In the "this is no surprise" category, the Regional Transportation Council voted unanimously Thursday to support construction of the Trinity tollroad and then issued a few choice quotes about the regional debacle facing us if the tollroad is voted down in November’s referendum.
Part of the message from the RTC, as its known in transportation circles, is that building a high-speed tollroad will reduce pollution in and around Dallas County because cars driving faster throw off fewer noxious pollutants than cars idling on highways. Good point, I suppose, if that’s as far as the logic went. But let’s think about this: We build a new tollroad to relieve traffic congestion around downtown and allow Flower Mound and Cedar Hill residents easy access to each other. But once the road is built, more people say to themselves: Hey, I can drive to a less-expensive home in Cedar Hill in 15 minutes now, so why do I need to live in high-priced Dallas anymore? So more people shift their homes (and their tax and spendable dollars) to outlying suburbs, with the intention of commuting to their jobs, which begins re-clogging the new tollroad and other highways in and around downtown, which just builds the pollution level back up again and has politicians clamoring for another multi-billion-dollar highway in 10 or 20 years.
Norm Alston has made a couple of intelligent posts here about whether it’s even a good idea anymore, given high gas prices and the pollution factor, to make it easier for people to commute to suburbs by car. The way to boost the economic benefit to the city of Dallas seems, logically anyway, to be fostering increased density inside the LBJ loop, which will naturally reduce pollution, make public transportation more viable, boost retail opportunities thanks to increased residential density, and make downtown and its surrounding environs employment magnets once again. I don’t see how a huge new high-speed tollroad, in and of itself, makes any of that possible or even likely.
The Wine Curmudgeon 
You bet the RTC wants this toll road. Dallas gives away our park land for it. We divert all the park access funding from the ’98 bond proposal to help pay for it. And who uses it? People who live in outlying cities. In other words, our tax base goes to the suburbs, and in return we get more traffic and more pollution.
If I was a non-Dallas member of the RTC, I’d be giddy with delight.
Yikes! Rick, do you realize what you wrote? Is this the beginning of the end of personal transportation in Dallas County? Are we headed towards a Utopian, Portland, OR-type model where road funds are intentionally diverted to non-road projects to discourage driving by making it terribly unpleasant?
I don’t like that.
Since this is Texas, Aren, I don’t think we’re going to have to worry about road funds being diverted to non-road projects; at least, that hasn’t happened in the 27 years I’ve been here. My thought is that any highway has one of two goals: Speed traffic elsewhere or facilitate traffic nearby. The nature of this tollroad seems to be speeding traffic elsewhere (i.e., from downtown to wherever and back again) rather than making life easier for those people living inside the LBJ loop, who are unlikely to spend much time on the tollroad. Yet these are the people who essentially make the economics of the City of Dallas work; we’re also the ones paying for at least a portion of this tollroad. So do we use our own tax dollars to build a big road out and away, or do we reject the way the road is designed today and wait for a better design, probably sweetened with enough money to actually build the park downtown instead of just draw pictures of it. I’m willing to bet that with $1.2 billion or whatever on the table, a “yes” vote on the referendum isn’t going to be the end of anything; someone will figure out a way to get ahold of that money for another roadway. Sure, it’s a gamble, but since we don’t have casinos here…
When it comes to politics I’m more of a libertarian than anything else. However, I also feel very strongly that if folks won’t voluntarily give up their addiction to oversized, gas-guzzling vehicles then they must be otherwise compelled to seek alternatives. While conteplating this apparent contradiction, something occurred to me.
Liberty, as defined by Enlightenment-era writers such as Locke, Mill, and Rousseau, is about personal freedom with constraints. Do what you want with your life and property IF AND ONLY IF your actions do not infringe on the life and property of others. Whether you believe in global climate change, or you believe we should reduce our dependency on foreign oil, the bottom line is the same – over-consumption of fossil fuel has a negative impact on us all.
Ideally, we, individually and/or collectively, will choose to sober up, but what if this does not happen? What if we as a people choose to preserve our own comfort at the expense of everyone else? What happens when outside intervention is the only choice left?