A dangerous road that runs through downtown Dallas will get a second look from the city following a number of crashes.
The Dallas City Council on Wednesday approved a traffic corridor study for the section of Cesar Chavez Boulevard from U.S. 75 to Interstate 30 to begin next month. The road, which is as wide as nine lanes in some sections, is the site of a disproportionate number of fatal and severe crashes. Dallas will commit nearly $300,000 in pandemic recovery funds to the project, which will assess traffic safety and pedestrian access.
Those funds will also cover improvements to signals at the intersections of Cesar Chavez Boulevard at Canton Street and Cesar Chavez Boulevard at Marilla Street.
Residents have been sounding the alarm about Cesar Chavez for more than a year. The road carries thousands of drivers through the East Quarter and Farmers Market districts, areas that have evolved into residential hotspots over the past decade. The street’s proximity to the interstates and highways that encircle downtown means motorists often drive fast, and residents say the wide road design encourages that.
“They’ve shared concerns about how the neighborhood’s changed over time, but the road hasn’t,” said Evan Sheets, vice president of planning and policy at Downtown Dallas Inc.
Cesar Chavez is part of the Vision Zero High Injury Network — a network of roads identified as being particularly deadly. Vision Zero is the city’s goal to eliminate traffic fatalities and reduce serious injuries by half by 2030. Roads with a higher number of traffic deaths are prioritized for engineering safety evaluations as part of the plan.
“This is a thoroughfare that has weekly accidents, I’m sure we’ve all passed by those,” City Council member Jesse Moreno told the council Wednesday. “What I’m really excited about is it’s going to be looking at traffic, but more importantly pedestrian volumes on how we redesign the street with the possibility around routes as well.”
The city has already instituted short-term measures on Cesar Chavez like installing rumble strips to calm traffic, reducing lanes with cones when necessary and working with the Dallas Police Department to increase enforcement, Sheets said, but a long-term solution is needed.
“Ultimately, the I-30 reconstruction project is going to change the nature of that segment of street and I think any permanent changes need to be looked at within that scope, and also with changes to I-345 reconstruction and all the other projects going on,” Sheets said. “So that’s really trying to take into account what the future will look like and what the transportation loads on that corridor look like. And then ultimately designing a road diet for the section near the townhomes that meets the needs of the street and addresses the concerns of the residents there.”
The study is expected to be completed in March 2025.
