Posted August 12, 2024 in Weblog

By Emilie Bahr

“Meet the individuals selecting to dwell car-free in Dallas.” 

The headline from the Dallas Morning Information got here throughout my social media feed just 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 automobile.

It hardly appears newsworthy that somebody might dwell in a serious American metropolis of 1.3 million with no automobile. Until you’ve spent any time in Dallas.

In 1994, I moved from Baton Rouge to Dallas to start out highschool within the metropolis the place my mother had relocated for work. My new house 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 best way wherein it was devoutly dedicated to concrete and vehicles.  

My hometown, the place I lived with my dad and attended underfunded Louisiana public faculties, 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 varsity 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. Automobiles additionally weren’t only a technique of getting round – they have been the last word standing image. Valet parking was in all places – even on the mall and the grocery retailer. The scholar parking zone at my personal women’ faculty regarded just like the showroom of a flowery European automobile seller, the attendant watching over it was among the many most beloved members of the varsity workers. 

As soon as the shock of my new surroundings wore off, it didn’t take me lengthy to fall below the spell of Dallas’ car-centrism. 

Former Bogota Mayor Enrique Peñelosa famously stated: “A complicated metropolis just isn’t one the place the poor personal a automobile, however the place the wealthy take public transport.” Once I lived in Dallas, my then-stepfather’s suggestion on a few events that I take the town bus to high school relatively than have him drive me felt like a specific model of cruelty.  Public transit was merely not  an choice that  one would willingly select.

My attitudes about mobility basically 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 footwear.

Upon my return to the U.S., I watched glumly from the window of my mom’s automobile as she drove me house from DFW airport by 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 dwelling, I continued to stroll in all places I might, a behavior that on a number of events precipitated a Good Samaritan to tug 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 automobile had damaged down.

My mother moved from Texas years in the past, and I haven’t had many causes to return to Dallas previously couple many years. So after I went again final yr 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 resort and we went for morning runs alongside the Katy Path, a rails-to-trails greenway that’s now a thriving group gem. I took observe of the brand new mixed-use growth that has risen up round gentle rail that hardly existed after I lived there and now stands, in keeping with DART’s web site, as one of many longest programs 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 quite a lot of new off-road trails. Maybe most conspicuously, once-neglected older, pedestrian-scale neighborhoods – with timber and sidewalks and a wide range of makes use of – have been now experiencing a renaissance, crammed with individuals on a Saturday night time after I met up with a bunch of outdated pals for dinner. 

We even walked from dinner to a close-by bar. And nobody requested us if we wanted a journey.