A main neighborhood thoroughfare is slated for expansion, and the neighbors aren’t happy
Cindy Bourne is being sensible, rational and intelligent.
“Getting angry is not going to get us anywhere,” says Bourne, the president of the Casa Linda Estates Neighborhood Association. “Just because we don’t want change doesn’t mean it isn’t needed.”
Sadly, though, it doesn’t look as if being sensible is going to be any more effective. That’s because Bourne and her group, along with several other Casa Linda-area neighborhood associations, have run into the Texas Department of Transportation. TxDOT, as it’s lovingly known in bureaucratic circles, wants to improve traffic flow on Garland Road between Bucker Road and Northwest Highway, as well as reconstruct the Garland-Buckner intersection.
As part of this process, the department wants to standardize lane widths on Garland between Buckner and Peavy Road. All in all, it’s really a minor part of the overall project, says David Stauder, the TxDOT design engineer overseeing the work.
Which, if you’re a traffic expert who builds roads, is perfectly true. Stauder talks about increasing the lane widths just six inches, which would involve, he says, bumping curbs out a couple of feet. In fact, it’s just one of more than 700 such projects paid for, mostly with federal money, throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Hardly worth getting excited about.
On the other hand, if you live in the area where Garland Road will be reconfigured — and between Buckner and Peavy, there are eight or 10 blocks full of homes on either side of Garland Road — it’s far from a minor project. It’s about digging up front lawns, tearing down trees, and adding noise, something residents are far from happy about.
It’s easy to understand why. No one who proposes these things ever seems to take into account the concerns of the people who live in and around the traffic improvements. Stauder is certainly professional and sincere in his desire to improve traffic flow on Garland Road, and he was more than polite when he talked to me — although there was little doubt he figured I wasn’t all that sympathetic to his position. But in his desire to see the big picture, he loses sight of all the numbers that need to be painted in.
In this, Stauder is not alone. There is a long and depressing tradition in and around East Dallas of these kinds of road and traffic improvements, from the legendary and infamous plan to widen Greenville Avenue to as many as four lanes to the reversibles on Live Oak and Ross avenues (the latter of which was such a disaster that it’s now back to normal traffic lanes).
It’s a tradition based on the idea that neighborhoods don’t matter as much as roads, that bringing people in and out of the city is more important than the people who live in the city. TxDOT is going to spend $1.7 million for the entire Garland Road project, which seems like a lot of money (especially given the dire financial condition of the state and federal governments) so someone in Garland or Rockwall can drive to work without having to get on Central Expressway. What’s even scarier, says Bourne, is that she has seen a study that proposes expanding Garland Road to eight lanes.
Yet it’s difficult to blame traffic engineers for thinking that way. After all, they get paid to build roads, not to ponder whether there are better solutions to congestion than building more roads. On paper, sitting in an office, the reversibles on Ross no doubt seemed like a brilliant idea. That that stretch of Ross included four schools probably never entered into the calculations.
It’s more difficult to understand why the people who have to OK these ideas, be they on the city council or in Austin, keep going along with them. This is just the sort of short-sighted, neighborhood-unfriendly plan that the Mayor insists she won’t stand for. Yet Bourne says the City has been strangely silent, acquiescing to most of TxDOT’s recommendations. More disturbing, she says, is that residents have suggested several compromises, all of which have been rejected.
After all, would the world come to an end if TxDOT left Garland Road alone between Buckner and Peavy? Let’s hope someone has the good sense to make that point.
