12/15/03  Dude, where's my lake?

We voted for a lake and boulevards, not a suspension bridge over a  drainage ditch and a tolllway.  If the the boulevards are not must haves in the bridge design, then the Trinity River Project is just becomes an architectural folly and a major bypass - with no stimulus to riverside development or  recreation. A big long range mistake.

It is very discouraging to see that the Council has turned the focus of
the project primarily onto highways and bridges - and not the     interface with the river itself. When faced with a challenge this big, it is tempting for politicians to succumb to an edifice complex, which they have in a big way.

For instance, while it is largely a knock-off of his other projects, the proposed Calatrava bridge at Woodall Rogers is the wrong solution in the wrong location. For starters, it is an enormous suspension bridge - designed to span a wide deep river like the Hudson, not the Trinity, nor the roadway proposed on one side of the flood plain.

That's what beam bridges or the proposed arch bridge at I-35 are
meant to do.

Once the river plan is turned into an expressway, the opportunities for "enhancing" the river will become just so much highway landscaping to be viewed at 70 miles an hour.  

The natural environment of the river will be compromised in the bargain. Also missing from the approved plan is any real connection between the city and the river - anything that would encourage development adjacent to the river along the levees.

The boulevards along the levees that initially sold me on the project are gone.  If the bridges are built without anticipating interchanges for such boulevards, they will stay gone, and with them any realistic hopes for offices, retail and residences fronting the river.

Look at it this way - what if Central Expressway had been built inside the Turtle Creek flood plain.  If Garland Road and Buckner had been built immediately adjacent to White Rock Lake.

Get the picture ? For the sake of a pretty bridge and a new highway, we will have given up on the river for nature, for recreation and development.

A neat trick on us all.