Dallas to Spend Its Tomorrows Fixing Yesterday's Mistakes, Like One-waying Uptown's Streets

On May 20, 1973, a Sunday, a small note about a significant traffic change appeared in this newspaper. Best I can tell by combing through our archives, it came without much warning. I guess that's how Dallas rolled back then, when it was the can-do (whatever-we-want) city. The brief said that after the following day's rush hour, "the one-way couplet of McKinney and Cole-Carlisle will become a reality." Three days later, in a short story buried in the metro section, an official with the city's traffic department finally explained why the decision was made to one-way the two-way streets: to "improve traffic flow and create a less congested internal corridor to downtown."Which is how five miles' worth of McKinney and Cole, all the way from Knox Street to downtown, turned into speedways through Uptown neighborhoods increasingly filled with homes, condos, parks, churches — you know, people, about 19,000 of them, according to the latest look.   Continue reading...