I decided to visit Dallas for the weekend, mainly to see examples of new (and old) urbanism.
Today I started off with the new. I took a bus from Love Field to the Mockingbird light rail station, where there is a transit-oriented development named after the station. In fact, the development's movie theatre was atop the rail station. The development is what I would call "minimal new urbanism"- some lofts over some shops, but too small to include anything else (the Gulch in Nashville, which I visited a few weeks ago, is pretty similar).
Mockingbird Station (mockingbirdstation.com) has some defects from a new urbanist perspective: too much space devoted to a surface parking lot blurs the difference between this development and neighboring strip malls (though even so the difference is, I think, visible). Also, it is cut off from Highland Park and Southern Methodist University (just to the west) by an expressway- or more precisely, some weird hybrid of an expressway and a surface street. Finally, there wasn't all that much residential- looked to me like just one set of lofts, though maybe there was something else I did not notice.
Then I went on the DART rail station to the Forest Lane station in North Dallas (where I was staying). I was really surprised by how crowded the trains was. I was expecting more or less empty trains, but instead it was jam packed- not just standing room only, but standing shoulder to shoulder. And this was 2:00 or so, not even rush hour. Normally I would have walked the mile or so to the hotel, but the weather was over 100 and I was carrying a pretty big bag so I took a bus.
After decompressing at the hotel for a few minutes, I took a DART bus to Addison Circle, a much more well-known new urbanist development.* Addison is much bigger, maybe half a mile wide - amazing in some ways, less so in others. What I really liked:
*Lots and lots of public space - one really neat, heavily forested mini-park, a couple of less exciting ones, plus one big park at the edge of the development.
*Incredibly quiet residential streets. I heard doves coo, and was able to make a cell phone call with ease (by contrast, I tried on the bus but it was too noisy).
Downside: a little monotonous, since it was all the same height and all multifamily. No high rises (unlike Atlantic Station in Atlanta), and no single family (unlike Celebration). Not the best I've seen but still nice. I'd live there if it was convenient.
Then I went grocery shopping for Shabbat (in sprawl halfway between Addison Circle and my hotel) and walked down a truly dreadful street, Forest Lane between Preston and Coit. Most of the houses and subdivisions were surrounded by walls; I felt like I was in some Third World country where walls protected the mansions from the riffraff.
*There doesn't seem to be just one web page for this development, so just google "addison circle" for more info.
