Along with power outages and impassable roadways, the Blizzard of 2021 has gifted Dallas wordsmiths with some small — very small — consolation: an expanded vocabulary. Before this week, I doubt many of us were familiar with the term “load shed,” electric utility jargon for cutting power to wide areas to prevent catastrophic system failure. Load sheds result in rolling blackouts, which happen all too frequently in Dallas — something we all know too well.
Another unwelcome addition to the local lexicon: ERCOT, the acronym for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Reliability? We can file that in the oxymoron category, or maybe under “obscenities.”
A more mellifluous addition to the civic dictionary is the “sneckdown.” The word conjures an image of desperate smooching under the high school bleachers, but it’s got nothing to do with teen hormones. Coined by the transit advocate Aaron Naparstek, it is a portmanteau of snow and neckdown, and refers to the snow-covered areas that remain in streets after storms, creating artificial expansions of sidewalks and traffic islands. (A neckdown being street-design jargon for a road narrowing.)
What make neckdowns something more interesting than a seasonal anomaly, is what they can teach us about how our streets are used — and how they can be improved. Like a homicide detective’s black light, they reveal the traces of a scene that are normally invisible.
Specifically, sneckdowns illustrate the spaces of the street normally dedicated to automobiles that are not used by automobiles, those being the spaces where snow accumulates. Not surprisingly, and especially in Dallas, they reveal just how much more space we have given over to cars than they actually use or need. The places we see snow are places where sidewalks can be expanded, where crosswalks can be shortened, where medians can be planted, where bike lanes can be installed.
You don’t have to look far on social media to find images of Dallas sneckdowns, of places, especially downtown, where it is abundantly clear that the balance between pedestrians and cars is out of whack. That is why Dallas is one of the most dangerous places to be a pedestrian in the United States. But safety is only one of the problems: The poor pedestrian environment degrades the economic vitality and quality of life in the city.
As the load sheds and sneckdowns suggest, Dallas has a resilience problem, and it is going to get worse given our aging infrastructure, the increasingly drastic effects of climate change, and our over-reliance on cars. We might add to this another factor: that congenital Texas intransigence that denies these problems exist, and deems any plan to address them as either the overstepping of personal liberty or the product of liberal propaganda.
Indeed, Gov. Greg Abbott has taken aim at the Green New Deal, suggesting that a loss of solar and wind power is responsible for the failure of the state power grid. It’s a red herring argument: fossil fuel generation has been reduced to an even greater extent than renewable sources, according to ERCOT, and the chief culprit has been frozen infrastructure at fossil fuel and nuclear generating plants.
As we’ve seen with the coronavirus, if you don’t acknowledge the actual problem, it’s awfully hard to fix. The costs of inaction are severe, and though we all suffer, those who have it worst are the most vulnerable: the elderly, those with health issues and disabilities, and marginalized communities in general. Indeed, minority communities have been hit hardest by storm-induced blackouts.
For those who leave home, the conditions can be deadly.
There is no more vivid illustration of the dangers of our dependence on automotive transportation than the 133-vehicle pile-up that killed six people last week in Fort Worth. In dangerous conditions, North Texans find themselves with no alternative but their cars, because there are so few public transit opportunities. This forces ever more people onto a road network that is simply too extensive to maintain, a problem exacerbated by winter weather, when ice and snow add to already hazardous conditions.
Some impetus for change to this situation may be coming from Washington, where the new administration has promised a less auto-centric transportation policy. Along with aviator shades and grandpa-isms, a dedication to Amtrak has been a longtime Joe Biden signature. That interest should extend to train service of all kinds, from urban and regional networks (like DART) to the high-speed inter-city system currently under development in Texas.
It is encouraging that a mayor, albeit a small-city mayor, will be setting the nation’s transportation goals and funding priorities. Pete Buttigieg, formerly the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was confirmed this month as Biden’s transportation secretary, and has already indicated a willingness to rethink urban mobility.
Among the policies of particular interest to Dallas is an openness to the removal of urban highways, which have not only encouraged an auto-centric culture but were built to the detriment of minority communities. “Black and brown neighborhoods have been disproportionately divided by highway projects or left isolated by the lack of adequate transit and transportation resources,” Buttigieg wrote on Twitter, acknowledging an often ignored truth.
In I-345, the elevated corridor that links US 75 to I-45, Dallas has an ideal candidate for highway removal. It is a prime example of a road that cut off a minority community — historically black Deep Ellum — from downtown. The road is long past its useful life. Tearing it down would open up a wide swath for development in walking distance to the city’s commercial heart ideally suited for the kind of “missing middle” and low-income housing Dallas needs desperately.
The problem with “sneckdowns” is they disappear when the snow melts. You can either take their lessons and apply them or ignore them and accept the status quo ante.
As the storms this past week have shown, that status is no longer acceptable, and there’s a word for ignoring reality, and it’s one we all know: dumb.
