Retrofitting Streetcar Suburbia: The Story of Main-Columbia-Abrams
At the recent debate between the contenders for the Dallas District 14 City Council Member incumbent Philip Kingston made a reference to the expansion of Abrams Road as an example of the kind of street project that does a disservice to the neighborhood it’s in. It’s easy to find dozens of examples of this in Dallas’ old neighborhoods. You’ll be walking through a delightful streetcar neighborhood with its relatively straight grid layout, surrounded by tasteful homes, four-plexes and courtyard apartments when you’ll suddenly encounter a high-speed road with long curves that make it impossible to see if it’s safe to cross. It feels out of place because this kind of road was forced on a neighborhood that was never designed for it.
These experiences unfortunately define much of Old East Dallas’ character. Some were caused by mere widenings of once modest streets (like Gaston Avenue, now one of the most dangerous streets in OED) but others, like Abrams Road, were subjected to much more damaging treatment.
Destroying our City to Save It
After researching the Dallas Morning News archives from that era, it was at the behest of the East and South Dallas Chamber of Commerce that a whole slew of street-widenings were planned across OED. The tone of the articles from the era make it evident that these projects were intended to connect the new neighborhoods of Northeast Dallas to Downtown with nary a mention of the impact on residents located between these two points:
“Eventually this throughway will extend four more blocks from Garrett to connect with Main Street, giving Northeast Dallas a new direct link with down-town.”
Many of these projects were doubtlessly attempts to counteract the white flight that emptied out much of East Dallas as residents used the new freeways to live in new suburbs like Mesquite and North Dallas. The logic being “if we can just make our streets as fast as the highways, merchants can compete with the convenience of car culture in the new suburbs.”
Fortunately, many of these projects, like the 4-lane expansion of Junius St. from Hall to Brookside, never came to pass. A few of these “cross-town route” projects did come to fruition and define a good part of OED neighborhood character. One of them that looms large both for its impact on the neighborhood and the way it has fallen pathetically short of its aspiration is the Main-Columbia-Abrams Road connection. The apparent idea of this project was to create an additional route for cars to get downtown from the burgeoning north Dallas suburbs by relieving traffic on Gaston & Live Oak and directing it onto Abrams-Columbia-Main street. As the unwieldy name suggests, that’s not actually one street, but thanks to the power of bulldozers and steamrollers, it was MADE to be one street.
The Price of Progress
The best way to get an understanding of the impact this project had on the neighborhood is to look at the street today with the old streetcar grid laid on top. Blue lines represent the location of the old streetcar lines in the area.
First up we have the Main to Columbia connection at Carroll Ave. As you can see on the map, the street cars moved along their tracks from Elm & Main onto Carroll at angles too sharp for a modern, efficient road system, so our traffic engineers erased the corners and made a nice smooth turn for all the motorists flying down the road at 45–50 mph or more. The legacy of the old main street is evident in the comically large slip lane on the south end of the intersection.
Sharp curves slow things down while gentle curves are great for keeping cars moving at a high speed. High speeds are great for squashing pedestrians. Combine this raceway geometry with the expansion to 6 travel lanes on a 100' right-of-way and it’s not surprising that Columbia is one of the deadlier streets in OED.
After continuing along a long stretch of Columbia, the street car met another line along Beacon St. that traveled into the Junius Heights area and up to the Lakewood Shopping Center. As ugly and damaging as the Main-Columbia connection was, it pales in comparison to the destruction wrought upon Junius Heights by the Columbia-Abrams connection. Dozens of homes in this area were demolished to make way for this mile-long, 6-lane monstrosity placed directly in the middle of the neighborhood. On the right side of the photo you can see Woodrow Wilson High School and JL Long Middle School separated from Lipscomb Elementary on the northwest side.
I can find no account of protests from the residents who had their homes seized or from those left behind who were now separated from their neighbors, schools, and library by a road too dangerous to walk across and too, instead all accounts are of the “rah-rah-roads” type from planners, business groups, and “Citizens Commissions” all dedicated to boosting the project. The only possible downside I can find mentioned is of efforts to save the iconic entryway to the neighborhood, which is already covered in an excellent piece by Flashback Dallas.
Measuring Success
The City got the high speed connection to downtown it needed, right? Not at all: by all measures, the road project was a failure. A six-lane divided road with left-turn lanes like Main-Columbia-Abrams is designed to carry 44,000 car per day. Today, according to the NCTCOG’s most recent traffic counts, Abrams carries about 16,000 cars per day or about the same number as a 2 lane road with center turn lane can handle.
This means that we’ve got 4 extra lanes of pavement that we are paying to maintain and replace that is going almost totally unused. This doesn’t even take into consideration the massive effort to build this road in the first place or the social damage to the neighborhood it split in two.
Building our City to Save It: A Proposal to Bring some Sanity to Main-Columbia-Abrams
Given all the harm we’ve done to one of our most pleasant neighborhoods, how can we mitigate the damage? We must start by treating our streets as assets designed to serve the community rather than expressways made to serve commuters. Below are just a few ways Main-Columbia-Abrams could be reimagined. Sound crazy? Quality street designs have already been done dozens of times. Demand more of our City and demand more of our streets.
