Patrick's idea is that you can defreeway and area, turn it into a grid or street level or whatever and solve everything, In reality that's not an answer to the problem. That's just creating a brand new set of problems to deal with. One of which being a major increase in the amount of traffic lights and increase in pollution from stop and go traffic also bottle necking would result from the lights. I majorly support mass transit, rail, bus, streetcar, but we would need to majorly increase are mass transit and make all of it 24 hours to make things really work correctly. Also improve our point to point destinations, so that we don't have to walk a country mile to get somewhere when we finally do get off that mass transit. Offering a full range of point to point mass transit would dramatically reduce the overall amount of traffic in the area. The street car system that Dallas has is in the early stages, but its a step in the right direction and dart light rail is providing the branch out from there, which helps of course.
Freeways get a bad wrap, but most of there bad wrap comes from poor implementation and underdevelopment in the traffic that it supports and the adjacent freeway for what it supports and the traffic coming onto it. The better answer is somewhere in the middle. Traffic lights has been one of the greatest problems in regards to interrupting traffics free flow. Elimination of most traffic lights and more over unders on the outer parts of downtown. Would allow traffic to free flow around and would decrease traffic overall, all the while having direct access pedestrian crossovers on major thoroughfares, so there is no need to have to press the button on the light and wait forever in a day to get the crossing light.
You can have freeways all around you and still have a very walkable connected city. Yep that’s correct. The problem has always been through the years is that poor implementation of pedestrian features, has made freeways become concrete barriers plain and simple. Which has produce the many negative feelings that people have towards freeways, such as Patrick is having in regards to pedestrian walk-ability. With proper implementation of pedestrian features, you can make the entire freeway system around you walkable, seamless, and urban development follow as well. Having multi point pedestrian access. Such as providing covered outdoor escalators for you to get across major streets and active freeways would solve most gripes. If the freeway is aerial. Then close out particular streets to make crossing seamless or add safe quick direct pedestrian access underneath the elevated freeway to ensure fast access to both sides. Also restricting the amount of on ramps and exits would confine most traffic to certain areas and would prevent allot of cutting through what would be quiet streets. Providing Automated Parking Garages. Would free up allot of space as well and would allow for more development. Most trenched freeways, require that you cross and active surface street before you are able to cross over the freeway. To solve this problem, make multiple direct pedestrian access points from which to cross over the freeway from, without having to contend with surface street traffic. Most current pedestrian featured crossings today are out of date, built insanely to high up, or are highly limited and hard to access and our down right ugly looking, but they don't have to be. The epidemic is that allot of cities, have mentally lock on working on walk-ability in conjunction of a active freeway and major thoroughfares. So it remains a concrete barrier and is generally why development stops at the freeway and resumes again further down. Some cities have very small segments of implementation of what I have been talking about. The areas that have done it, people love it and urban development continues on.
In regards to 345 it would be better to either send 345 into a tunnel, and or realign it so that it curves outward instead of inward. You could also trench 345 as well. Regardless there are many points along 345 and many other areas along downtown Dallas freeways where direct pedestrian access is non existent or very loosely done and dangerous.