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…
It’s time to start paying attention to the protests. Over the past month, drivers from across Uber’s platform — black-car drivers, UberSelect luxury sedan drivers and UberX drivers who just use their personal vehicles, whatever it is — have protested at the technology company’s Dallas headquarters in the West End…
Riding public transportation in Dallas is not nearly as bad as you may have been led to believe. One can, especially with a little help from Uber or Lyft, successfully navigate the city without owning a car. Nevertheless, DART is decidedly not great when compared with transit agencies in city’s…
Two years ago, DART proposed running a bus route from the city of McKinney to Parker Road train station. The transit agency was hoping to gain a foothold in the northern boom towns of Collin County, both to advance its vision of a seamless regional transit system and, more pragmatically,…
Like much of Dallas, I was late to work Tuesday because of a failure to anticipate just how bad downtown Dallas traffic was going to be Monday morning. Late buses and added time navigating downtown were the rule of the day. The traffic mess stemmed from a bunch of streets…
Every year or so, the Texas Transportation Institute releases its Urban Mobility Report, which looks at the impact of traffic congestion on major metropolitan areas in the United States, and every year or so the report’s release prompts a barrage of critiques from transportation wonks whose livings aren’t tied to building new…
The Volkswagen emissions scandal is not quite two weeks old, and it’s already spurred lawsuits from dozens of angry car buyers. The first such suit in Dallas was filed Monday, though it surely won’t be the last. All or most of these early cases revolve around a straightforward allegation of fraud. Customers…
As odd as it may seem at first glance given Texas’ highly developed car culture, the Dallas-to-Houston corridor might be the best spot in the country for high-speed rail. The two cities are at the center of heavily populated and economically dynamic metropolitan areas. They are separated by 220 miles,…
It only took Dallas’ UberBlack drivers a long weekend to get back their right to pick up only passengers willing to pay for their more expensive service. Late Monday night, following four days of protests and calls for strikes, Uber informed drivers through an email that they could opt out…
Until Friday, Uber in Dallas was essentially two different services. There was UberBlack — and its cousins UberSUV and UberSelect — the service that started everything for Uber. UberBlack began as a way to keep town car drivers who weren’t busy, busy. Drivers between gigs could switch the app on…
Tuesday, Schutze told you all about why we should be scared because Dallas is taking $1 million in rich-people money from the Trinity Trust to pay for yet another “charrette” to come up with a plan for a park between the Trinity River levees. Letting rich people fund park planning…
Want to actually, you know, drive on LBJ rather than just sitting on it? Now you can, but it’ll cost you. The TEXpress lanes are open. The new sunken pay lanes on Lyndon B. Johnson Freeway — we’ll begrudgingly admit — are a civil engineering marvel. They’ll also generate quite…
