The drive south down Interstate 35 isn’t a particularly pleasant one, but there soon there may be something to distract you, namely a 243-mile elevated rail line dedicated to shipping freight. The Texas Department of Transportation is close to reaching a deal to lease highway right-of-way to Freight Shuttle International,…
Say what you will about the highway-building mania of the mid-20th century. It led to an unsustainable car-dependent culture, choked off the city center and divided or destroyed neighborhoods. I seriously doubt, for example, that the shacks above were inhabited by well-heeled white people. But these photos, from the Texas…
The North Texas Tollway Authority has made headlines of late for slapping outrageous fees on civilians and veterans alike, publicly shaming them, then threatening to sue and boot their cars. But really, the agency wants you to know, it’s not the bogeyman some people make it out to be. It’s…
At the beginning of the year, the SPCA moved out of its 40-year-old digs on Riverfront Boulevard and into a shiny new facility off I-30 and Hampton Road. The move served two purposes: For one, the SPCA had outgrown the outdated Dealey Animal Care Center and needed a larger, more…
The proposed redesign of the S.M. Wright Freeway, a stretch of Highway 175 that runs parallel to I-45 south of Fair Park, will solve a lot of problems. It’ll turn the road from an indisputably ugly slab of concrete into a landscaped urban boulevard, and will straighten out the connection…
When you set aside any aesthetic hangups and knee-jerk assumption that any vehicle without an internal combustion engine is a piece of junk, it’s pretty hard to argue that electric cars aren’t a good idea. If we’re are going to drive anyway — and current habits and decades worth of…
One time I was talking down the street and I saw Jason Roberts leap a tall curb with a single bound. No joke. He barely broke a sweat under that tweed cap. Then he shot rainbow beams from his eyes that turned all the concrete into an organic garden tended…
DART already had the longest light rail system in the country before the $1.3 billion Orange Line added another three stations and several miles with its debut this morning. Sure, DART’s soon-to-be 90 miles of track are dwarfed by the subway system in New York City, the L in Chicago,…
Offering benefits to the partners of LGBT workers is gradually becoming a standard thing for large public employers in North Texas. The city of Dallas included domestic partner benefits in 2004, DFW Airport in 2010 and Parkland this year. Dallas County is poised to follow suit at the first of…
Since they were put in place a decade or two ago, use of Dallas-area HOV lanes has required having only two people per vehicle. The idea was to encourage carpooling but not make the requirement so onerous that the lanes would sit empty. In that regard at least, the plan…
Dallas and Fort Worth are similar. They’re both in Texas, both have oversized conceptions of themselves, and both came of age in the automobile era. The cities also developed similar bike plans, involving miles of designated bike lanes, at about the same time. And that’s where, transit-wise at least, the…
Slugging, aka commuting to work in random strangers’ cars, has long been a thing in Houston and a handful of other cities across the country but never in Dallas. Maybe it’s that use of our HOV lanes requires only two people per vehicle or that Dallas doesn’t have enough pockets…
With all the hullabaloo surrounding the completion of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, not to mention what must have been a righteous party, it was easy to forget that world-renowned architect Santiago Calatrava was supposed to design two more of his signature (e.g. big, white, and arch-y) bridges across the…
A few years back, the North Texas Tollway Authority took out those pesky toll booths and replaced them with cameras that, if you happen not to have a toll tag, snap a picture of your license plate and helpfully send you a bill — or send a bill to the…
Five years ago, the Trinity Railway Express signed a deal with 4G Metro “to provide the nation’s first comprehensive wireless broadband solution spanning the entire length of a major public railway.” Impressive, right? But by last year, it had become not so impressive. “The contractor wasn’t able to generate enough…
Splashed across the front page of the Morning News today, large and above the fold, is an article detailing a new Brookings Institution study that measures how well public transit connects people and jobs in the nation’s 100 most populous metropolitan areas: “D-FW among worst for getting to work on…
As promised, the North Texas Tollway Authority published a list of all drivers with 100 or more unpaid tolls, and it’s a long one. Some 25,000-plus people owe the agency a total of $12.5 million. NTTA is billing the posting as a convenient resource for drivers to check and see…
There was a lot of buzz back in May when a group led by the Central Japan Railway Co. and former Harris County Judge Robert Eckels announced plans to raise $10 billion in private funds to establish a bullet train linking Dallas and Houston. TxDOT, too, has been looking at…
Not to belabor the point, and with all due respect to the people who were injured, but watching a DART paratransit van plow into a line of cars on the Tollway is awesome. Now, we can watch it from the van’s perspective, plus bonus footage of the driver, who is…
A while back, DART announced it was considering fare changes that will, assuming they are adopted, will go into effect on December 3. The proposal would do several things. It would streamline the fare structure and introduce variable pricing for peak- and non-peak hours, but for most riders, it will…
If you watched the footage of a DART paratransit van plowing, without so much as a hint of a tap on the brake pedal, into a line of cars exiting the Dallas North Tollway on June 29, you might have assumed the driver was a) not completely sober, b) sending/receiving…
As a rule, I never read the DMN’s automotive section, which, in case you were wondering, is in fact a thing that exists. It’s not just that the section is basically one long advertisement for vehicles I’m never going to buy or that Car Talk is infinitely better as a…
