For all the talk of adding toll lanes to various portions of U.S. 75 and LBJ, there hasn’t been much attention paid to the Texas Department of Transportation’s plan to include similar lanes — referred to as “managed lanes” in plan documents — along the stretch of I-35 between U.S…
Michael Morris, as Schutze mentioned this morning, is arguably the most important man in local transportation. As transportation director for the obscure but powerful North Central Texas Council of Governments, he has an outsize say in how transportation dollars get divvied up across 16 counties and, by extension, which ideas…
It’s never a good idea to cut off a humongous cement truck on the freeway. Not so much because karma may bite you in the ass at some vague point in the future as that it could be piloted by a driver who has no qualms about crushing the back…
It may be surprising to hear, with as much as North Texas has been deservedly trashed for being a car-dependent, unwalkable hellscape, but DFW fails to crack even the top 50 of a recent Governing.com study measuring pedestrian deaths per capita. Between 2008 and 2012 the region has averaged 6.5…
Riding the DART train, you may have wondered at some point whether those those overhead straps are capable of holding the weight of a fully grown adult. The answer is yes. You’ve probably never wondered whether those straps are capable of holding the weight of a fully grown adult as…
Pop quiz: What was Dallas Morning News personal finance columnist Scott Burns referring to when, in a July 1989 column, he described “a project that may give Dallas, particularly downtown Dallas, a better future” and a symbol of “what we need to be the city we want to be in…
For decades, the passenger railway system in the United States has been in decline. But dreams of a high-speed railway across Texas have persisted, and with a rapidly increasing population and accompanying traffic woes, it’s becoming increasingly necessary. Between a recent announcement of an environmental study and concrete funding plans,…
In honor of the opening of Washington Metropolitan Area Transit’s new Silver Line, which connects previously unserved areas of Northern Virginia to the capital’s sprawling public transportation network, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight data journalism project has released an interactive chart of per capita public transit use in American metro areas with…
If you had planned to drive anywhere near Interstate 35W in Fort Worth and Denton County this weekend, we and the Texas Department of Transportation have one request: Don’t. Really. Please, just don’t. You may have seen some of the warning signs flashing from Waco to Denton County, telling drivers…
We know the real estate industry is doing well in North Texas because we keep getting stuck in traffic at huge construction sites. If you have an idea for a weird new thing you’d like to be built in Dallas, local Realtors are a good, powerful group to get on…
OK, so we’re a day too late on this latest effort to bolster local tourism. DART announced today that the highly anticipated DFW station would be opening four months ahead of schedule. With an originally scheduled opening in December, the date has been pushed up to August 18. Oh, and…
If you’ve been trolling Reddit anytime in the last week, you may have seen this article from June 2, 1968, in which Jack Davis, an engineer and manager for the Texas Turnpike Authority, was quoted in The Dallas Morning News. He spoke about the fledgling Dallas North Tollway project, just…
The conventional wisdom at the moment is that when Tesla Motors gets around to announcing details of its highly coveted, $5 billion battery gigafactory — the type of economic development that gives red-state governors with ill-concealed presidential aspirations wet dreams — it will land in one of two places: Reno…
The Dallas Morning Newsbroke the news over the weekend that the state of Texas is planning to kill off its least popular specialty license plates, and we couldn’t be more thrilled. Not because we take perverse pleasure in the notion that Highland Park ISD could only find 66 drivers to…
The Texas Department of Transportation really, like seriously this time, thinks it’s time for you to stop using your phone while you drive. They would also like all of us to stop eating, grooming and reading — although presumably not road signs — while operating our various means of conveyance…
In a presentation to the Plano City Council Monday night, the Texas Department of Transportation outlined its plan to convert HOV lanes on U.S. 75 between Lyndon B. Johnson Freeway in Dallas and McDermott Drive in Allen to mixed-use toll lanes. The plan would allow single-occupant vehicles access to HOV…
An attempt to change state rules that require cars to be sold from dealerships was buried in a flood of Texas Automobile Dealers Association cash, but that’s not stopping Tesla from opening its third Texas gallery today, this one at NorthPark Center. Visitors to the section of the mall between…
The Dallas City Council’s Transportation and Trinity River Corridor Committee was briefed early this afternoon about plans that should make travel on the LBJ Freeway east of Central Expressway just as exasperating as commuting on the western side. Matthew Craig, an engineer for Halff Associates, the firm charged with shepherding…
Moving away from Lower Greenville last summer, longtime neighborhood activist Avi Adelman could have turned over a new leaf. The camera he used to shove in the faces of drunk teenagers and public urinators could have been stowed in his closet. He could have quietly pulled the plug on Barkingdogs.org…
As a recent transplant to Dallas from Austin, where I apparently spent 76 hours in 2013 banging my head against a steering wheel, I have little sympathy for Dallasites. But traffic is traffic is traffic, and it sucks in any form. TomTom, the company responsible for most in-car navigation and…
After three years of bus service, Mesquite, DART’s first non-member city partner, appears set to spurn the agency for Star Transit, a private bus company that serves Balch Springs, Kaufmann County and Rockwall County. City officials said the potential move stems from DART’s changing its policies for non-member cities and…
It’s hump day, people, so lose yourself in a fantasy of jetting off on a one-way flight to exotic Lubbock or Wichita, with one of Southwest Airlines’ trademark ultra-cheap flights to … somewhere. Southwest announced yesterday that it would be offering a three-day sale on tickets for as low as…
