Transportation

The Texas Department of Transportation foots much of the bill for the road damage brought about by trucks traveling to and from hydraulic fracturing operations, and for the first time, the agency is collecting data with an eye to possibly recouping future funds. Short-term spending for TxDOT includes $40 million…

Update: 3:06 p.m.: CNN has a video wherein you can hear the disruption. It’s embedded below. Update, 12:30 p.m.: The flight’s on the ground, but it will need to restock its alcohol supply. Details after the original. Update, 11:23 a.m.: American has confirmed the incident, and says two flight attendants…

Saw that AP piece this morning about how Amtrak and the Texas Department of Transportation are looking at connecting Dallas-Fort Worth to Shreveport-Bossier City, which would involve inserting a stop at the Trinity Railway Express’s CentrePort/DFW Airport station. But the piece isn’t clear: Should this study prove such a line…

That item below — the one that says the Texas Department of Transportation is still hoping to open the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge to vehicular traffic on March 5, immediately following the Trinity Trust and Bridge-o-Rama’s respective now-not-really-opening-weekend wingdings? Forget it. Just forget it. This just came in from Dallas…

Speaking of putting cars on bridges over the Trinity River, or not …Couldn’t quite tell from last night’s Channel 8 piece if the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge will indeed be open to vehicular traffic following next weekend’s opening events; said Jason Whitely, there’s a shot it’ll be closer to mid-March,…

Last March council members Delia Jasso and Pauline Medrano joined Dallas Bike Coordinator Max Kalhammer and others for a bike ride through Seville, Spain, with Jasso sending word that the locals were strapping on their thinking helmets for a possible ciclovía somewhere in Dallas, which means turning over a complete…

It’s gettin’ close to the most wonderful time of the year for the Barking Dog — St. Patrick’s Day, which is about a month away. Over the weekend, Avi Adelman posted to his website the city and Dallas PD’s freshly minted map of street closures planned for Lower Greenville on…

Exactly one year ago Dallas Area Rapid Transit announced that it had signed a $210-million contract with Anniston, Alabama-based North American Bus Industries, Inc. for a new fleet of  compressed natural gas-fueled buses, which DART promised to start rolling out by October 2012. This morning I stumbled across this just-posted…

I’d called Keith Manoy, one of the city’s senior transpo planners, about this earlier in the day; but since then I’ve heard from one of his colleagues, who promises more details about those Elm and Commerce conversions — a time line, to be specific — sooner than later. But while…

For more than a year the city’s been talking about two-waying Elm Street in Deep Ellum, with Commerce to follow. Last we heard there wasn’t enough to fund the whole project; there’s $6 million in ’06 bond money, but not enough to finish what the city hopes to start sooner…

Following the passage of HB1353, the Texas Department of Transportation has been looking at where it oughta bump up the state’s speed limit to 75 miles per hour. Today it released that list, and it spans some 1,500 miles of Texas highways — a “major milestone,” per the press release…

I’ve been trying since daybreak to reach Max Kalhammer, the city’s bike coordinator, to talk about the not-at-all-surprising results of the Alliance for Biking & Walking’s 2012 Benchmarking Report, which says we’re one of the worst big cities in the entire country when it comes to people riding their bikes…

I felt the need last night, the need for the Speed channel, which carried the live-from-Scottsdale broadcast of the Barrett-Jackson auction — where, as you’re well aware by now, they put a certain hearse of local renown on the bidding block. So, then, how much did they fetch for Vernon…

Who doesn’t love Love Field? Easily negotiated, convenient, it’s everything that Dallas-Fort Worth International isn’t. But it’s always had that dingy, regional-airport feel. Said interim Aviation director Mark Duebner, “Compared to what we’ve been working with — our 1950s terminal with few amenities — this will be worth the wait.”…

At 1 today the Regional Transportation Council will discuss the doc you see below: the 132-page report finished last month as part of the so-called Cotton Belt Corridor Innovative Finance Initiative, which the North Central Texas Council of Governments touts on today’s agenda as “a thorough investigation of potential innovative…

Below is the 2011 Customer Satisfaction Survey dispatched this morning by Dallas Area Rapid Transit in advance of today’s board meeting. Long story short: Despite some issues with the transit agency — longtime riders think the buses are getting shabby, passengers don’t feel there’s adequate notice of service disruptions, there’s…

I’d forgotten all about Dylan Hollingsworth’s shoulda-been classic photo taken in January 2010, during what turned out to be the First Annual No Pants! Ride on Dallas Area Rapid Transit light rail. Then a Friend of Unfair Park shot me this video from yesterday’s third-annual balls-out trip on a train…

A Friend of Unfair Park passes along The Wall Street Journal’s latest look-see at how well the big carriers handle passengers and their luggage, and per the annual Middle Seat survey the two locally based airlines don’t do so well when it comes to getting your bags to your destination…

A quick look-see reveals efforts to sell the 1964 Cadillac Hearse that transported President John Kennedy from Parkland Memorial Hospital to Love Field have failed at least once before — in 2007, when Arrdeen Vaughan, the Alvarado funeral-home owner who’d had it for decades, came up $100,000 of the million-dollar…

Only yesterday we noted the Dallas Area Rapid Transit is ready to go on that final leg of the Orange Line that’ll connect with Terminal A at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. The price tag’s steep: $149,750,000 for the third section of the Orange Line, from Belt Line Station to DFW…

Last night Dallas Area Rapid Transit sent word that its board of directors signed off on the design-build contract that’ll push the under-construction Orange Line the final 5.2 miles that’ll get it to Dallas-Fort Worth Airport’s Terminal A. Long story short: You’ll be able to light-rail it from DART to…

Wait — who’s Tom Horton (no, not a Canadian coffee shop), and what has he done with Gerard Arpey? Oh, Arpey’s out — decided to “retire,” per the statement from Fort Worth-based AMR that follows in the wake of its Chapter 11 filing in NYC court this morning. (Though some…