LIFE OF LUXURY: WESTCOTT SHIFTS APARTMENT BOOM TO CENTRAL CORRIDOR 15
JANUARY 2016 I Vol. 12, No. 1 prestonhollowpeople.com facebook.com/phollowpeople @phollowpeople
EDITORIAL
Here’s How to Fix Northwest Highway
Northwest Highway should be our neighborhood’s Main Street, not a regional inner-loop thoroughfare.
COURTESY MIG
San Francisco transformed its Central Freeway into four-lane Octavia Boulevard and revived the neighborhood.
WICK ALLISON
T
he Preston Center task force is right to want to make Northwest Highway more like a parkway than the regional thoroughfare it has become. Nobody — particularly Councilwoman Jennifer Gates — should be distracted from that mission by the inner-loop highway idea being floated recently by Michael Morris, transportation director of the North Central Texas Council of Governments. That is the same inner-loop highway he once wanted to jam through Oak Lawn to East Dallas. If that had been built, we would not have a Turtle Creek or Uptown. Nothing about the idea improves by moving it five miles north to Preston Hollow. Morris says that the new highway
could be tunneled or cantilevered. At $1 billion a mile, neither option is likely. Moreover, neither option can be built now or in the near future. Morris says it cannot be included in NCTCOG’s regional 2040 plan. So why waste time talking about it? There is a solution that can be implemented now to transform Northwest Highway into the neighborhood Main Street it should be. That solution is to redesign the roadway to reduce the out-of-neighborhood traffic that now uses it. That solution is easy because it is already happening. In 2014, Northwest Highway carried 48,303 vehicles through Preston Hollow. The historical average has been 56,535. In 2002, TxDOT measured 62,353 vehicles, which may have been its peak. Contrary to perception, traffic on Northwest Highway is down more than 14 percent in the last 12 years. From its peak, traffic is down 22 percent. To quote Yogi Berra, “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” The way to reduce traffic even more is to reduce the lanes available
for drivers to use. Take Northwest Highway from six lanes to four. Build sidewalks. (Astonishingly, there are no sidewalks.) Create a beautiful median. Put in a bike lane. Make walking along the road pleasant. Make crossing the boulevard easy and safe. Gates worries that a redesign would send congestion somewhere else or increase traffic on other streets. But traffic is not a constant. A temporary barrier does divert traffic to nearby roads, but a permanent barrier, like the reduction of lanes, alters commuter behavior entirely. And that’s what the task force should want to accomplish. Congestion is not reduced on a road by inviting more drivers to use it, which is what an inner loop would do. The opposite is true. The more difficult it is for out-of-neighborhood drivers to use, the less they will use it. The history of the last two decades provides the answer to Northwest Highway congestion. Traffic is going down. We can force it to go down even more. And we can do it now — if we have leaders willing to force the issue rather than dodging it.
Westhollow Seeks Community Sense By Todd Jorgenson
People Newspapers Ask Donovan Lord’s neighbors where they live, and you might get a variety of responses. Preston Hollow? Northwest Dallas? And that doesn’t even count the various homeowners associations just west of Midway Road, north of Walnut Hill Lane. Lord wants to give his area of Dallas an identity, and while it starts with a name, he hopes to make Westhollow Society about more than that. “One of the main issues I’ve seen is a lack of understanding about what our area is and where it is,” Lord said. “I wanted to give the area an identity.” Westhollow, as he defines it, is an area consisting of about 22 neighborhoods and more than 7,000 homes with boundaries including Walnut Hill, Midway, LBJ Freeway, and Dennis Road. Having lived there for 11 years, Lord has seen what the region has to offer, and more importantly, what it hasn’t. “We want to bring more culture and better retail developments to the area,” Lord said. “We aren’t Preston Hollow. We have different needs and it’s a different part of the city.” His effort started about three years ago with an initiative to install sign toppers. He’s also focused on beautification, crime reduction, even a new library.
C O U R T E SY: W E S T H O L LO W S O C I E T Y
Westhollow Society hopes to create a public improvement district for several neighborhoods.
He hopes to accomplish that by getting city approval for a public improvement district, in which residents of a designated area pay supplemental taxes (about 13 cents per $100 of property value) in exchange for enhanced services such as added police patrols, marketing efforts, landscaping and lighting, street cleaning and repairs, and cultural improvements, depending upon the needs of
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