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 sho ... More >>
For the people who live in the countryside east of Lake Ray Hubbard and Lake Lavon, the appeal is in the quiet rural roads, dense trees, wild animals in the woods and bright stars shining in the night sky. To a Dallas company called the Texas Turnpike Corp., all that open space is a sign that not e ... More >>
There's something fascinating happening in Collin County. Residents are voicing an opinion on an issue -- in this case they loathe the idea of tolled "managed lanes" running down their portion of Central Expressway -- and, lo and behold, their duly elected leaders, including Collin County's entire l ... More >>
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 two years ... More >>
Arlington is celebrating this morning. After decades as the largest U.S. municipality without mass transit, the city now has a bus service. So park your Ford Excursion and prepare to retire your warmed-over gibes about Arlington as the ultimate suburban wasteland. All done? OK, now bring them back ... More >>
If you need a reminder that Oak Cliff and downtown will soon be linked by street car, head over to the Houston Street and watch as drivers try to get across the viaduct, which is closed for construction. Another reminder: DART just announced that it's officially sealed a $9.4 million deal with Penn ... More >>
When DART last sat down to update its long-range plan in 2006, the agency was thinking big. With the recession still beyond the horizon, planners envisioned 86 additional miles of rail and 121 miles of new bus routes. Since then, the agency has added the bus routes, opened up the Green Line (making ... More >>
When Jason Roberts and his crew at the Oak Cliff Transit Authority first began trying to fund a streetcar line connect downtown with Oak Cliff, they asked the feds for around $48 million. They got only half of that. They've scraped together a bit more funding from various sources, but not enough to ... More >>
In 2002, Arlington voters considered a proposal to establish a public transit system. The system would have been funded through a modest quarter-cent sales-tax increase that had the support of the City Council and every major business group in town but not, as the News reported at the time, the Con ... More >>
When the Denton County Transportation Authority was shopping for rail cars for its A-train commuter line in 2009, it settled on 11 diesel-electric vehicles manufactured in Europe by Stadler, a company based in Switzerland. The cars are quieter, more fuel efficient and more spacious than the light ra ... More >>
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 ... More >>
Anyone who has ridden cross-country on a Greyhound bus, and who walked by the bus station on Lamar Street yesterday, would have assumed that the group of protesters gathered there were speaking out against the inhumane conditions suffered by its passengers. On the contrary, the picketers were m ... More >>
Update, 12:30 p.m.: The flight's on the ground, but it will need to restock its alcohol supply. Details after the original. Update, 11:23 a.m.: American has confirmed the incident, and says two flight attendants were injured. The airline's statement is after the original item. Original item: An Am ... More >>
A Friend of Unfair Park passes along The Wall Street Journal's latest look-see at how well the big carriers handle passengers and their luggage, and per the annual Middle Seat survey the two locally based airlines don't do so well when it comes to getting your bags to your destination. As in: Ame ... More >>
The Census Bureau released a lot of data this morning, including the 2010 American Community Survey Single Year Estimates; we'll get to that once we look over the charts and graphs -- fun! But among the docs dumped is Commuting in the United States: 2009, which says, among other things, it takes ... More >>
Straws in the wind: 1) Rick Perry, toll czar of Texas, still pushing private highways; 2) DART a dismal failure; 3) North Texas Tollway Authority still run by the good old boys. This could all be good. You know where we need to wind up with all this? A toll road from Dallas up to Lake Texoma ... More >>
Why should Dallas build a tiny, inefficient streetcar line when it's broke? Because trolleys are groovy.
Perhaps you've heard: Back on March 25, a still-unidentified Southwest Airlines pilot was somewhere over the great state of Texas when he decided to use his open mike to review the Love Field-based carrier's flight attendants. Said the fellow, all he could find on his route were "11 fucking over- ... More >>
Check me on this. Dallas Area Rapid Transit, the outfit that runs the trains, didn't know how to keep their trains running in an ice storm. The same kind of trains operate in winter weather cities all over the world. There's a way to keep them running in an ice storm. But DART didn't know how. L ... More >>
David Spence/OakCliff.comThe Dallas City Council and Dallas Area Rapid Transit board will hold a joint meeting this morning during which they'll discuss, among other things, DART's long-term expansion plans, the planned Blue Line extension to the University of North Texas at Dallas campus and tha ... More >>
University of Texas at Arlington LibraryMain and Akard, circa 1953That headline is the very first sentence in a press release from the U.S. Federal Transit Administration announcing that on Thursday, it and the North Central Texas Council of Governments finally signed the grant agreement that wil ... More >>
Dallas Area Rapid TransitThe North Carrollton/Frankford Station as seen during the early morning hours of Opening Day on December 6A little while ago, the Federal Transit Authority announced that it's advancing around $182 million in New Starts grants to a handful of transit projects already unde ... More >>
Seems like it was only Friday that Transport Workers Union Local 556 -- which reps Southwest Airlines's 9,400 flight attendants -- was sending Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and TSA Administrator John J. Pistole that note letting the officials know they most certainly did not app ... More >>
The Hatcher Station, one of four light-rail stations identified as by the city as a recipient of the feds' grant announced this morningThis morning we've received several press releases from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Department of Transportation announcing ... More >>
Chris HeinbaughOn the other side is the final dispatch from Chris Heinbaugh, Mayor Tom Leppert's chief of staff, who's among the traveling party wrapping up that trade mission to Spain and France. The quote in the headline comes from the release that follows, in which Leppert says the Euros are r ... More >>
A couple of weeks ago, we were discussing the future of the McKinney Avenue Transit Authority -- specifically, its plans to create a "connector loop line down St. Paul and up Federal to Olive," in the words of MATA's chief operating officer, John Landrum. MATA and Dallas Area Rapid Transit were h ... More >>
Click to embiggen: DART sends this map of the MATA's downtown loopMorgan Lyons, Dallas Area Rapid Transit's spokesman, and Jay Kline, DART's streetcar liaison with the city, were kind enough to forward along this map of the McKinney Avenue Transit Authority's "0.65-mile urban streetcar track exte ... More >>
When the boy and I were on Rosie a few days ago, we were the only non-tourists on the trolley. Trust me, I asked for a show of hands.In the comments to yesterday's item about stumbling upon those streetcars in the Dallas Area Rapid Transit's rail yards, a few Friends of Unfair Park got to wonderi ... More >>
Meant to point this out last week, when I first saw the story on Salon. But now it's made its way to the U.K. -- this story of the little train that could ... run on cow fat, that is, all the way from Oklahoma City to Fort Worth every single day. (Though "with stops along the way in Norman, Purce ... More >>
Click to enlarge the Wonderview site plan from the March City Plan Commission briefingPatrick Kennedy, the professional urban designer behind Walkable Dallas-Fort Worth, likes what he sees in Mark Cuban's proposed Wonderview development near Kiest Boulevard and Southerland Avenue. Only, he writes ... More >>
One of the proposed alignments for streetcars through downtown Dallas. Here's the January City Hall briefing containing all the options.Sooner than expected, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood announced the 51 projects across the country to receive Transportation Investment Generating Economi ... More >>
Click to expland the image if you actually want to peek at DART's 2030 Transit PlanThis morning at Dallas Area Rapid Transit HQ, president Gary Thomas lauded the rail expansion as "on time and under budget," and presented a new study by professors at the University of North Texas's Center for Econom ... More >>
Courtesy Justin CozartIn 1945, Dallas city and transit officials, among them Mayor J. Woodall Rodgers, introduced "the first of twenty-five new, silent, streamlined street cars."Almost two months ago, the Dallas City Council's Transportation and Environmental Committee got a peek at the proposed ali ... More >>
Courtesy the Oak Cliff Transit AuthorityOne of the original streetcars that ran through Oak Cliff long, long agoJason Roberts -- a Happy Bullet, co-founder of the Art Conspiracy, Texas Theater-rehabber and, for the purposes of this item, Oak Cliff Transit Authority board member -- sends word that th ... More >>
Seven months ago, the word "streetcar" started showing up on Unfair Park -- seems Jim's plenty keen on the idea, along with other trolley-touters who look to yesterday's transportation option as tomorrow's development generator. Which is why, as the Dallas City Council's Transportation and Environme ... More >>
So, from the looks of a letter that arrived in my in-box last night, most of the airlines' woes come from but a single source: oil speculators. At least, that's what American Airlines' Gerard Arpey and Southwest Airlines' Gary Kelly -- and nine of their fellow CEOs and presidents -- insist in a miss ... More >>
Not a scene from DFW's air traffic control, swear One week ago today, the Government Accountability Office released a report that noted the Federal Aviation Administration's stepped-up efforts to hire new air traffic controllers, to compensate for "the projected departure of over 15,000 air traffic ... More >>
Johns Hopkins University Well, thank goodness for Morgan Lyons, that’s all I can say. A little birdie called to alert me to a very important meeting taking place Friday at City Hall to discuss building a trolley line through downtown and also to talk about the second downtown light-rail alignm ... More >>
Look at it this way -- at least Flight 48 to Paris wasn't late. It's the little things that matter. Editor's note: Edmund Newton, managing editor of our sister paper in Fort Lauderdale, sends along the following tale: Here’s the question: Is it safe to fly during times when commercial airlines ar ... More >>
If you're planning to fly American Airlines in to or out of Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport today, well, no, you're not. Friend of Unfair Park Tim Wagner, the Voice of American Airlines, was just on KRLD-AM (1080), where he said the airline has canceled its full schedule of flights to and fr ... More >>
More good news for American Airlines, which is starting the year with two false-imprisonment lawsuits hanging over its head. Today, the U.S. Department of Transportation released its Air Travel Consumer Report for November, and of the 20 major carriers in the United States, Fort Worth-based American ... More >>
Michael Morris, Director of Transportation for the NCTCOG, lives in Arlington. Which doesn't stop him from poking his nose into other cities' bidness. Michael Morris sighting this morning. I want to read it into the record. Morris, of course, is my least favorite local politician. Nothing personal. ... More >>
Almost done here. As in, the Trinity River toll road's damned near a done deal. With 355 out of 400 precincts reporting, it's 37,006 folks for the toll road and 33,011 against. --Robert Wilonsky
Party for trollies in Oak Cliff