Meet Hexel Colorado, the biggest urbanist in Dallas
"We could become a walkable, bikeable city overnight if we just had the courage"
For this week’s Substack, I want to write about one of the most interesting characters I met on my car-free quest in July. It was a random, last-minute-meeting that happened thanks to friends and friends-of-friends making the connection. On the Megabus from Austin to Dallas, I had a phone call with a young man named Hexel Colorado, and I’m going to go ahead and presume (after spending all afternoon with him) he’s Texas’ biggest public transportation advocate. Of course, he doesn’t own a car, and when he’s not working his day job as an engineer, he also runs a blog called This Dallas Life.
Hexel heard I was arriving by bus and agreed to meet me at Opening Bell Coffee as it was close to the train line. After touring the Longhorn Ballroom, I went to the coffee shop via a ride from my kind friend Valerie. (I could have walked, but she recommended I didn’t.)
Later that day, Hexel generously showed me so much of Dallas and its public transit. I wrote a little bit about our time a few months ago in my Substack entry, Riding Trains in Texas. Before we went adventuring, he agreed to be interviewed. Now, after nearly a four month delay, I have at last written it. I hope everything is still accurate, ha!
Hexel describes himself as “first generation Asian American, a Dallas native and a city nerd.”
In his mid 20s, he was born in Old East Dallas. He grew up in the neighboring, smaller city of Fort Worth, where he could always see the skyscrapers of Dallas in the distance. As an adult, he moved all over the metroplex. He’s just recently moved back to Dallas again.
(The Metroplex encompasses 11 counties in North Texas, primarily Dallas and Fort Worth. Dallas as a city has 1.3 million people. Seven million people reside the metroplex.)
”Six million people might say they live in Dallas, but they don’t. Six million people will give wildly different answers. I can get very nitckpicky. Even within the city of Dallas, the city of Dallas is the product of multiple towns coming together. All these towns have their own history,” Hexel said.
He’s watched Fort Worth come into its own too. For example pop singer Leon Bridges is from Fort Worth but would always claim Dallas. Now he claims Fort Worth. More and more artists are proud to be from Fort Worth.
”Technically Fort Worth has a higher population than Austin, because they’ve annexed so much land. If you look at the boundaries, Fort Worth is creeping out and grabbing things. Dallas truly is denser than the other cities. It’s still very sprawled. Fortunately, in my mind, Dallas is relatively circular compared to the other cities because at some point the other towns grew,” he said.
I had never thought about a town “annexing land” or the benefits of a round-shaped city. Before I started this trip, I thought of myself as a bit of a public transit nerd, a train fan and a proud bike rider of short distances (preferably on sidewalks.) I might say ‘I dabble in urban planning,’ meaning I read the occasional Atlantic and Guardian article on the topic and have opinions at the dinner party. I’m a member of multiple public transit groups on Facebook! Hexel made me realize that people are out there with a passion for cities and urban living that reached heights higher than the Empire State Building. His knowledge about Dallas was bigger than Texas.
”Dallas downtown is denser than the other downtowns, by resident population. Austin has a denser mix of land uses. Downtown Austin is way more fun than downtown Dallas. Austin just has Interstate 35 (I-35) cutting through. Here in Dallas, we have four to five highways. Because we have so many highways, it’s consuming large acreages of land, and there are limits the amount of uses. Austin maintained its urban fabric,” he said.
I’d just come from visiting my friend Ivey in Austin where we enjoyed riding trains through the inner city. She’s lived there more than a decade now, and we always have fun downtown. I’d never thought too deeply about the town’s urban fabric.
Houston, Austin and Dallas, all have battles against the highway, Hexel told me. Austin has I-35, Houston has I-45 and Dallas I-345.
He told me the best thing about Dallas is that it still really has strong bones for a great city. Nowhere was built by accident.
”What I mean by strong bones is, rather than ripping out all of our rail, we still have it. Even if we’re not using it to its potential, there’s a clear line of site between where we are now, (car dependent sprawled city) to a more walkable, more transit-friendly more bikeable city,” he said. “In my mind things are pretty bad now, but the more I look at the history of Dallas both how vibrant it used to be and what happened to bring us here now, I don’t see any reason why we can’t reverse it. It’s only been 70 years that we’ve slowly gotten to the point we are now. For the first 100 years of Dallas history, it was this incredibly dense walkable city.”
He talked about how diverse Dallas is with the largest Jewish population in all of Texas. In 2020 Dallas was 42% Latino, 28% white and almost 23% black and almost 4% Asian.
Its car dependency is a relatively new phenomenon, and at one point they even had a large streetcar network, tied to the identity of the city. (Fortunately Dallas still has a trolley system, and later that evening Hexel and I took a little ride on it!)
”If there is any city to have the courage to start undoing policies and bringing us back, I think Dallas is the great place to turn things around,” he said.
The worst thing about the city, according to Hexel, is that they’ve destroyed a lot of their history. People have forgotten the city that it once was. People are hesitant at the idea of changing things and reclaiming land, because this is all they know.
Dallas is full of cars, but, to be clear, you can still have fun in the city via foot. I know I did.
Hexel mentioned positive urbanization happening in other parts of Texas. For example Austin eliminated parking minimums. A parking minimum means every building is required to have a certain number of parking spaces.
”If you look at a satellite view of Austin, Houston and Dallas are just covered in parking, by comparison,” he said. “There’s a lot of policies that we could do, converting a car lane into a bike lane. We could become a walkable bikeable city overnight if we just had the courage to spend our dollars on non-car infrastructure. We don’t because there’s this Dallas exceptionalism, ‘yes other cities have done it, but we’re not Austin, not Portland’.”
He thinks many Dallas residents just embrace car culture, and Dallas was a better city before it implemented a lot of policies along the way like racist redlining. In the 1920s, Dallas built highways through black and brown communities like Little Mexico and Freedman (a town of freed slaves). Becoming a car centric city meant that the neighborhoods of color were lost.
”By embracing cars, people of color were forced to sacrifice their investments in the city,” he said.
When it comes to the news, Hexel reads Dallas Morning News and D Magazine. He reads Advocate, a neighborhood publication, and he also enjoys Twitter where he follows fellow urbanists.
A local controversy is that Dallas recently passed an ordinance banning Airbnbs in single family neighborhoods, Another is the massive permit backlog with planned development, slowing progress. Parking minimums are a local Dallas scandal for Hexel too.
‘The insanest thing of all, we require massive amounts of parking for bars,” he said.
For good food he recommends Deep Ellum, a historically black community and neighborhood that was the center of music and culture in Dallas until the highways cut through it. Deep Ellum almost died after the highway, but fortunately it’s now coming back. Hexel also recommends Bishop Arch on the other side of the river, and his very own neighborhood, Lower Greenville.
”All three of these were historic streetcar suburbs, where the trams would go through,” Hexel said.
Here’s an map of Dallas’ streetcar line from 1919. I pinched it from this D Magazine article, all about Dallas’ transit history.
Hexel is also a photographer. He told me about a Sunday evening over Malcolm X Bridge. He captured a silhouette of the skyline, and in the foreground trains were neatly lined up in the railyard.
”The bridge goes over the railyard, specifically the light railyard. I discovered a really cool spot to see the city, (a place) I think most people have not been to,” he said.
He wishes the world knew Dallas isn’t the rest of Dallas/Fort Worth. Dallas is not the metroplex. A lot of places in the region are named after Dallas, but much of the metroplex doesn’t have public transit at all.
”The one thing I wish people would recognize is that Dallas (the city) has a lot more to offer than the rest of the metroplex,” he said.
Then Hexel went on to demonstrate this to me, and we had so much fun! It was such a special afternoon. We talked Dallas history while riding Dallas Area Rapid Transit all over the city. Thank you again, Hexel! I may not remember all the information you shared with me that Thursday, but I’ll never forget our time in Dallas.
Got me thinking about what a city might become. Thanks Alex.