Dallas Drafts a Mobility Plan as DART Revamps Routes

Now’s your chance to have a say in the transportation and mobility planning in Dallas, with both the City and DART.

Would you believe Connect Dallas will be the very FIRST Strategic Mobility Plan for the City of Dallas? This document will take all the transportation plans and projects, and set the priorities which will guide implementation over the next 5 years.

If the 20th Century was focused on building Dallas’ core transportation system, the 21st Century should be focused on connecting people to jobs, job to people, and creating great places with lasting value.

Connect Dallas Foundations Report, Sept 2019

What transportation plans does Dallas have, you ask? The Connect Dallas Foundations Report is a great review of all related plans ever – if you nerd out on facts about Dallas you will be enamored with this report – but the quick overview is:

The document driving most mobility projects has been the Thoroughfare Plan designating the intended Level of Service (LOS) or automobile traffic volume and therefore the specified design of each street. In 2016 City Council adopted a Complete Streets Design Manual which further directs design to be based on adjacent real estate uses, rather than LOS, and requires that design accommodate a variety of transportation modes and include things like trees and benches. Dallas also has the 2011 Bike Plan.

Separately, there’s the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) organization with its trains, buses and specialty services operating across 13 cities in the region.

Connect Dallas is the City’s first five-year strategic transportation vision, to develop a transportation system that supports the City’s housing, economic, equity and sustainability goals. Connect Dallas is a multimodal plan that will consider all forms of transportation, including biking, walking, transit, automobiles, freight, and new mobility options, such as bike-share, transportation network companies and e-scooters.

Have Your Say

The Connect Dallas process began in 2019 with a few different opportunities lined up for engagement including a survey of initial impressions and a Mobility Fair and Symposium in February.

This March the team is soliciting input through a final survey of preferences for 3 basic scenarios of how the City could prioritize different types of mobility and land-use decisions. We can’t have it all. We have to prioritize all the infrastructure projects that need to get done.

Survey results will be shown to Dallas City Council for our representatives to determine which scenario citizens will prioritize. That decision will essentially define the final report for Connect Dallas and define which transportation projects will get done over the next 5 years.

DART Redesigns Bus Network

DART is also in the midst of a multi-year process to redesign the bus network. Phase 1 is in the works with surveys and engagements planned for the general public and DART users at various stations and stops in the coming month, April 10th through May 8th. The initial report, serving as the foundation for the surveys, will be published on April 10th.

The most interesting thing I’ve learned during this intense focus on Dallas transportation networks is that the success of a city’s transportation system is highly dependent on the adjacent land uses. As we see these two plans develop we are sure to see them begin to impact more than just which potholes get filled and which streets get trees and benches. These plans will help define which neighborhoods become walkable transit-rich areas and could even play into the current changes to parking requirements in development now.

This is our chance to say how transportation improvements will develop and impact our City. While I’m not holding my breath, I’m hopeful this could be the beginning of some greatly needed changes.