By midday Thanksgiving, Love Field’s 4,000 parking spaces weren’t enough. Each one had been sold and parked in, leaving those arriving to take afternoon flights circling hopelessly or forced to go home and take DART back to the airport. The influx of cars can be blamed on more than just…
The results are in from a survey we told you about earlier this month in which DART riders about things like frequency and what the agency could do better as it preps its latest 10-year plan. Turns out, the riders did a really good job. On the frequency question, the…
A Dallas tow company called Longhorn Wrecker may soon owe the state $88,900 in fines over towing violations. Reached for comment a few weeks ago, a bitter company representative said it was “all bullshit” and that his company had never been in trouble before. He apparently wasn’t taking into account…
The McKinney Avenue Transit Authority has heard your cry, trolley rider for whom 15 minutes is just too long of a wait. The Uptown transportation provider now has a live map showing where each of its vehicles is at any given time. It is exactly what it looks like in…
OK, North Texas. Regional transportation planners have heard your shrill, anti-toll battle cry. They know you will not countenance a speculative private toll road that inexplicably runs from Wylie to Greenville. They also know you also hate those new “managed lane” thingies, which essentially charge drivers for using highway space…
There is no worse feeling as a DART commuter than seeing your bus pull off seconds before you complete your jaywalk/sprint to the bus stop. The frustration of almost making it is bad enough, the fact that you’ll have to wait a long time — sometimes over an hour –…
In January, before many people were aware that a little-known corporation with the powers of eminent domain wanted to build a private toll road through the rural communities east of Lake Lavon and Lake Ray Hubbard, the Texas Department of Transportation was promising in a written agreement to help the…
Say what you will about Longhorn Wrecker, one of Dallas’ notorious towing companies, you can at least never accuse it of laziness. This is the same company that during the Dallas Gay Pride Parade five years ago descended on a post office nearby and towed a few dozen cars from…
About a week ago, on October 23, Uber announced that it was cutting prices for its UberX service in Dallas for the third time since the service made its Dallas debut in November 2013. Taking an UberX from my Oak Cliff apartment to the Observer offices costs about $7 now;…
North Texas’ regional transportation officials recently announced that they would no longer recommend forcing people out of their homes in the countryside northeast of Dallas to build another toll road, because it turned out that people didn’t like the idea. “We thought we had consensus that we should proceed in…
From the beginning, the private toll road that would run parallel to Interstate 30 seemed like a sure thing, no matter how many people who lived in the way who said they didn’t want the road. “I think that maybe the ship has already sailed, and all these meetings out…
God’s reign of terror against the region continues Tuesday afternoon with an all-timer of a traffic jam on U.S. 75. The freeway is closed in both directions at Forest Lane because of downed power lines on 75 proper and the service road. According to reports, a utility pole caught fire,…
Our transportation overlords at the North Central Texas Council of Governments have been accused of massaging numbers to justify letting a company called the Texas Turnpike Corp. build a tollway from Dallas to Greenville that no one who lives in the way seems to want. The council of governments, aka…
Equest CEO Patrick Bricker couldn’t have designed a better spot for a new headquarters. The land, 238 sprawling acres of pasture just off Lake Ray Hubbard in Rowlett, checked all the boxes: close enough to the nonprofit’s current home in Wylie to be convenient to its existing base of therapeutic…
Since 1999, the guardrails manufactured by Dallas’ Trinity Industries have been credited with saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of drivers across the country. Trinity’s popular older guardrail design, called the ET-2000, is supposed to roll back when struck by cars, absorbing some of the impact and lowering the…
They’ve tried to beat them at the City Council, they’re still trying to beat them with Michael Morris and the NCTCOG, now Yellow Cab is trying to join Uber and Lyft by offering an app that consumers might actually want to use. See also: Vonciel Hill and Michael Morris Join…
Breathe easy, Texas. Your long-term transportation needs — the one lawmakers and policy experts have been fretting about for years — have officially been solved. The masses, in their wisdom, which the Texas Transportation Institute has distilled in a just-published survey, have settled on a sure-fire way to address the…
A few years ago, a private, Dallas-based corporation announced it would like to build a private toll road, all with its own money, connecting northeast Dallas County to somewhere around Greenville, running basically parallel to the Interstate 30 and passing near Lake Lavon and Lake Ray Hubbard. The Texas Turnpike…
The Texas Department of Transportation’s sign regulations are so strict that the agency once said that even the commandments of the Lord would require a permit. But the woman who owned the Ten Commandments sign in question fought back, and it seems that TxDOT is finally putting its rules into…
Opposition to the Trinity Toll Road hasn’t quite reached the torrential flood that will be needed to sweep it into oblivion, but there’s at least a decent-sized stream that’s been growing, drop by drop as former supporters realize it’s a terrible idea. This morning, the Texas Public Interest Research Group…
If you’re looking for popcorn-worthy fireworks at a public transit-related public meeting, your best bet is to watch the Dallas City Council decide who should represent the city on the DART board, an exercise that invariably descends, as so many other discussions at City Hall do, into a bitter racial…
Brace yourself, Dallas transit users. We’re here to break some tough news: DART is losing. We don’t mean that the agency, now three decades old, has largely failed to woo people out of their cars. That’s true, but it’s not entirely DART’s fault. Neither to we mean that the focus…
