DART: A view from Richardson

by William "Bill" McCalpin of Richardson Echo

My wife, Chris, and I were at the Wildflower! Festival on the first night, Friday, May 15, sitting at the open area on the south side of the Renaissance hotel where one of the sound stages was set up. The Killdares, a Dallas-based Celtic/rock band, was one of the first acts to play at Wildflower!, and they were warming up the crowd nicely, to the point of bringing people in the hotel out on to their balconies to watch the performance.

Around the Eisemann Center and the other buildings, there were thousands of people already streaming around, stopping under tents to shop, watching a street dancing group whose acrobatics are amazing (and a little frightening), and moving from stage to stage nestled between the buildings that not only contain offices, but also have restaurants and shops on the first floor and apartments on the upper floors – in a fashion very much like long establish Eastern cities in the US or even Europe. Even the computer-driven fountain in the pavement – which pushed and stopped jets of water upwards from the pavement to the delight of dozens of children who were around it and in it on this warm Texas evening – provided the perfect example of an active life in an urban setting out in the streets and not behind closed curtains at home.

So, “Westmoreland”?

Well, not twenty yards behind the stage on which the Killdares were playing was one of the shells over the Galatyn Park DART station. A train was parked in the station, resting during one of its brief stops, and the electronic sign on the side of the car, barely visible through the shrubbery around the station, gave the name of the other end of the line as the train traveled south, that is, to the Westmoreland station.

Unlike a toy or demo train, this train actually goes someplace, connecting Richardson with Northpark, the Museum District, the Symphony Hall, the Catholic Cathedral, the Dallas World Aquarium, the West End, Union Station, the Convention Center, and even the zoo in Oak Cliff. Richardson was one of the first suburbs to sign up to work with the DART, and became the first suburb to get DART’s light rail service in the summer of 2002. Richardson has been fully invested with light rail from the get-go, and the full results of this commitment are just beginning to show.

Cities in the American Southwest that were substantially developed after the automobile tend to look quite different from the older urban environments of the cities founded in the 19th Century. Our newer cities are full of broad roads, tons of vehicular traffic, and a sense of isolation as people tended to live in the suburbs and work ‘downtown’. Dallas, for example, has been an automobile city since the end of World War II, and all the growth has reflected this: suburban-like residential neighborhoods, broad streets in a grid fashion, and the near requirement that you own a car to be able to go anywhere.

Richardson, of course, followed this example in the first 40 years of its development as a suburb of Dallas. Yet somewhere along the way, someone realized that this car-intensive suburban environment was not the “be-all and end-all” for Richardson. From the moment that the DART light rail arrived in Richardson, there existed the pressure for Richardson to change – and it has. Now, near the DART stations, you have multi-use buildings where there is retail use downstairs and residential use upstairs – something that is normally unheard of in the new suburbs developed after the adoption of the automobile. We have outdoor events where tens of thousands of people can gather - more than 80,000 people attended last year’s Wildflower! Festival alone. And we give our residents the option of working elsewhere and commuting by car or bus or train.

This is, in fact, good news for the homeowners in Richardson. Why? Because as cities age, there is often pressure on single-family residential areas to redevelop into multi-family and other high density uses. I lived in such an area in Oak Cliff near Jefferson and Edgefield in the Winnetka Heights Historic District, and the original single family dwellings had become of mishmash of doctor’s offices, retail stores, and apartment buildings before the historic district was created about 1981.

But it is clear that replacing single-family housing has not been the intention of the leadership in Richardson, who clearly want to preserve the large areas of single family homes that we have today. They do this by encouraging higher density development in our ‘transit villages’ along the DART light rail line which takes the pressure off of inappropriate redevelopment in our residential neighborhoods.

This is a ‘win-win’ for everyone in Richardson. The homeowners preserve the integrity of their neighborhoods, the businesses in Richardson are able to locate more of their employees here, the young and young at heart are able to live in apartments or other shared housing in a living urban environment, and mostly important, Richardson continues to grow.

Yes, just as the car shaped the development and layout of the cities after World War II, the existence of effective light rail public transportation is going to evolve the development of Richardson, bringing high density to where it can be enjoyed while leaving the beautiful, treed, single family neighborhoods of Richardson intact.

Richardson had been involved with DART for nearly two decades before the first light rail train rolled into our town. Over the course of the 26 years since Richardson voted to join DART, we have had thirteen City Councils made up of dozens of leaders in Richardson, yet over this time, our leadership had consistently understood that good things need nurturing and planning and take a long time to flower. We ought to be very grateful for their efforts as we grow our city.

William "Bill" McCalpin is a longtime Richardson resident.

The author of this editorial is solely responsible for its content and the stated opinions do not necessarily reflect those of the The Richardson Echo. This editorial was unsolicited.