On Tuesday, Toyota will break ground on its new North American headquarters in Plano. Toyota North America CEO Jim Lentz is celebrating the launch of the project by pretending that Texas’ outsize corporate incentives had no influence on the company’s relocation. In an interview at the North American International Auto…
One thing has proved true during each of Dallas’ last two significant winter storms, DART service — DART rail service specifically — will fail. The week that Jerryworld hosted the Super Bowl in 2011, DART light rail suffered its first full shut down. Almost three years later, DART experienced another…
Everyone in Dallas drives around with a mental map showing the contours of local traffic enforcement. It shows the places where cops with itchy ticket-fingers treat minor driving infractions as tantamount to high treason and, conversely, those spots where they are too busy catching murderers or snacking on doughnuts (depending…
Sustained high oil production in the Permian Basin, the Bakken region of North Dakota and Western Canada, along with the seeming willingness of OPEC to ride out the resultant plummeting oil prices mean gas prices will continue to remain below recent levels, according to GasBuddy.com’s 2015 Fuel Price Outlook. In…
If you’re flying out of the newly Wright Amendment-unencumbered Love Field this week and haven’t yet found a parking space, you can breathe a shallow sigh of relief. The airport will have 1,150 more spaces for Christmas than it did for Thanksgiving. Almost half of those spaces (500) are valet…
After this weekend, lord willing, DART’s replacement of downtown’s light rail track will finally be over. The work was scheduled to be done at the end of November, but bad weather has forced the final weekend of work to be pushed to tomorrow and Sunday, leaving Christmas shoppers downtown and…
Starting in the spring of 2015, cabs, limos and app-based services like Uber will operate on a reasonably level playing field. That’s the end result of months of wrangling that culminated with three and a half hours of debate before the Dallas City Council voted 13-2 to approve a transportation-for-hire…
All signs point to the Dallas City Council adopting a new transportation-for-hire ordinance at their Wednesday meeting. The ordinance, fought over for more than a year, attempts to level the playing field for cabs — dominated by Yellow Cab in Dallas — and app-based services like Uber and Lyft. To…
The D-Link has to be considered a success. The city-funded, DART-operated, free-to-ride circulator has done what it was created to do: connect many of Dallas’ entertainment districts — Bishop Arts, Downtown Dallas, the Arts District and Victory Plaza — at a reasonable frequency. It’s the only bus line that runs…
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…
