Natinsky Suggested Closing Main Street to Cars. To Which One Man Says, “Unh-Unh.”

Rudy Bush directs our attention back to the musings of Patrick “Car Free” Kennedy, whose “perfectly happy workout” we interrupted on Monday when Kim returned from Dallas City Hall with the news that Ron Natinsky, head of the Economic Development Committee, wanted to make sure the new downtown Dallas plan was open the possibility of closing Main Street to vehicular traffic. Kennedy, who’s wary of Downtown Dallas 360 to begin with unless it deals with the tangle of highways choking the CBD to death, says Natinsky’s idea is a bad one for myriad reasons, chief among them: Main Street, at least a hunk of it, is more or less the only downtown street that actually seems to be working. He’s got a point.

A better move than screwing with Main Street would be taming Elm and Commerce. In an ideal world (even with the inner freeway loop), exactly none of the internal downtown streets would be feeder roads as Elm and Commerce function as for Main. The feeder roads should stop the moment they enter downtown. And by stop, I don’t mean stop, but become Livable, ie Jaywalk friendly — the context-sensitive and complete streets movements offer plenty of guidance.