This article originally appeared on the blog “America Walks” and is reprinted here with permission.
“Meet the people who are giving up a life without a car in Dallas.”
The headline from the Dallas Morning News came across this on my social media feed recently and couldn’t resist clicking on it and watching the short video about a woman living without a car in Big D.
The fact that someone can live in an American city with 1.3 million inhabitants without a car is hardly news, unless you’ve ever been to Dallas.
In 1994, I moved from Baton Rouge to Dallas to attend high school. My mother had moved there for work. My new home was different in many ways from where I grew up, but the most obvious to my pro-urbanist consciousness was its devotion to concrete and cars.
My hometown, where I lived with my father and attended Louisiana’s underfunded public schools, was hardly a model of pedestrian-friendly urbanism. The neighborhood I grew up in didn’t even have sidewalks. My father regularly drove me to the school bus stop.
Still, in Dallas, I was surprised at how normal it was to commute for hours across the city, driving 90 miles per hour on toll roads and freeways that cut through the city’s sprawling, sparsely populated area. Cars weren’t just a means of transportation, either—they were the ultimate status symbol. Valet parking was everywhere—even at the mall and the supermarket. The student parking lot at my private girls’ school looked like the showroom of a fancy European car dealership, and the guard who guarded it was one of the school’s most popular employees.
After the shock of my new surroundings wore off, it didn’t take long for me to fall under the spell of Dallas’ car-centricity.
Former mayor of Bogotá, Enrique Peñelosa, once said, “A progressive city is not one in which the poor own cars, but one in which the rich use public transportation.” When I lived in Dallas, my then-stepfather’s occasional suggestion that I take the city bus to school rather than have him drive me seemed like a special form of cruelty. Public transportation was simply not an option one chose voluntarily.
My attitude towards mobility changed fundamentally during a semester abroad in Paris, where I experienced for the first time the freedom and joy that comes with living in a pedestrian-friendly city and walked many kilometers every day in my worn-out (and fashionable) tennis shoes.
Upon my return to the U.S., I watched gloomily from the window of my mother’s car as she drove me from DFW Airport through traffic jams and a seemingly desolate landscape of shopping malls back home to our North Dallas neighborhood of identical brick single-family homes. Not wanting to give up my newfound zeal for walking and car-free living, I continued to walk wherever I could, a habit that on several occasions resulted in a Good Samaritan stopping to ask if I wanted a ride. He was convinced that I was walking not because I wanted to, but because my car had broken down.
My mother moved away from Texas years ago, and I haven’t had many reasons to return to Dallas in the last few decades. When I returned there last year for a high school reunion, I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw.
My husband and I were staying car-free in a downtown hotel and took a morning walk along the Katy Trail, a greenway that runs from one rail line to another and is now a thriving community gem. I noticed the new mixed-use development that has sprung up around the light rail, which barely existed in my day and is now one of the longest systems in the country, according to DART’s website. I saw bike lanes—though these were mostly unprotected and along busy roads—and rental bikes dotted around town, as well as a number of new off-road trails. Perhaps most striking was that once-neglected, older, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods—with trees and sidewalks and a variety of uses—were now experiencing a renaissance and were bustling with people on a Saturday night when I met up with some old friends for dinner.
We even walked from dinner to a nearby bar and no one asked us if we needed a ride.
