The Dallas City Council has unanimously signed off on its vision for DART’s future priorities, and it came with a message. “We want to make sure that we as a city send a strong message to DART,” City Council member Casey Thomas said. “We beat [DART President] Gary Thomas, last time;…
Dallas is subway happy. Property owners and their renters want the downtown train, known as D2, to be a subway. Local politicians want a subway. Even the Observer’s Jim Schutze wants a subway. The suburbs who have paid into DART don’t want their Cotton Belt line to be forgotten amid…
“So a guy walks into a bar downtown and asks, ‘Where’s the closest subway station?’ ‘Sorry buddy, the closest thing you’ll find to a subway here is a Quiznos,’” the bartender replies. That’s how Amanda Austin, downtown resident and owner of Dallas Comedy House in Deep Ellum, started her comments…
Every fall, the battle for bragging rights among Texas cities begins. The winners don’t have the best high school football teams, no, they’ve got the worst roads for traffic in the whole state and the rights to complain that comes with it. The Texas Department of Transportation’s new 100 Most…
Finally Oak Cliff’s streetcar actually goes somewhere. Monday, after nearly 18 months of ferrying riders from downtown’s Union Station to the El Fenix at the intersection of Colorado and Zang Boulevards in Oak Cliff, the city of Dallas and DART joint project will begin taking people all the way from…
It’s a small win, and one neighborhood business owners aren’t too happy with, but Dallas urbanists picked up a significant victory from the Dallas City Council Wednesday. Knox Street is going from four lanes to three, acceding to the vision laid out for the popular retail and residential stretch that’s…
Dallas Area Rapid Transit’s proposed new rail line through downtown has been met with plenty of controversy. Some in Deep Ellum, though, feel they haven’t been given the same say as property owners downtown in the path of the line called D2. On Monday night, community organizations put on the…
On Tuesday morning, the editorial board of The Dallas Morning News offered the newspaper of record’s official take on Christie Myers, a 30-year-old white woman from the suburbs: She’s awesome. What makes Myers so awesome? After hearing harrowing tales of hours-long public transit commutes from residents of the neighborhood in southeast Oak Cliff she’s…
Franklin Russell was already tired when he accepted a Lyft ride request from a passenger at downtown Dallas’ Greyhound Station at about 2:45 a.m. He was trying to make a little extra cash before picking his sister up in Richardson, to take her to the airport. Upon arrival and commencing the…
Twenty years ago on Tuesday, Dallas Area Rapid Transit officially got into the light-rail business, opening an 11-mile “starter system” that carried passengers between downtown’s Pearl Station on the north and Oak Cliff in the south (Westmoreland Station on the Red Line, Illinois Station on the Blue Line). Since then,…
In the four years Texas Central Railway unveiled plans to link Dallas and Houston with the country’s first bullet train, officials with the private company have talked a lot about how quickly the line will whisk travelers between two of the country’s largest fastest-growing urban areas, about how darn Texan…
On any given day, members of the exclusive City Club can look down from the the 69th floor of the Bank of America Plaza, Dallas’ tallest building, and glimpse the Trinity River as it exists today: a rigid trickle of water confined by a straitjacket of levees, a denuded floodplain…
America has many iconic streets. Some are famous as centers of commerce or government, others for their world-class shopping or music. Dallas has many of those same streets, except without any of the qualities that make them iconic. In fact, many of Dallas’ famously named streets aren’t really fit for…
Anyone who’s driven in Dallas for more than a few years has this experience. There you are, absent-mindedly piloting your automobile down a city street — likely one you’ve traversed unmolested every day for months — when you are stopped short by a peculiar sight. There, plodding across the intersecting…
With the possible exception of our love for Whataburger, nothing unites Texans like their hatred of toll roads. Few reliable public opinion polls directly measure the level of hatred, but the Texas A&M Transportation Institute’s semi-regular statewide transportation survey provides a taste of the depth of feeling on the issue…
Late last week, DART provoked a bit of a fervor when the transit agency’s police chief told The Dallas Morning News’ Brandon Formby that the long awaited security cameras finally being stalled on DART’s light rail trains would be equipped with facial recognition software. DART is a lot of things,…
One of the best lists each year, put out by the Transportation Security Administration blog, informs us of just how many guns were confiscated at America’s airports. In 2015, as it has every time the list has been published, Texas did itself proud, filling out a full 50 percent of the…
Westlake seems like a perfectly lovely place to live, so long as one doesn’t mind being neighbors with Glenn Beck. It’s astoundingly prosperous, with a median household income north of $250,000, which is where the Census Bureau stops counting. Children there are automatically admitted to Westlake Academy, the charter school…
There’s an alternate universe in which Dallas doesn’t exist. I mean, Dallas still technically has a physical presence and it shows up on maps and stuff, but it doesn’t exist in the way that people normally think of cities as existing, with people living, working and recreating. All of that…
DART and Miller Lite are teaming up to give free rides to anyone who wants one on New Year’s Eve. Sounds great, except for one thing: Actually taking advantage of the offer. Unless you’re willing to get home before midnight or leave a Deep Ellum bar at the stroke of midnight…
Car crashes are part of the background of life in a big car-dependent city. The really awful ones maybe you’ll catch on the news. Others you gawk at as you drive by, or else rage at from a line of traffic. Sometimes they come and go like phantoms, vanishing by…
Dallas’ notorious tow companies seem to like parades. At the 2009 Gay Pride parade, Longhorn Towing illegally took 30 cars parked at the Oak Lawn post office, and the company was required to return the $138 towing fees to some customers after getting sued. This past Saturday, the night of the annual…
