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Opinion

Southern Dallas residents need I-345. Why is a wealthy consortium trying to tear it down?

The Roddrick West problem is just a subplot.

The long-running question over what to do with a tiny strip of highway in Dallas is now tied up in a weird political knot.

Roddrick West, son of powerful state Sen. Royce West (a.k.a. Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Royce West), wants to do business with the Texas Department of Transportation.

Specifically, he wants to lease land under Interstate 345, a mile-and-change stretch dividing Deep Ellum and downtown. And he wants to build soccer fields beneath the highway.

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Others can debate the merit of the proposal. But given his father’s role as vice chair of the Senate’s transportation committee, this is raising eyebrows, as anyone would expect. There’s no evidence we’ve seen that Roddrick West has done anything wrong. But deals like this need not only avoid conflicts of interest; they need to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest.

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So the Dallas City Council, which shares the land with TxDOT, was right to hit pause on this proposed lease Wednesday until everything that happened around it is aired in the full light of day.

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As interesting as it might be, the Roddrick West saga is really an odd subplot in a story of more lasting importance about I-345 itself.

A powerful consortium calling itself the Coalition for a New Dallas led the opposition to the West deal. Members of the coalition appear eager to use the proposed lease to draw attention to their more important goal — tearing down I-345.

The group — founded by D Magazine Partners CEO Wick Allison and including developers with transparent moneyed interests along with a smattering of current and ex-politicians — wants to replace I-345 with surface streets in the expectation that a dense and lively urban neighborhood will spring up in its place.

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That sounds wonderful in a way. We think highways have done too much to divide Dallas too, and we hope to see that mitigated, beginning with the canyoning and decking of I-30 between South Dallas and East Dallas.

But the political push to tear down I-345 — issuing almost entirely from the Coalition for a New Dallas — is the sort of urbanism that gives urbanism a bad name.

The highway links I-45 to the south with Central Expressway to the north. Some 180,000 cars travel it per day. More than 75,000 of those begin their trips south of I-30, heading north. Many of the people in those cars are middle- and lower-income residents from southern Dallas getting to their jobs in the north. They rely on the road as a way of life.

A dense urban neighborhood of pedestrian-friendly streets sounds picturesque. But it doesn’t sound like the sort of place a commuter will be able to easily traverse on the way to a custodial job at Parkland Memorial Hospital or a maintenance job at Love Field.

And it sure doesn’t sound like the kind of neighborhood with price points to invite working people to set up a home.

A new Dallas does need to be a place where highways don’t split neighborhoods. But getting to that Dallas doesn’t mean tearing down a stretch of road that serves working people who need to get to work and get home more than they need a lively pedestrian corridor.

It means considering the needs of all the people and acting not in narrow interests of a few but in the broader interests of the greater good.