The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), along with the City of Dallas and Dallas County, has released the results of its Dallas City Center Master Assessment Process (Dallas CityMAP). The goal of the 15-month study was to assess major urban interstate corridors immediately surrounding and entering the Dallas urban core and how they can best integrate with the future vision of the city.
Leading infrastructure consultancy HNTB led a multi-disciplinary team of consultants for TxDOT to deliver the CityMAP process, which included implementing a public engagement process that included conducting more than 80 one-on-one interviews with key stakeholders and organizing multiple public workshops, as well as the creation of a website outlining the CityMAP process. HNTB provided scenarios exploring the ‘art of the possible’ for future Dallas highway infrastructure, with associated development opportunities, in order to show how and where TxDOT, the City of Dallas, Dallas County and other stakeholders could direct monetary resources to make the freeway system a more functional part of the urban fabric, and to create a more livable 21st century city for Dallas’s rapidly growing urban population.
Dallas CityMAP will ultimately be used to deliver key scenario alternatives for the development of future transportation and for public and private infrastructure improving city connectivity, and to evaluate funding priorities for TxDOT, the city and their partners. The project will also be used to help identify and guide future transportation and urban design, environmental planning and policy decisions, by local, state and federal elected officials and other decision makers responsible for these corridors running through and around the Dallas urban core.
“It has been an honor to work with TxDOT’s leadership and staff at all levels, the City of Dallas political leadership and staff, and various stakeholders, to gain input and help create a unique and innovative process to deliver a vision for the city’s urban corridors,” said James Frye, HNTB vice president and landscape architect.
“We believe Dallas CityMAP responds directly to a wide variety of requests made by partner agencies, stakeholders and Dallas residents, and will help guide decision makers in deciding the future of Dallas’ urban freeway corridors through an open and comprehensive approach.”
Texas Transportation Commissioner Victor Vandergriff commented, “CityMAP was about people, process and product. HNTB’s James Frye, Brandi Crawford and Dan Chapman led this extraordinary work and did so under intense pressure. They had to capture all of the competing interests and roads, and we’re incredibly grateful for their work.”
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings added, “CityMAP is the result of an unprecedented effort by TxDOT to gather public input about the future of downtown Dallas corridors, and to lay out the ‘art of the possible’, even before any formal studies are started. An effort of this scale and scope has never been attempted before. In particular, I hope that it provides the impetus to reconnect southern Dallas neighborhoods that have been divided by poor transportation decisions in years past. It is time to rectify those divisions.”
