Transportation

High-speed rail, the white whale of North Texas transportation planners, has some competition, the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Transportation Council plans to announce Wednesday. In addition to rail, the RTC will consider Virgin’s Hyperloop One technology in an upcoming environmental impact study of a high-speed connector for Dallas, Arlington and Fort…

Just as Dallas’ skirmish over the bike-share wave of 2017 seems to be winding down, a new front is opening up in the city’s ongoing quest to prove that if you squint and tilt your head just right, you can actually maybe get by in Dallas without a car —…

Late Tuesday afternoon, Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly refused to guess at what caused an engine on one of his airline’s jets to explode Tuesday morning, shattering one of a Dallas-bound plane’s windows and killing an Albuquerque woman. Jennifer Riordan, a 52-year-old bank vice president, is the first passenger to die…

A plane headed to Dallas Love Field from New York City’s Laguardia Airport made an emergency landing in Philadelphia Tuesday morning after an engine on the aircraft blew out, breaking one of the plane’s windows and injuring a passenger. Marty Martinez, the founder and CEO of Dallas-based digital marketing agency…

A Dallas firefighter and a New York journalist with ties to North Texas died Sunday night when a helicopter in which they were taking a tour of the city crashed into the East River. A tourist from Argentina and two employees of Liberty Helicopters, the company running the tour, also…

A Phoenix-to-Dallas Southwest Airlines flight made an emergency landing in New Mexico late Sunday night after the plane’s cabin began to fill with smoke. The Albuquerque Fire Department took two people to the hospital with minor injuries after 140 people were forced to either slide down the plane’s emergency slides…

For Eric Burton, the sidewalks of his Bryan Place neighborhood have always been a hazard. Burton, left blind by a degenerative eye condition, struggles daily with paths that are uneven, buckled and cracked, but he’s learned to deal with it. Over the past seven months, however, a new obstacle has…

The idea, put forward by Dallas officials and reported in the Observer and elsewhere throughout the end of 2017, was that the City Council was going to do something about the bikes this spring. The public, inasmuch as the public is represented by Dallas social media, was fed up with the…

Lime Bike has unveiled its latest weapon in its turf war with its fellow dock-less bike share startups — electric bikes. While the bikes don’t appear to be headed to Dallas as part of their initially roll-out, Dallas bike share riders could moving around at as much as 15 miles…

Many things aren’t clear about Dallas’ growing hoard of bike-share bikes — how many of them there are, whether their owners will ever make money off of them or if they’re just separating Silicon Valley venture capitalists from their cash — but some things are. The bikes, as evidenced by…

For now, as bike sharing in Dallas rolls toward the end of its unregulated Wild West phase, the game for the five companies in business in the city has been pretty simple. They’ve put as many of their bikes on the streets as they can, mostly thanks to a stream…

From former Observer Editor-in-Chief Joe Tone, back in town for a visit, comes this photo showing a lovely East Dallas home that’s been, to coin a phrase, LimeBiked for the holidays. Here’s hoping it’s the start of a trend. Perhaps instead of environmentally unfriendly and difficult-to-remove toilet paper, teenagers and…

The city of Arlington is trying to stave off the stigma of being the largest city in the United States without public transportation. Less the a month before discontinuing its single bus line, the Metro Arlington Xpress, the city launched one of the nation’s first public microtransit projects to provide…

Airports are uniquely suited to use social media to advertise themselves and pass along useful information. When it comes to holiday travel, however, the area’s two airports have distinctly different strategies. One is posting a litany of public service announcements; the other feels like a meme campaign to promote the…

Last week, wide-eyed technophiles, venture capitalists and hopeful market disruptors gathered in Portugal for a conference called the Web Summit. The venue may have been in Lisbon, but the news from the conference has a direct bearing on North Texas — Uber announced it was collaborating with NASA on a…

Following months of complaints from employees, Dallas-based American Airlines announced in a letter to employees Wednesday that it is seeking a new uniform vendor for flight attendants. Since the new uniforms debuted last September, the Association of Professional Flight Attendants received more than 3,500 complaints from American employees, blaming the uniforms for…

Guest columnist Terry Maxon worked as an airlines reporter in Dallas for more than two decades, covering the major carriers headquartered in North Texas. Here, he offers his take on the airline’s recent run of negative attention — deserved and otherwise. If you’re like most people, you may be wondering…

A key marking executive of American Airlines is leaving “to spend time with his family, according to a copy of his resignation obtained by the Chicago Business Journal,” a move made in the aftermath of several high-profile missteps. Those include a messy roll-out of uniforms that employees lambasted as unwearable…

Yesterday, the Middle East’s largest airline announced a 20 percent cut in flights to the United States. One can almost hear the applause coming from the airlines and union headquarters here in North Texas. For years, airlines and unions have argued that carriers from the Persian Gulf have been taking…