As its share of the North Central Expressway construction, the Park Cities will get a designer sound wall. As our share of the North Central construction, we’ve already received reversible lanes on Ross Avenue and Live Oak Street. And people wonder why those of us who live in East Dallas are paranoid.
It’s bad enough that we have been forced to participate in the North Central project, which will benefit Richardson and Plano (the Evil Empires) much more than it will benefit us. When is the last time, after all, that anyone in East Dallas used North Central to get anywhere else in East Dallas?
It’s even worse that the Park Cities have apparently refused to share in the inconvenience and discomfort caused by the construction. Do no, for example, expect to see reversible lanes on Hillcrest or Preston roads, or altered traffic signals to speed up the flow of traffic.
But what is really galling is that the Park Cities are receiving state money – some of which is our money – for the construction of what a state official calls a 13- to 14-foot high “architecturally treated” sound wall, complete with some sort of ceramic tile design, on the west side of Central between Lovers Lane and Potomac Avenue.
No similar sound wall, incidentally, is planned for the east side of Central – which should come as no great surprise to anyone who follows these sorts of developments.
The sound wall itself is not the problem. In fact, I could make a great argument that all of the Park Cities should be walled off. The problem is that the Park Cities are again getting preferential treatment, despite what seems to be their failure to participate in the other, less congenial, parts of the Central project.
Dallas traffic engineers, for example, submitted eight pages of traffic plan recommendations and improvements to the Park Cities governments so they could do their share in coping with overflow from the Central renovation.
Once construction begins south of Northwest Highway, City engineers figure motorists will avoid Central for alternate routes such as Preston, Hillcrest, Ross and Live Oak, increasing the traffic on streets that weren’t designed to handle the extra cars.
That’s one reason why we received the reversible lanes on Ross and Live Oak.
City traffic engineer Ken Starr says the City wanted to have the reversibles in place before our part of Central was torn up. The reversibles are supposed to ease congestion by adding a lane in each direction during the appropriate rush hour. The City thinks so much of the plan that the reversibles will remain even after the Central work is completed.
But don’t expect anything like that in the Park Cities. The suggestions were offered, and then they were apparently filed wherever it is that Park Cities officials file suggestions that would distress their residents.
And I don’t want to hear about how the extra traffic will hurt kids and families and neighborhoods, the standard Park Cities excuse for not participating in this sort of thing. They don’t have a monopoly on kids and families and neighborhoods in the Park Cities, no matter what their residents may think.
The Ross Avenue reversible lanes pass a couple of elementary school and a YWCA, and if that’s not doing our part, I don’t know what is.
Whenever the Park Cities are asked to join the rest of us in making the Dallas area a better place to live, their residents use their political clout, based on their wealth and entrenched position in the community, to weasel out of working with the rest of us.
It happened here, it happens in education, and it happens whenever some of their youths go off on a weekend bender.
It’s about time someone told them to stop.
