Real Quality of Life Improvements Can Start With a Set of Wheels

by Rudy Karimi, Dallas Park & Recreation Board Member for District 14

I have a confession to make. Recently, I have become obsessed with our quality of life in Dallas. I don’t just mean the hot mess that is our city leadership. I mean my mission to help create the kind of city where parents feel safe letting their kids play in parks, where community members know each other by name, and where we actively build the communities we actually want to live in. The Traffic Garden is part of that vision.

Call me crazy, but I believe we can advance many of our city’s challenges simply by getting outside on a set of wheels. Whether it’s teaching kids traffic safety, getting around without a car, or simply improving mental health, getting people onto a bike, scooter, or skates solves more problems than most people realize.

The demand for safer, family-friendly wheel infrastructure is already bursting at the seams in Dallas. This past May, I organized a grassroots “Bike Bus” to my kids’ school, Geneva Heights Elementary in East Dallas. I was quietly hoping for 20 people to show up to ride the route I selected. Instead, closer to 120 parents and kids arrived with their bikes, scooters, and helmets, flooding the neighborhood streets with pure joy and laughter! Video from that morning proved what many of us already knew: our community is yearning for safe, active spaces to connect and build core memories.

Unfortunately, our amenities are currently lagging behind that demand. We have an immediate opportunity to close the gap by transforming an underperforming piece of pavement in East Dallas into our city’s very first “Traffic Garden” at Tenison Park. A Traffic Garden is a miniature city designed to scale, complete with small roads, crosswalks, traffic signs, and railroad tracks. It creates a controlled, safe environment where young children and their families can master the fundamentals of trail and street safety before facing them in the real world.

The vision is simple: reimagine the park’s central parking lot off Clermont Avenue. This is currently an underutilized space and too often the site of unsavory and nefarious activities.

Now imagine a world where this fun and safe attraction exists at Tenison Park, seamlessly linked to a redesigned East Grand Avenue, reconnecting the neighborhoods of Hollywood/Santa Monica and Mount Auburn, which have been cut off from Tenison Park by an over-provisioned speedway for decades. Yes, this could be a reality thanks to a project the city and TxDOT have simultaneously planned to calm traffic, upgrade sidewalks, and add dedicated bike lanes, turning a hostile highway into a walkable neighborhood street.

Now, let’s picture how these separate visions complement each other, because the educational Traffic Garden is just the anchor for a much larger, diverse wheel-based recreational hub. Over time, we can integrate other amenities like bike pump tracks and a “skate spot” into this footprint, creating a vibrant destination for all ages to get outside and create core memories together!

This transformation perfectly respects Tenison Park’s existing layout. The park is already divided into two distinct areas: we can fully protect the rich riparian zone, wildlife habitats, and pollinator gardens north of Clermont Avenue while aggressively activating the underperforming southern half with this dynamic, family-focused hub.

Tearing out old asphalt to create green space is a slow, prohibitively expensive process. Repurposing it for an educational, family-focused amenity is smart, pragmatic, and immediate. If we want a better quality of life in Dallas, we have to build it. Let’s build the blueprint at Tenison Park and replicate it all over town.