The Jefferson Boulevard Viaduct went both ways for two years, beginning in March 2013, while crew installed the streetcar line on the Houston Street Viaduct.
Tom Fox/Staff Photographer
The only thing this town gobbles up faster than a Fletcher’s corn dog is a boondoggle. And I’ve got just the heaping dose of flim to serve with that extra side of flam.
Initially I was just going to use this space to consider the fate of the Jefferson Boulevard Viaduct, which, for now, brings Oak Cliff into downtown Dallas. For now, because City Hall has a concept of a plan to wreck that. It’s a solid plan, too. Shaped like a convention center.
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But wait! It turns out there are also plans afoot to forever make the 115-year-old Houston Street Viaduct a hike-n-bike path with a streetcar sidecar, which would force Jefferson to go both ways – into and out of downtown. That was news to me. But in this town, everything is a secret until it’s a surprise.
And you can’t write about any of that without crashing into the new Kay Bailey Hutchison and a wrecked old parking garage. What a mess it all makes.
Let’s start last week and go backward, which now seems to be a very Dallas City Hall way of operating.
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On March 23, Rosa Fleming, executive director of the city’s Convention and Event Services, told the City Council’s transportation committee that the Jefferson Viaduct has to move because of the new convention center’s footprint. And whatever the fix, Jefferson would no longer morph into Market Street when it hits downtown and no longer would it carry drivers all the way to Elm Street and the West End.
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This is how the city thinks you should be able to get into downtown from Oak Cliff — and back to Oak Cliff from downtown. Nobody on the Dallas City Council’s transportation committee thought this was particularly appealing.
Dallas City Hall
According to Fleming and higher-ups from convention center developer Jack Matthews’ “Inspire Dallas” team, the best of the four bad options presented last week would force drivers onto Hotel Street just south of the new convention center. Except Hotel only heads in two directions: toward Stemmons Freeway or Interstate 30, both of them pointing away from downtown. And getting folks from downtown to Hotel so they can head back to Oak Cliff would be no easier.
At present, the abandoned Reunion Arena garage stands between the bridges – the one the city has let rot in plain sight for nearly two decades. I noticed it had a new name in small print in last week’s presentation: “Potential Hotel Site.” Keep in mind that the city owns the garage. But Ray Hunt owns the air rights above it.
Fleming and Matthews’ team also explained that the bridge would need to come to grade much sooner than its current design. Fleming said that’s because the convention center had been value-engineered, with two stories shorn off to save $500 million, keeping costs somewhere in the $3-point-whatever billion range. Said Fleming, it was necessary to “retool the viaduct given the complexities of the program.”
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To which council member Cara Mendelsohn eventually replied, “This seems like a very bad idea.”
Because, OK, fine, maybe Fleming’s saving $500 million on building construction costs. But neither she nor Matthews’ team knows how much a Jefferson Viaduct makeover will cost. There hasn’t even been a traffic study — one made public, at least — much less a cost analysis of a redo of a 1.3-mile-long, 53-year-old bridge over the Trinity River.
The proposed uses for the Houston and Jefferson viaducts, as presented during a September 2025 virtual public meeting
Dallas City Hall
“You’re going to forever change the traffic, which is going to be a nightmare for people,” Mendelsohn said. The savings “might be a short-sighted cut,” she said, “and while I don’t even like it being $3 billion, the truth is that if it’s going to take another $500 million to get it right, I’d rather spend that and have it done properly.”
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What makes this even more perplexing and frustrating is that for the last several years, a whole bunch of engineers, traffic managers and transportationists have been trying to figure out how to untangle the connections between north Oak Cliff and the south side of downtown. There’s a whole book on the subject, 285 heavily illustrated pages of riveting reading – Oak Farms Transportation Corridors Study Consensus Report – published last summer, courtesy of the city and the North Central Texas Council of Governments.
That study proposes a fix that removes those three tricky Oak Cliff entrances onto the bridge — from North Zang Boulevard, North Marsalis Avenue and East Jefferson — and makes Jefferson the lone vehicular pathway out of north Oak Cliff. The plan also plants new streets and sidewalks through Cinenda Partners’ 34-acre Oak Farms site between Colorado Boulevard and the south levee, which has been awaiting redevelopment for a decade.
Fleming and her team appear to be ignoring — or dismissing — all of that work. Or, at the very least, they appear to be going it alone: Michael Morris, the COG’s longtime director of transportation, told me this week the COG hasn’t been consulted about the Jefferson Viaduct issue, despite having spent years of working on, ya know, the Jefferson Viaduct issue.
“The convention center has taken on a life of its own,” he said. I didn’t mean to, but I laughed. “I had no expectations when it came to the convention center. It seems to have its own oxygen and its own path forward.”
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Morris doesn’t think the Hotel Street proposal will work — in part, he said, because it will force drivers coming in from Oak Cliff to “merge with congested freeways.” But, he said, nobody asked him.
“If Jefferson is going to Hotel Street, then I don’t know what’s next,” said Morris, who worked with the Texas Department of Transportation to secure $30 million to make necessary repairs to the Jefferson and Houston bridges. “Are we back to redoing the whole Oak Farms study again? Because you can’t convert Houston to two ways.”
That’s because of the streetcar, which one day might or might not go all the way to Uptown, who knows anymore. And both the expensive Oak Farms study and the convention center plans call for closing Houston to cars, with “space for a potential additional Dallas Streetcar track.”
The North Central Texas Council of Governments, with Dallas’ transportation officials and planners from Halff, spent years trying to untangle the Oak Cliff side of the levee for the Oak Farms project. This is their proposed result.
North Central Texas Council of Governments
The Jefferson Viaduct only exists because city and county officials wanted to peel some cars off the heavily trafficked Houston bridge, which was a two-way street until the Jefferson bridge opened in 1973. But according to a July 30, 2025, COG memo, the idea of shuttering Houston to cars came from 1500 Marilla: “The city is proposing conversion of the Houston Street viaduct into a facility with streetcar and non-motorized traffic only.”
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Gus Khankarli, the city’s director of transportation, said via email Thursday that the concept originated with those Oak Farm studies, one of which includes a proposal to extend the streetcar to Halperin Park and the Dallas Zoo.
“We had two joint public meetings where the concepts were presented and received strong public support,” he said. But nothing’s going to happen until they solve the Jefferson problem, he said.
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The Oak Farm study says simulations show Jefferson can handle two lanes heading north and two lanes heading south without “substantial spillover or redistribution of traffic to other routes.” But that was before Fleming and her folks came to council with four proposals that everyone hates – out of 12 total they had considered. Fleming said the full dozen will be presented this month as they work to solve a problem they created when they tried to solve a problem created when they tried to solve a different problem, all of their own making.
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“I am not in love with any of the options we saw last week,” north Oak Cliff council member Chad West told me Wednesday night. “We can do better. I don’t know what that looks like yet, but there’s a happy medium between providing multi-modal transportation and keeping direct access for cars to Oak Cliff and downtown.”
Oh, man. This is turning into quite the car wreck.