Dallas Might Be Ready to Bury a Downtown Highway and It's About Time

Victor Vandergriff, the Texas Transportation Commissioner, said something wild Monday, just before we hung up.We were talking about Interstate 345, the unmarked 1.4-mile stretch of concrete connecting North Central Expressway with Interstates 30 and 45 that's far better known as the overpass that cuts off Deep Ellum from downtown. I know -- been a while since that divisive overpass was a talking point. But it was back at City Hall this week, in part because the Texas Department of Transportation's about to dig back into it with an expensive, yearlong-at-least traffic and engineering study. And the city now wants in.On Monday a council committee tentatively approved looking at the land beneath the 43-year-old overpass -- how much it's really worth, what you can really build there if the overpass is erased. So I called Vandergriff, who'd overseen TxDOT's landmark CityMAP study that considered vanishing 345, just to discuss the ramifications of such a survey.   Continue reading...