Posted August 12, 2024 in Weblog
By Emilie Bahr
“Meet the folks selecting to reside car-free in Dallas.”
The headline from the Dallas Morning Information got here throughout my social media feed lately and I couldn’t resist clicking it. The article was locked behind a paywall, however I watched a brief video linked to the story profiling a lady who lives within the Massive D with out proudly owning a automotive.
It hardly appears newsworthy that somebody might reside in a serious American metropolis of 1.3 million with no automotive. Except you’ve spent any time in Dallas.
In 1994, I moved from Baton Rouge to Dallas to begin highschool within the metropolis the place my mother had relocated for work. My new dwelling was totally different in some ways from the place I’d been raised, however maybe essentially the most pinpointable to my proto-urbanist consciousness was the way in which through which it was devoutly dedicated to concrete and vehicles.
My hometown, the place I lived with my dad and attended underfunded Louisiana public colleges, was hardly a paradigm of walkable urbanism. The subdivision the place I grew up didn’t even have sidewalks. My dad routinely drove me to the college bus cease.
Even so, in Dallas I used to be struck by the normalcy of hour-long commutes throughout city and driving 90 miles per hour on toll roads and highways that bisected the town’s sprawling, low-density footprint. Vehicles additionally weren’t only a technique of getting round – they have been the last word standing image. Valet parking was in every single place – even on the mall and the grocery retailer. The coed car parking zone at my personal women’ faculty appeared just like the showroom of a elaborate European automotive seller, the attendant watching over it was among the many most beloved members of the college employees.
As soon as the shock of my new surroundings wore off, it didn’t take me lengthy to fall underneath the spell of Dallas’ car-centrism.
Former Bogota Mayor Enrique Peñelosa famously mentioned: “A complicated metropolis is just not one the place the poor personal a automotive, however the place the wealthy take public transport.” After I lived in Dallas, my then-stepfather’s suggestion on a few events that I take the town bus to highschool slightly than have him drive me felt like a selected model of cruelty. Public transit was merely not an possibility that one would willingly select.
My attitudes about mobility essentially shifted throughout a school semester overseas in Paris the place I first skilled the liberty and pleasure that got here from life in a walkable metropolis, racking up many miles every day on my well-worn (and trendy) tennis sneakers.
Upon my return to the U.S., I watched glumly from the window of my mom’s automotive as she drove me dwelling from DFW airport by means of gridlock and what felt like a barren panorama of strip malls to our north Dallas subdivision of matching brick single-family houses. Unwilling to let go of my newfound zeal for pedestrianism and car-free residing, I continued to stroll in every single place I might, a behavior that on a number of events induced a Good Samaritan to drag over to ask me if I wanted a journey, sure that I used to be strolling not as a result of I wished to however as a result of my automotive had damaged down.
My mother moved from Texas years in the past, and I haven’t had many causes to return to Dallas up to now couple a long time. So once I went again final 12 months for a highschool reunion, I used to be pleasantly stunned by a few of what I noticed.
My husband and I stayed car-free in a downtown lodge and we went for morning runs alongside the Katy Path, a rails-to-trails greenway that’s now a thriving group gem. I took word of the brand new mixed-use improvement that has risen up round gentle rail that hardly existed once I lived there and now stands, based on DART’s web site, as one of many longest techniques within the nation. I noticed bike lanes – even when they tended to be unprotected and alongside high-traffic roads — and bike share bikes scattered round city, together with numerous new off-road trails. Maybe most conspicuously, once-neglected older, pedestrian-scale neighborhoods – with bushes and sidewalks and quite a lot of makes use of – have been now experiencing a renaissance, full of folks on a Saturday night time once I met up with a bunch of outdated buddies for dinner.
We even walked from dinner to a close-by bar. And nobody requested us if we would have liked a journey.
