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This is how the city thinks you should be able to get into downtown from Oak Cliff \u2014 and back to Oak Cliff from downtown. Nobody on the Dallas City Council’s transportation committee thought this was particularly appealing. (Dallas City Hall)<\/p>\n
According to Fleming and higher-ups from\u00a0convention center developer Jack Matthews\u2019 \u201cInspire Dallas\u201d team<\/a>, the best of the four bad options presented last week<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n At present, the abandoned Reunion Arena garage stands between the bridges \u2013 the one the city has let rot in plain sight for nearly two decades. I noticed\u00a0it had a new name in small print in last week\u2019s presentation<\/a>: \u201cPotential Hotel Site.\u201d Keep in mind that the city owns the garage. But Ray Hunt owns the air rights above it.<\/p>\n Fleming and Matthews\u2019 team also explained that the bridge would need to come to grade much sooner than its current design. Fleming said that\u2019s 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 \u201cretool the viaduct given the complexities of the program.\u201d<\/p>\n To which council member\u00a0Cara Mendelsohn eventually replied, \u201cThis seems like a very bad idea.\u201d<\/p>\n Because, OK, fine,\u00a0maybe Fleming\u2019s saving $500 million on building construction costs. But neither she nor Matthews\u2019 team knows how much a Jefferson Viaduct makeover will cost. There hasn\u2019t even been a traffic study \u2014 one made public, at least \u2014 much less a cost analysis of a redo of a 1.3-mile-long, 53-year-old bridge over the Trinity River.<\/p>\n The proposed uses for the Houston and Jefferson viaducts, as presented during a September 2025 virtual public meeting (Dallas City Hall)<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re going to forever change the traffic, which is going to be a nightmare for people,\u201d Mendelsohn said. The savings \u201cmight be a short-sighted cut,\u201d she said, \u201cand while I don\u2019t even like it being $3 billion, the truth is that if it\u2019s going to take another $500 million to get it right, I\u2019d rather spend that and have it done properly.\u201d<\/p>\n What makes this even more perplexing and frustrating is that\u00a0for the last several years, a whole bunch of engineers, traffic managers and transportationists have been trying to figure out<\/a> how to untangle the connections between north Oak Cliff and the south side of downtown. There\u2019s a whole book on the subject, 285 heavily illustrated pages of riveting reading \u2013 Oak Farms Transportation Corridors Study Consensus Report \u2013 published last summer, courtesy of the city and the North Central Texas Council of Governments.<\/p>\n That study proposes a fix that removes\u00a0those three tricky Oak Cliff entrances onto the bridge<\/a> \u2014 from\u00a0North\u00a0Zang Boulevard, North\u00a0Marsalis Avenue and East Jefferson \u2014\u00a0 and makes Jefferson the lone vehicular pathway out of north Oak Cliff. The plan also plants new streets and sidewalks through Cinenda Partners\u2019 34-acre Oak Farms site between Colorado Boulevard and the south levee, which has been awaiting redevelopment<\/a> for a decade.<\/p>\n Fleming and her team appear to be ignoring \u2014 or dismissing \u2014 all of that work. Or, at the very least, they appear to be going it alone: Michael Morris, the COG\u2019s longtime director of transportation, told me this week the COG hasn\u2019t been consulted about the Jefferson Viaduct issue, despite having spent years of working on,\u00a0ya know, the Jefferson Viaduct issue.<\/p>\n \u201cThe convention center has taken on a life of its own,\u201d he said. I didn\u2019t mean to, but I laughed. \u201cI had no expectations when it came to the convention center. It seems to have its own oxygen and its own path forward.\u201d<\/p>\n Morris doesn\u2019t think the Hotel Street proposal will work \u2014 in part, he said, because it will force drivers coming in from Oak Cliff\u00a0to \u201cmerge with congested freeways.\u201d But, he said, nobody asked him.<\/p>\n \u201cIf Jefferson is going to Hotel Street, then I don\u2019t know what\u2019s next,\u201d said Morris, who worked with the Texas Department of Transportation to secure $30 million to make necessary repairs to the Jefferson and Houston bridges. \u201cAre we back to redoing the whole Oak Farms study again? Because you can\u2019t convert Houston to two ways.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/2558c90ab7657e26e2b54907ea20674c.jpeg\"\/)
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