I live in downtown Dallas and run nearly every day, typically leaving my house at 5 AM, usually for one to four hours. My own observations of the situation from

I live in downtown Dallas and run nearly every day, typically leaving my house at 5 AM, usually for one to four hours. My own observations of the situation from the point of view of a frequent pedestrian: - Construction has gone haywire. The Dallas Observer has had a running series of articles entitled "Dallas hates pedestrians" for years now because of the number of sidewalks that are chronically closed or simply never existed in the first place. Crews make no effort to create pedestrian corridors and pedestrians are forced into the streets because of it. Sidewalks remain closed for weeks and even months after the work is done. Signs block the sidewalks effectively forever because the crews don't bother to remove them even when work is done. - Drivers absolutely do not give a shit and pay no attention to pedestrians. I stare these people in the face as I'm approaching on a sidewalk and they do not see me because they're not looking. They only look for oncoming vehicle traffic, not pedestrians. Frankly, I'm probably going to get hit at some point. I've been within inches several times in the past year even when I had the clear right of way crossing in a crosswalk on a green light. - Highway offramps are in terrible places. Vehicles are being asked to go from highway speeds to downtown speeds in the span of a few hundred meters and they don't because they'd have to be slamming on their brakes to do it. I intentionally avoid roads that are near the highways because of this. Drivers there will be flying off the highway and it won't make any difference if they see you or not. - Dallas (and presumably a lot of other US cities) has a huge problem with chronically homeless people living in the downtown area. These aren't the "can't afford housing" uptick in homelessness people. These are the randomly wandering into the streets at all hours of the day and night screaming at ghosts because they are clearly severely mentally ill and have been homeless for years if not decades because of it. Little to no services exist to do anything for these people, and as encampments get shut down, unless they're just going to die, they don't really have any choice but to take to the more trafficked streets. - Presumably because of increased reliance on mobile phone map apps giving directions, increasingly many drivers clearly don't know the area and get lost and confused very easily, often going the wrong way down a one-way street or frequently stopping and starting because they don't know if they're at an intersection they're looking for or if it's the next one. People seem to be increasingly driving through neighborhoods they are not familiar with, including neighborhoods that previously saw virtually no vehicle traffic except for people who actually live there. In addition to apps trying to route you around congestion, this is probably also a symptom of the fact that so much housing has become short-term rentals and even the people occupying housing in the neighborhood don't actually live there or know the neighborhood.