SocraticGadfly: Angela Hunt nails Trinity toll road in Dallas

March 26, 2009

Angela Hunt nails Trinity toll road in Dallas

While Wick Allison makes nice and Jim Schutze fulminates

Dallas City Councilwoman Angela Hunt nails it: with the serious concern the Army Corps of Engineers has about Trinity River levees here in Dallas, it’s time to abandon the idea of a Trinity toll road, and move TxDOT money to other projects. Dallas can still build Trinity Park without waiting on a toll road.

Oh, and whenever some sort of road is built there, tolls or not, there’s no way, with levee issues, it can be more than four lanes wide.

But, she does have one big boo-boo. She calls for a road connecting I-20 and the west side of Loop 12.

As I e-mailed her….

We already have Spur 408 connecting I-20 and Loop 12's west side in southwest Dallas.

Nothing new is needed.

Hunt e-mailed me later, saying that to meet the News' column length, she'd chopped some information about details of a connector to Walton Walker. Well, her e-mail, and her blog, which said the same thing, didn't really clarify stuff that much to me, or indicate what's "missing" that Spur 408 doesn't already do. (Now, if she had mentioned something similar to 408 stubbing off from the northwest corner of Loop 12/Walton Walker, that would be different.) Or, that 161, when actual freeway lanes are done, certainly won't do.

D Magazine’s Wick Allison does caveat that the North Texas Tollway Authority was going to pay part of some part-related construction.

Meanwhile, at the Observer, Jim Schutze (who else) describes just how bad the levee problem could be.

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