News reports, like the one from WFAA above, say that the Transportation Security Administration and Dallas Police are offering to help DART Police secure their stations, following yesterday’s shooting, the latest in what seems like a string of violent public transit incidents. This would involve having more officers posted on DART trains and at DART stations.

Would that have made a difference for Eric Johnson, who lost his life when a DART police officer exchanged gunfire with a man who’d been turned away from riding a bus for trying to board with an expired pass?

When we’re faced with tragedies like this, it’s natural that we want to do something to prevent such a senseless act from occurring again. But isn’t the plain fact that we live in a big city, with a lot of other people, some of whom are prone from time to time to commit awful acts?

Things like this are going to happen. After all, there was already an officer on the scene.

And, as WFAA reports, one of yesterday’s victims claims he was struck by a bullet fired by the officer, not the suspect.

This morning I mentioned in Leading Off that I think DART could help its bus ridership numbers (which have dropped) if it overhauled its bus model. Well, look-y here: it’s a new bus design that DART plans to roll out. New benefits include: better A/C and composite flooring, which promisses a smoother ride.

Righto, great, great. But this is what I’m excited about: check out those new, sexy wheelchair ramps! I know. Very exciting. Why? Well, the current way people with wheelchairs, walkers, children’s strollers, etc. get on and off the bus is by riding the lift, which moans and groans and takes about three to five minutes to get one person on or off the bus. I ride the Bus 11 up and down Jefferson Blvd. There are a lot of clinics near Jeff and many mothers with young children who ride that route. On most days, we stop at nearly every corner for a wheelchair or stroller. Often, more than one person needs to use the lift at each stop. It makes the ride nothing short of torturous.

So, the new bus should help somewhat. Next up for making buses better: designated lanes marked-off with curbs, built-out bus stops that allow for wheelchair boarding without the use of a ramp (which will be easier now that the new buses have lower flooring), and lots of street paint and signage to make finding and learning the bus system close to as intuitive as streetcar systems tend to be. Because I think streetcars are swell, but the point of the project is to have better public transit for all, not a great streetcar line for a few.

Horse Thieves Hit Camp For Disabled Kids: In the latest installment of crooks who are worse than crooks, two horses have been stolen form Camp El Har, a camp that offers therapy for kids with various disabilities, like autism. Now owners of two other horses on loan to the camp have removed their animals out of fear of further thefts, which has forced the camp to postpone its classes indefinitely.

Will ‘Black Atheist’ Billboard Ruffle Feathers? A group called African Americans for Humanism and the DFW Coalition of Reason will unveil a billboard today which voices support for atheists during African American history month. But while the billboard has already prompted some push-back from South Oak Cliff pastors, pre-event controversy also led to an unexpected act of community service: members of the DFW Coalition of Reason turned out at Pastor Kyev Tatum’s church garden Sunday to help harvest their greens, which will be donated to local food banks. Tatum reconciled the art of charity like this: “the devil might have picked it, but the good lord sent it.”

The Dallas-Fort Worth drought ended just in time to greet the first Emirates flight from Dubai. Photography by Jeanne Prejean

The Eagle, er, the Emirates, has landed. At Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, at about 8:45 this morning, to great fanfare — as shown in the photo above of the so-called “shower of affection” that was accorded the Boeing 777-200LR aircraft upon touchdown. (”Shower of affection” means something else where I come from, but apparently this is an aviation ritual.) The plane had left Dubai about 16 hours earlier, becoming Emirates Airline’s first-ever daily, non-stop flight to D/FW. It was scheduled to turn around and head back to the United Arab Emirates a couple of hours later.

United Arab Emirates Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba

As part of the inaugural hullabaloo, various government and airline officials cut a cake, said “Howdy” a lot, and gave each other gifts. Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price handed Yousef Al Otaiba, the UAE ambassador to the United States, her black cowboy hat. When the ambassador (they actually call him “Excellency”) put it on, he joked, “I’m gonna get shot when I get back to D.C.” That was an apparent reference to the Cowboys-Redskins rivalry (we think).

The officials also said that Texas is the U.S. leader in exports to the UAE, accounting for $2 billion of the $16 billion that’s logged annually. That figure, they added, is sure to increase with the new service to Dubai, which in turn will offer flyers connections to many more destinations in the Middle East, Africa and the Indian Subcontinent.

At that they opened up the 777 for a quick tour, showing off the plane’s gourmet grub, red-capped flight attendants (see below), all-class entertainment system (100 TV channels, 500 audio channels, 100 video games, etc., at each screen), and luxury seating. At each of the “lie-flat” beds in Business Class, for example, rose petals had been strewn, and one immaculate little pair of white “sleeping socks” had been set out. The 777 seats 266 passengers in all, eight in private suites with their own bar.

The plane's first-class "private suite." The Pringles are complimentary (we hope).

According to Nigel Page, Emirates’ senior VP for commercial operations, the new service is expected to produce an economic impact of $227 million on North Texas annually. He said that today’s flight from Dubai had been at 76 percent of capacity, that the return flight would be 100 percent full, and that he expected all the airline’s daily flights to average 75 percent capacity in the early going.

This DFW Airport Ambassador (left) seems a tad wary of the brightly smiling Emirates Airlines flight attendant.

As Bloomberg notes, Tracy Hope Davis stated that “The scope of services set forth in each application is so broad that the potential for duplication with the other firms is apparent.”

I am continually astonished by the corporate consulting industry, the way that a company will insist its CEO and other top executives are worth lavishing millions of dollars upon but is just as quick to feel it must hire an outside firm for “strategic” advice that apparently none of its C-suite stars could come up with themselves. My guess is that there’s a CYA motivation to much of it.

On the other hand,  bankruptcy is not part of a company’s normal operations, and it shouldn’t be surprising that AMR could use help. This is how much help they requested:

Law Firms

• Weil Gotshal & Manges — Bankruptcy counsel
• Debevoise & Plimpton — Special aircraft counsel on “aircraft financing and lease arrangements”
• Groom Law Group — Special employee benefits counsel
• Paul Hastings — Special labor counsel for “objecting to and litigating potential bankruptcy claims by employees and/or unions,” among other matters
• Morgan Lewis — Special labor and employment counsel for collective bargaining negotiations

Consultants

• Bain & Company — Strategic consultants to American Eagle “to provide labor cost assessment and labor solutions and negotiations support.”
• Deloitte — Consultants for “bankruptcy consulting functions”
• Ernst & Young — Auditor and tax advisor
• KPMG — Tax compliance and tax consultants
• McKinsey & Company — Management consultants to, “among other things, provide business plan support services.”
• Perella Weinberg Partners — Financial advisor on labor-related services (like how to get out from under labor agreements and pension obligations)
• Rothschild Group — Financial advisor and investment banker
• Skyworks — Aircraft restructuring advisor (dealing with their aircraft lease and financing obligations)

Keep in mind that those are in addition to 51 firms they’ve applied to be able to continue work with to “Handle Tax and Other Matters” and 167 law firms they work with in the “Ordinary Course of Business.”

Meanwhile American Airlines CEO Tom Horton sent a letter to employees yesterday that implied layoffs will be coming:

“Since we will be refining the organization and getting leaner, we will obviously end the process with fewer people,” Horton said in the letter, although he offered few details on what changes have been or will be made.

I should have headlined this post “Why I Was Never Interested in Business School or Law School.”

A Santiago Calatrava rendering of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge.

We need to take care of this before it gets to be too late. We kept telling ourselves we’d get around to deciding how we should refer to the decade that ran from 2000 through 2009. The 2000s? The Aughts? And we never could come to an agreement.

Let’s not allow the same thing to happen to the Woodall Rodgers Extension Bridge, or, as the Hunt Petroleum Company would have us call it: the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge.

Hunt contributed $12 million to the Trinity River project and therefore has the right to honor the family matriarch. I have no objection to that being the official name, for the purposes of press releases and on first reference in newspaper stories. But that’s a heck of a long eponym, compounded by the fact that the double surname makes it difficult to know the proper way to abbreviate. Should it be the Hunt Hill Bridge, or just the Hill Bridge?

Generally, we the media have punted. It’s usually either something like “the Calatrava bridge” or “the Santiago Calatrava-designed bridge” on second reference in news articles. When we just can’t avoid the issue, we’re stuck having to repeat the whole damn name, as the Dallas Morning News does here, or as our own FrontRow blog does here.

Stop the madness. Surely we’re going to come up with a generally accepted nickname anyway. You know, whatever traffic helicopters will say when they need to talk about bottlenecks on the bridge, e.g.  ”Heavy backup onto Woodall this afternoon due to a three-car pileup on the Marge.”

Let’s make this happen sooner rather than later. My proposals:

1)  The Calatrava (named for the architect) — It’s how we most often hear people refer to the bridge anyway, right? Yes, the name is a number of syllables itself, but its vowel sounds flow together easily, unlike the hard stops forced upon the speaker by the Ts in “Margaret Hunt Hill.”  The other objection is that a second Calatrava bridge is in the works, but since we all know that the Spanish architect was asked to make his other design a cheaper version, let’s face the fact that we’re really only going to have one fully-formed Calatrava bridge.

2) The PVC (named for its appearance) — I’ll admit to being among those who think the bridge’s main feature looks like Dallas decided to make a knockoff of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis out of PVC pipe.

3) The Marge (a nickname) — Our best, most enjoyable option for shortening “Margaret Hunt Hill.” With the added benefit that, provided the Margaret McDermott Bridge (the bridge over I-30, which was also to have been a Calatrava design) comes into existence, Dallas can come to be known around the world as “Home of the Marges.”

The Marge, almost ready for primetime.

First of all, her beau was recently carted off to jail. She told the person on the other end of the phone that her man looked her in the eye as the cops led him out the door and said, “Baby, I left a little money in the dresser for you.” Apparently, this is not the first time my traveling companion’s lover has been behind bars, because she bragged that she has memorized both phone numbers for the Lew Sterrett Justice Center information line.

She wasn’t privy to all the details of her man’s case; because they were not technically married, his lawyer couldn’t tell her everything. Even his mother wasn’t in the loop, as the jailbird neglected to list anyone as his “in case of emergency” contact. But the guy was apparently in contact with lots of people. I’m not exactly sure what “putting money on his book” means, as I’ve never been to jail, nor have any of my loved ones, but I could understand the woman’s displeasure as she said, “I ain’t putting money on his book so he can write letters to no other bitches. Those hos ain’t done nothing for him.”

Still, she was contemplating going to Costco or Walgreens and buying “one of those jumbo, big-ass cards” for her man’s birthday. She laughed as she envisioned him being made fun of by his fellow inmates for receiving such a large card. She just hoped that the guards would deliver it.

Here was the part I found most horrifying: Whereas I was taking the train to Arapaho Center Station, where I would hop in my car and drive a mile to my house, this woman was going to get off at Downtown Plano Station and make two more connections via bus so that she could stay at an aunt’s apartment. It sounded as if it was going to take her three to four hours to traverse a distance that someone with access to a car could cover in about 30 minutes.

So as I sat there judging her, silently reveling in the knowledge that my life was so much better than hers, I was overcome by a sneezing fit. I must have stifled seven or eight of them honkers. When I was finished, the woman offered me a “God bless you.” A few seconds after that, she said “Sir?” and offered me something else — a sealed wet wipe, the kind made available at restaurants that serve ribs, as well as a paper napkin to dry my hands with.

I am such a jerk.

I was going to remark upon my dislike for hearing about how something is “sleeker” and “more comfortable” when the bottom line is that they’re cramming six more seats onto the plane so that they can rake in $250 million more in ticket revenue and pay $10 million less in fuel costs. I didn’t like how with all their talk about how “eco-friendly” their new cabins will be, they seemed to be glossing over the fact that the distance between seats is being reduced by an inch, and the new seats will recline back only 2 inches instead of 3.

The Southwest spokesman insists that that the thinner material on the new seats will make up for these losses, keeping “leg room” the same or better. I remain skeptical.

But I’ve also decided that Southwest — having posted its 39th straight annual profit in an industry in which much of its major competition has ended up in bankruptcy — has proven it knows how to keep customers happy enough. Even as ticket prices have gone up, according to the AP report: “The average passenger on Southwest paid a fare of $140.18 in the fourth quarter, a 7 percent increase from a year earlier.”

Maybe I should trust that they know what they’re doing.

Several months, countless hours, and $1,200 later, Jeppson has 10,000 maps to hand out. He just dropped a few off by our office. I plan on using mine to get home tonight.

Jeppson has lived downtown for 6 years. He currently lives in the beautifully renovated 400 N. Ervay (which I immediately fell in love with and wrote about here). I told him my feelings about the tunnels, and he said he’s neutral. “They’re an asset that already exists, so why close them down?” he says. “Don’t expand them, but don’t close them down.” He’s on a task force that is evaluating the tunnels. He said the group is close to releasing some recommendations. I hope one of those recommendations is to open the tunnels around lunch on Saturdays. I know it won’t happen, but I would really love to be able to get a Salata salad or a Chick-fil-A sandwich without getting in my car.

If you want one of Jeppson’s maps, check out his site here or stop by our office. I’ll have a few at the front desk.