Road, 449 crashes occurred between 2019 and 2023 — 259 south of Mockingbird Lane and 190 north of Mockingbird, where the number of total lanes increases from four to six (plus a turn lane), according to a City of Dallas public meeting presentation. Most of these crashes only result in property damage, but fatal wrecks have happened once a year between 2022-2024. Crashes usually occur at a left turn, right angle or in a rear-end situation. The most common causes are failing to yield to the right of way when turning left, not controlling speed and disregarding stop-and-go signals.
“If somebody wants to make a left turn, they’re blocking a lane, and then somebody nice slows down or stops for them, and they go, and then another person gets mad and speeds past them. Bam!” Robbins says.
From January 2018 to June 2023, just over 600 wrecks were reported on Skillman Street, which is made up of six lanes north of Lovers Lane and four lanes to the south until Live Oak Street, for the most part. The types of crashes on Skillman and causes were about the same as on Abrams.
Photography by Kathy Tran
In 2024 alone, there were 68 crashes on Abrams Road between Richmond Avenue and Northwest Highway, with four resulting in suspected severe injuries and one alcohol-related fatality wreck, says Auro Majumdar, Traffic Engineering and Operations assistant director at the Dallas Department of Transportation and Public Works, in an email.
Skillman Street between La Vista Drive and Abrams Road had 63 crashes last year, but they weren’t as severe as the ones on Abrams.
Though it’s not the top factor contributing to wrecks, speeding is reportedly an issue on Abrams Road and Skillman Street. Despite Abrams’ posted speed limit of 35 miles per hour, drivers on average travel 4-6 mph over the limit. On the four-lane stretch of Abrams, 13-14% of drivers go 10 mph over the limit. And 6.3-16.5% of motorists drive 10 mph over the speed limit in the six-lane section.
The speed limit on Skillman Street ranges from 30-40 mph, depending on the section, and people surpass that limit by 35% on average.
Former Dallas City Council member Philip Kingston points out that it’s not speed but speed variance that poses a problem.
“When you have people trying to go 45 miles an hour on Abrams and Skillman, which is a very normal speed that we see every day, and you have somebody coming to a complete stop to take a left turn, you are creating a 45 mile an hour delta between cars,” Kingston says. “That is where you get injuries and death.”
If you think that more tickets should be issued to speeding motorists, Majumdar says this is only part of the solution.
“While speed enforcement is effective in discouraging speeding, the most impactful strategy is to combine enforcement with engineering and education,” Majumdar states in an email. “In other words, properly engineered roadways and traffic control devices, together with effective education/outreach, and enforcement, are demonstrated to be most effective in reducing speeding.”
Dallas Police Department Tactical Operations Division Major Eric Roman says in an email just as much as Majumdar — “Speed enforcement along with traffic safety campaigns, community engagement and collaboration with our City Department of Transportation is part of our multifaceted approach to traffic safety.”
DPD prioritizes traffic safety, Roman says, and has a Speed Racing Task Force that is supposed to handle aggressive driving and “combat street takeovers incidents.” The patrol divisions all have Strategic Targeting Against Aggressive Driving and Road Rage vehicles “to provide proactive traffic enforcement to reduce the number of traffic accidents at high-accident locations.”
The department also runs public awareness campaigns and community events to urge motorists to wear their seatbelts, drive sober and be smart on the road.
“Traffic accidents take seconds to occur and are life-changing,” Roman says. “A few tips to driving safely: Drive smart, plan ahead, pay attention to your surroundings, take your time when traveling, drive defensively and be respectful to others while driving.”
But Kingston says the issue is more than people not obeying traffic laws but the roads themselves that need to be made safer.
“Either the facility encourages safe driving or it does not,” he says. “An unsafe facility can have whatever speed limit signs it wants. It can have as many traffic cops as you can put out there and as many signals as you can have, and an unsafe facility will continue to be unsafe.”
Kingston describes traffic on Abrams and Skillman as “incompatible with the neighborhood feel that people who live around there want to have.”
“These were both streets that were intended to be neighborhood streets,” he says. “For the four lanes that they are, they’re inadequately sized because they were never supposed to be that big. There was a huge move in the ’60s and early ’70s to widen all of the streets in Dallas. That was what was seen as good city planning back then.”
To evaluate the roads and recommend improvements, the City of Dallas Department of Transportation and Public Works began studies on Abrams Road from Richmond Avenue to Northwest Highway and Skillman Street from Live Oak Street to Abrams in 2023. Multiple recommendations were listed in the November 2024 presentations on Abrams and Skillman. Majumdar says several additional analyses, which were conducted after the public meetings in response to comments received, will be presented to stakeholders soon.
Of course, East Dallas residents have their own ideas of ways to calm traffic.
Photography by Kathy Tran
Straight from the neighbors’ mouths
Ironically, Rudy Karimi and his family moved near Tietze Park so they could live on a quieter street.
Karimi and his wife, both of whom serve on city boards, used to live near Woodrow Wilson High School, where he said there was a lot of through traffic and speeding. But there’s always been speeding on Abrams Road and Skillman Street, too. To Karimi, it won’t help to lower speed limits because people will just go as fast as they can anyway. And more police officers in the area probably wouldn’t solve the problem because they can’t be everywhere and catch every traffic infraction.
So, what would help?
“What slows people down is the things that are a nuisance,” Karimi says. “I’m a big fan of speed humps,” or speed cushions. He also mentioned narrowing streets as a way to reduce the speed of traffic, similar to how traffic is slower on streets where vehicles are parked on both sides.
Karimi doesn’t think speed cushions should be used on Skillman Street or Abrams Road but instead on slower neighborhood streets.
“Why does it matter on neighborhood roads? Because when you change your behavior on neighborhood roads, naturally, it’s going to change your behavior on larger roads,” he says.
Robbins would like to see Abrams Road get “Matilda-ized,” or given a structure similar to Matilda Street — a nearby two-lane road with a turning lane in the middle plus bike lanes and sidewalks on the sides. Having a dedicated turn lane should take the pressure off of drivers wanting to go left and help prevent accidents. Plus, having complete sidewalks and lanes for cyclists, like Robbins, sends a message to motorists.
“I think when drivers see pedestrians, they’ll tend to slow down,” he says. “If they see asphalt, they tend to speed up.”
Lakewood resident Robyn Gaytán was living off Matilda Street when it was transformed into what it is today. She liked the change and thought it helped control speeding, although she suspects that people avoid using Matilda in favor of other roads, like Abrams.
“We totaled a car on Matilda one time” before the changes were made, Gaytán says. “My husband, he got hit on a corner and spun around like three times and totaled the car, so I feel like it’s definitely helped on Matilda. … It was very much like Skillman or Abrams back then.”
Reducing the number of lanes or width of lanes (sometimes called “road diet”) is somewhat popular among residents. It came up as one of the options people said they wanted to see happen in last year’s survey regarding Abrams Road and Skillman Street, among other traffic calming measures.
“Road diet refers to a kind of a palette of approaches to road safety that generally includes the narrowing of roads, so either taking out lanes or simply narrowing the travel lanes will cause people to drive slower,” Kingston says. “There are a bunch of other things that are more broadly known as traffic calming that generally go along with road diet, but all that’s in the same family of things you do to try to make streets safer.”
Kingston’s wife, Melissa, who is the chairperson of the City Plan Commission Thoroughfare Committee, chimed in to say that there is a plan in the works to give Skillman Street the road diet treatment. We reached out to a city spokesperson to confirm this but didn’t receive a response by the press deadline.
Kingston claims that a three-lane road can be just as efficient as a four-lane road in terms of moving traffic, just slower and safer.
Majumdar says staff is still looking into the impacts of lane reductions. The public meeting presentations for the Abrams and Skillman corridor studies address this practice. For Skillman, the presentation details two options for lane reduction, and while it does list some positive aspects, the information provided stresses that lane reduction would cause certain intersections to become more congested over time. The Abrams presentation reads, “A preliminary analysis of a reduced lane scenario indicated high levels of delays at key intersections.”
But Kingston cautions against the “level of service” engineering mentioned in the presentations.
“What it means, basically, is if people have to wait too long at a light, traffic engineers want to widen the street, and that has been proven to be dangerous,” he says.
The recommendations available to the public don’t suggest adding more through traffic lanes, but the level of service thought process is used as a justification against lane reduction in some areas.
Lakeshore Drive neighbor Alan Horowitz points out the Lakewood area is missing an east-west highway or major thoroughfare, and that brings motorists through neighborhood streets that aren’t meant for heavy traffic. One of the City’s recommendations is to put a traffic light at Lakeshore Drive and Abrams Road, but Horowitz has mixed feelings about this plan. On one hand, having a traffic light there might make turning left on Abrams safer.
“If I want to take a left on Abrams, I can’t do it in the mornings or the evenings. Like, I can, but it’s very dangerous,” Horowitz says. “There’s people taking lefts onto Lakeshore from the other side. There’s people turning; there’s traffic that builds up from the lights back on Belmont and Richmond. … It’s dangerous, like it’s just too chaotic. So I typically have to go either up Alderson all the way up to Monticello, which has a light which is between me and Mockingbird, or I have to go all the way to Skillman on the other side and just go north from there.”
But he’s concerned that the new signal may bring in more through traffic.
Ultimately, Karimi has faith that the roadway conditions around Abrams Road and Skillman Street will improve in the future.
“I think East Dallas continues to grow,” he says. “More and more families are moving here. Keyword: families with small children. These folks can be very vocal. My wife and I are very vocal, and there’s a lot of us. So when we start to ask for certain things that make sense, I think it takes time, but I think they will happen.”
The City’s recommended solutions
On Abrams Road
(from the 2024 public meeting presentation):
- Upgrade traffic signals at Northwest Highway and Mockingbird Lane; remove and replace signals at Lovers Lane, Kenwood Avenue, Monticello Avenue, Belmont Avenue, Richmond Avenue and Southwestern Boulevard; and add new signals at University Boulevard/Axton Lane, Trammel Drive, Ravendale Lane, Bob O Link Drive, Lakeshore Drive
- Install left-turn lanes at key intersections
- Maintain signing and striping at a high level of retroreflectivity
- Clear sight-distance obstruction at intersections
- Replace/ install barrier-free ramps at intersections where needed
- Install sidewalk where missing, repair existing sidewalk as identified
- Enhance illumination at intersections, convert existing streetlights to LED
- Enforce traffic infractions, educate the public on the high cost of traffic accidents
On Skillman Street
(from the 2024 public meeting presentation):
In the short term…
- Signal timing improvements at key intersections
- Wheel stops or curb/gutter installation between La Vista Drive and Oram Street along Skillman Street
- Speed reduction pavement markings and rumble strips on Skillman near Tietze Park
- High-visibility crosswalk at Woodcrest Lane
In the long term…
- Installation of a 12-foot shared-use path to accommodate both pedestrians and cyclists on the east side of Skillman Street and a 6-foot sidewalk on the west side of Skillman from Oram Street to Southwestern Boulevard
- Installation of a 10-foot shared-use path from Theater Way to Abrams Road
- Installation of curb and gutter with a 6-foot sidewalk from La Vista Drive to Oram Street, which would require relocation of striped parking stalls
- Signal infrastructure improvements at key intersections with end-of-life signal equipment
- Proposed pedestrian hybrid beacon signal at Vickery Boulevard near Tietze Park
- Median narrowing from Ridgewood Trail to Lovers Lane
- Median improvements with the proposed pedestrian hybrid beacon signal at the Home Depot driveway
