In the "this is no surprise" category, the Regional Transportation Council voted unanimously Thursday to support construction of the Trinity tollroad and then issued a few choice quotes about the regional debacle facing us if the tollroad is voted down in November’s referendum.
Part of the message from the RTC, as its known in transportation circles, is that building a high-speed tollroad will reduce pollution in and around Dallas County because cars driving faster throw off fewer noxious pollutants than cars idling on highways. Good point, I suppose, if that’s as far as the logic went. But let’s think about this: We build a new tollroad to relieve traffic congestion around downtown and allow Flower Mound and Cedar Hill residents easy access to each other. But once the road is built, more people say to themselves: Hey, I can drive to a less-expensive home in Cedar Hill in 15 minutes now, so why do I need to live in high-priced Dallas anymore? So more people shift their homes (and their tax and spendable dollars) to outlying suburbs, with the intention of commuting to their jobs, which begins re-clogging the new tollroad and other highways in and around downtown, which just builds the pollution level back up again and has politicians clamoring for another multi-billion-dollar highway in 10 or 20 years.
Norm Alston has made a couple of intelligent posts here about whether it’s even a good idea anymore, given high gas prices and the pollution factor, to make it easier for people to commute to suburbs by car. The way to boost the economic benefit to the city of Dallas seems, logically anyway, to be fostering increased density inside the LBJ loop, which will naturally reduce pollution, make public transportation more viable, boost retail opportunities thanks to increased residential density, and make downtown and its surrounding environs employment magnets once again. I don’t see how a huge new high-speed tollroad, in and of itself, makes any of that possible or even likely.