Mark Haslett

Michael Morris, transportation director for the North Central Texas Council of Governments, is no longer recommending Texas Turnpike Corp.'s private toll road project. But the state still sort-of is.

North Texas' regional transportation officials recently announced that they would no longer recommend forcing people out of their homes in the countryside northeast of Dallas to build another toll road, because it turned out that people didn't like the idea. "We thought we had consensus that we should proceed in this direction, and obviously we were wrong," said Michael Morris, transportation director of the North Central Texas Council of Governments, when we talked last week.

But does a regional transportation official's recommendation even mean anything anymore? In this fast-paced world of Texas transportation officials and unpopular toll road projects, the state is sending mixed messages about whether the toll road is really dead.

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Flickr/Alan Stanton

Dallas has terrible streets. Ask any driver who hasn't been rendered prematurely senile by the constant jostling over disintegrating pavement or any cyclist who's survived a run-in with a man-eating pothole. Hell, ask City Hall, which estimates that it will take three-quarters of a billion dollars to get the city's roads back in decent shape. When you couple aging infrastructure with a long-standing municipal propensity to value shiny new hotels and bridges over nuts-and-bolts governance, this is what happens.

This ground has been well trod, and bitching about the general crappiness of the city's streets is a tired and unsatisfying exercise. But what if Dallasites could bitch about street crappiness with mathematical precision? To not only say, "Sweet Jesus, the potholes on Garland Road sure do suck," but to quantify the precise amount of suckiness those potholes contain.

See also: Dallas Streets Keep Getting Worse and Worse

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Mark Haslett

From the beginning, the private toll road that would run parallel to Interstate 30 seemed like a sure thing, no matter how many people who lived in the way who said they didn't want the road.

"I think that maybe the ship has already sailed, and all these meetings out there, the public comments, it's putting a check in the box," Lavon's Mayor Chuck Teske says in last Thursday's cover story. "I really don't think they care what the residents out here think."

Late last Friday, however, local transportation planners suddenly seemed to care what the residents thought. The North Central Texas Council of Governments announced in a press release Friday afternoon that it is no longer recommending the toll road proposal be included in the Mobility 2035 plan, a key document that outlines where federal transportation money is going to go.

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KDFW via Twitter

U.S. 75 and Forest, as we speak.

God's reign of terror against the region continues Tuesday afternoon with an all-timer of a traffic jam on U.S. 75. The freeway is closed in both directions at Forest Lane because of downed power lines on 75 proper and the service road. According to reports, a utility pole caught fire, leading to the lines crashing vengefully onto the traffic below.

Traffic is stopped. It is advisable to avoid 75 anywhere north of downtown at all costs.

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via North Central Texas Council of Governments

Our transportation overlords at the North Central Texas Council of Governments have been accused of massaging numbers to justify letting a company called the Texas Turnpike Corp. build a tollway from Dallas to Greenville that no one who lives in the way seems to want.

The council of governments, aka NCTCOG, (Or as Shutze calls them, THE COG!), presented a PowerPoint slide full of a bunch of numbers last month that they say explains why the tollway makes sense. But the PowerPoint slides had that unofficial, PowerPoint-ish look to them. Where are all the NCTCOG's data coming from?! tollway opponents demanded to know.

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Equest

Meet Zoe, a 4-year-old Equest client with spina bifida, and her therapy horse Crunchie. Now imagine a highway bursting through the walls.

Equest CEO Patrick Bricker couldn't have designed a better spot for a new headquarters. The land, 238 sprawling acres of pasture just off Lake Ray Hubbard in Rowlett, checked all the boxes: close enough to the nonprofit's current home in Wylie to be convenient to its existing base of therapeutic riding clients, big enough to accommodate the climate-controlled arenas and riding trails that are part of its expanding mission, and inside Dallas County, which would make it eligible for proceeds from the Crystal Charity Ball.

The land was very nearly gobbled up by a 665-home subdivision. It had the zoning, a name (the Trails of Cottonwood Creek) and everything, but Equest elbowed its way in at the last minute and bought the property for $4.9 million at the beginning of the year.

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thisisbossi

Guardrails are supposed to save you from your own poor driving, but may sometimes kill you instead.

Since 1999, the guardrails manufactured by Dallas' Trinity Industries have been credited with saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of drivers across the country. Trinity's popular older guardrail design, called the ET-2000, is supposed to roll back when struck by cars, absorbing some of the impact and lowering the risk that the people inside the car will get seriously hurt or die.

But in 2005, Trinity Industries altered the design of its guardrail model, shaving off about an inch of metal on each guardrail. It was a minor change, the company has claimed, and one it said wasn't implemented to cut costs, even though a 20/20 news investigation this month uncovered emails from Trinity's own engineers calculating that the change would save the company $2 per each guardrail.

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Uber, Curb and Lyft App Screenshots

Familial resemblance?

They've tried to beat them at the City Council, they're still trying to beat them with Michael Morris and the NCTCOG, now Yellow Cab is trying to join Uber and Lyft by offering an app that consumers might actually want to use.

See also: Vonciel Hill and Michael Morris Join Forces and Seek Delay on Car-Service Regulations

As you can see, Yellow Cab's newly rechristened Curb app is what would happen if Uber's app was skinned with its competitor Lyft's color scheme. Functionally, Curb seems to behave similarly to Uber's and Lyft's apps as well, down to the referral bonuses. You pinpoint your location with your smartphone's GPS and a cab is dispatched to you.

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Jack Keene

If only the traffic lights weren't mistimed.

Breathe easy, Texas. Your long-term transportation needs -- the one lawmakers and policy experts have been fretting about for years -- have officially been solved. The masses, in their wisdom, which the Texas Transportation Institute has distilled in a just-published survey, have settled on a sure-fire way to address the state's congestion issues: Texas needs to do a better job of timing stop lights.

Tweaking traffic signals wasn't the only congestion cure respondents overwhelmingly endorsed. Their second favorite was "doing a better job of managing accidents."

Such results underscore a fundamental challenge in dealing with Texas' transportation needs in a meaningful way. Voters are in favor of solutions only so long as they involve no inconvenience and don't cost anything.

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via North Central Texas Council of Governments

The NCTCOG held its last public meeting about a new tollway proposal that is still being studied, in the ultimate Catch-22.

A few years ago, a private, Dallas-based corporation announced it would like to build a private toll road, all with its own money, connecting northeast Dallas County to somewhere around Greenville, running basically parallel to the Interstate 30 and passing near Lake Lavon and Lake Ray Hubbard. The Texas Turnpike Corp., has been so enthusiastic about its idea that the North Central Texas Council of Governments, the regional transportation planning agency, has agreed to get involved and examine it.

The tollway is just an idea that's being studied, the agency's transportation department director Michael Morris has assured the worried property owners whose land might be in the route's way. It's not a done deal, officials have said, and they don't even know where exactly the route would go, if they find the toll road is necessary at all.

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