For the most part, the debate over what to do with Interstate 345, the elevated strip of highway that cleaves Deep Ellum from downtown Dallas, has taken place in the abstract. Like the Trinity toll road, I-345 is a litmus test for where you stand in Dallas’ ongoing fight toward…
The battle over the placement of DART”s second rail line through downtown doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen. At a meeting last week of the Greater Dallas Planning Council and Urban Land Institute, DART indicated that it was wholeheartedly behind some version of the Young Street alignment for the…
Clarence E. Sullivan arrived in Ellis County in 1890 to seek his fortune. Though barely 18, he was already well-tempered by life. A runaway buckboard had killed his parents when he was a child, leaving him to be raised by an older brother who scratched out a meager living outside…
Since it went public with plans to build a high-speed rail line between Dallas and Houston, Texas Central Railway has been adamant that it won’t be suckling at the government teat. The project would be entirely private, allowed to rise and fall on its own merits, as judged by the…
No matter who one asks, a second rail line downtown is the most important project on DART’s agenda, essential to the transit authority’s future. It will expand the capacity, and the possibility, of transit infrastructure that is currently strangled by the manufactured bottleneck of four above-ground train lines running on…
Marty Hiles had big plans for Ellis County. “A bunch of us — mostly retired, all former CEOs, executives, we’ve been around the world, done things, every one of us are veterans — we got together and we were looking and said ‘You know what? Ellis County needs to come out of…
News bubbled out of Austin last week that the ride-sharing app Uber would add the capital city to a short list of areas in which Uber offers UberAccess. UberAccess allows app users to summon a wheelchair-accessible vehicle. In areas without UberAccess, Uber only guarantees that customers with wheelchairs that can fit…
Among the first things Unfair Park — yes, we’re still calling ourselves that, old habits die hard — does when it gets up in the morning is to quickly scroll through Twitter. Since the downtown-to-Oak Cliff streetcar started rolling in April one thing that’s popped up consistently is DART’s alert…
Uber and Lyft have been legally operating in Dallas for almost three months now. Uber was already dominating cabs in the competition for business trips, a trend that has only continued since the City Council’s new transportation-for-hire ordinance went into effect on April 30. Data on personal trips are harder to…
Texas is in a weird place when it comes to transportation. It is a state utterly dependent on the automobile and yet policy makers have proven unable — or, more precisely, unwilling — to properly fund the roads and infrastructure that makes car travel feasible. The gas tax has been…
A post on the Bike Friendly Oak Cliff’s Facebook page indicates that some poor, unknown soul got a parking ticket at Klyde Warren Park. Not a car ticket, but a bicycle parking ticket. If you’ve ever ridden a bike in Dallas and then unsuccessfully looked for a place to park,…
There’s probably not enough time — about five weeks, give or take — left in 2015’s session of the Texas Legislature to get anything done with regard to Dallas state Representative Rafael Anchia’s dual Trinity toll road-killing bills. Wednesday, though, they did get a hearing at the state capitol, and…
Monday afternoon, the Army Corps of Engineers concluded the decades-long approval process for the Trinity River project. Dallas can begin building a park between the Trinity River levees in addition to the Trinity toll road in whatever guise it may take. That is, the city can start on the portion…
Sixty-three percent of Dallas residents who’ve made up their mind about whether or not a toll road should be built between the Trinity River levees oppose the project, according to extensive polling done by The Dallas Morning News between April 10 and April 17. Among registered voters who’ve made up…
The Trinity River toll road, that high-speed, six- to 10-lane highway between the levees that even Mayor Mike Rawlings’ appointed “Dream Team” of urban planners said was a truly bad idea, is not dead. It’s just looking a little peaked after a long, crowded City Council meeting where toll road…
The public reaction to Mayor Mike Rawling’s “Dream Team’s” coming-out party yesterday has been startling for its lack of cynicism. D Magazine Editor Tim Rogers wrote a piece headlined “Larry Beasley Just Killed the Trinity Toll Road” — Beasley is the leader of the Dream Team. The Morning News ran…
Police from across the state lined up at a hearing of the Texas Senate’s Transportation Committee to vouch for red light cameras. The cameras are not merely revenue generators, they prevent accidents and injuries, officers said. “If I could put a police officer on every corner where I have a…
The trains themselves are pretty damn neat. Slick, good looking and capable of operating without overhead wires, the city of Dallas’ new Union Station to Oak Cliff streetcar looks the way one might wish the transit authority’s light rail vehicles looked. The thing is, and this should change later this…
Just before Dallas’ revamped transportation-for-hire regulations go into effect on April 30, a new report shows how deep of a foothold app-based car service Uber has carved into the city. Dallas and San Francisco are the the two cities that saw more business users take trips in an Uber car…
It’s not about the road. It’s about the park. So says the American Institute of Architects Dallas chapter, which released a statement Wednesday condemning the long-planned, under-funded Trinity toll road. AIA Dallas supports a great Trinity Park as essential to the future health and prosperity of Dallas. Any highway similar…
For two long weeks, workers at the Carmel Car Wash on Mockingbird Lane heard a constant “bang bang” sound. It wasn’t gunshots. It was cars going through a pot hole so bad that complaints of tire blow-outs were common. In the Lakewood Advocate, Rick Wamre wrote four days ago that…
We’ve been highly critical of DART’s handling of winter weather here at Unfair Park. The agency’s cuts to bus service during inclement weather leave Dallas without adequate public transit at the time when it’s most needed. That being said, the limits Winter Weather Scenario One places on rail service make…
