The Dallas City Council unanimously agreed Wednesday to oppose any new elevated passenger rail projects through downtown. Yesterday, the regional agency charged with securing money for these sorts of enormous transportation projects said it is no longer planning to put a 7-story rail line through downtown Dallas. The agency promised more details next month, but it is a significant about-face from recent discussions.
All this hubbub is about a possible high-speed rail line west to Arlington and Fort Worth, whose stations would be below ground. The consternation happens when the train surfaces aboveground in West Dallas and continues, 17 stories in the air, through downtown, on its way to a station in the Cedars. Much of the recent discussion around this project happened late last year in the Arlington headquarters of the North Central Texas Council of Governments, the aforementioned regional agency.
When the matter got to City Hall last March, bureaucratic hell broke loose. Each of the four alignments showed an elevated line running through the southwest corner of downtown. Hunt Realty, which is planning to spend $5 billion on a mixed-use project on its empty land near where the line would go, commissioned renderings of an elevated line running perilously close to the Hyatt Regency and Reunion Tower. Hunt floated the idea that Reunion would have to be torn down, which was reported by WFAA. Council members expressed concern about how the project might affect the nearly $4 billion plans for the new convention center next door. Was an elevated rail bisecting a corner of downtown really worth putting all this new development at risk?
Wednesday, at the behest of the Council’s Economic Development Committee, the body voted wholly in support of keeping an elevated train out of downtown, Uptown, and Victory Park. This decision basically tells the feds that the city would not support such an alignment, which could put funding at risk.
Then on Thursday, Michael Morris, the transportation director of the North Central Texas Council of Governments, broke some news. “I think our plan forward is not to have an elevated train through your downtown,” Morris said. “We’re more than happy to comply and simply move forward.”
Councilmember Cara Mendelsohn asked him to share the alignments. He declined, saying he would need more time to explain them, and promised to unveil more at a workshop next month. He declined again on Friday when asked by D Magazine, saying he could not share any specifics with the public until briefing the board of the Regional Transportation Council. Morris said the agency has been working to identify routes around downtown since getting significant pushback last March, prior to the resolution.
“I believe we have a solution that complies with the Dallas Council resolution that wishes to have no elevated routes in the central business district of Dallas,” Morris said in an interview. “I believe we have a path forward. We’re going to totally comply with the city of Dallas in their resolution, and I don’t think the world is going to come to an end.”
There are two related high-speed routes here, Houston to Dallas and then Dallas to Fort Worth. The former is further along. The project to Houston was resurrected last year by Amtrak, which came to the table once the private developer appeared to fail to bring it to fruition. Amtrak quickly hired Andy Byford, who earned the nickname “Train Daddy” for massively improving the frequency and reliability of New York City’s subway system. He led the transit systems in both London and Toronto, and his arrival at Amtrak signaled a newfound investment in the country’s first possible high-speed rail line.
In the months after Byford’s hiring, President Joe Biden met with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kushida and secured permission to use that country’s Shinkansen bullet train technology, which, Morris said, has operated for 54 years with 99 percent reliability and no fatalities.
Dallas to Houston is an ideal test case of the technology in the States: a straight shot of relatively flat land between two of the country’s largest cities. Adding an extension to Fort Worth is a bet on this project coming to fruition—and that there will be an appetite for an expansion elsewhere. About 90 percent of the land along the western route lies in the public right of way. It only gets complicated once it gets to Dallas, which is why Council has raised a collective eyebrow.
“If you look at high-speed rail in the rest of the world, this isn’t just about Dallas to Houston and Dallas to Fort Worth,” Morris said back in March. “It’s Fort Worth, then does it go to Denver? Does it go to Oklahoma City? Where do we go west of Dallas to a national network?”
Morris had a caveat, though. “It seems very unlikely we would want to build high-speed rail between Dallas and Fort Worth if we did not have a leg that connected us to all the other Texas cities,” Morris said during a January meeting.
The train to Houston has already been environmentally cleared by the feds, which means it can begin pursuing the dollars to build it. The clearance plan for Fort Worth is underway and expected to be finished in February. That’s why the City Council passed its resolution, to try to get a word in before the alignment is established.
Morris has said that he would prefer that rail be elevated to reach the 7-story-tall station terminus in the Cedars, which is where riders will access the train to Houston. The feds have approved that location and height, and changing it would put the entire project in peril, Byford told the Council last March. During that meeting, Morris said forcing riders to travel down 7 stories to a different, at-grade rail line to Fort Worth would dissuade people from taking the train. He had proposed a people mover into downtown to the Eddie Bernice Johnson Union Station, which could become a mixed-use transit hub that connects to DART, the Trinity Railway Express, and Amtrak. With this week’s Council resolution against elevated rail downtown, Morris said those options would not be possible.
“It appears this current City Council wishes not to have any routes to downtown. Now you need to understand the implications of that,” he said. “All that evaporates, so we have to make sure everyone understands that.”
Meanwhile, sensing Dallas’ concern, Fort Worth and Arlington are digging in.
Arlington will need to join some sort of transit authority to get a station, but its mayor, Jim Ross, has expressed support for the project during the regional transportation meetings. Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker released a statement during Thursday’s meeting that essentially told Dallas that it won’t stand by and let its concerns stall the project. “This is not a unilateral decision,” the statement said.
“Fort Worth continues to be the fastest-growing large city in the country. … High-speed rail is an integral part of our transportation future and it will include Tarrant county,” she said in the statement. “This is a regional decision that will require stakeholders and elected officials to collaborate and solve complex problems for the advancement of our North Texas region.”
The Dallas City Council’s resolution also declared that it would not support the high-speed rail project before an economic impact study is conducted and submitted to the body for review. Morris is working from his typical position: in the middle, having to find a way to solve Dallas’ concerns while keeping the project moving for its western neighbors.
Correction: The rail station is seven stories high, not 17.
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Matt Goodman is the online editorial director for D Magazine. He's written about a surgeon who killed, a man who…
