Articles about Transportation
Why You Should Be Absolutely, Paralyzingly Terrified to Drive on Dallas Roads
Watch this video of an 18-wheeler flipping onto a car on the Dallas North Tollway yesterday.
Then read Patrick Kennedy’s column (from our March issue) about how traffic engineers sacrifice safety in favor of speed.
Why are we not all agoraphobes?
Large Marge: The Motion Picture
Continuing my series of excuses for using the preferred nickname for the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge in blog post headlines, I’d like to point you to the series of photographs of the city’s great white hope snapped by Scot Miller and featured in our March issue.
For fans of the moving pictures, check out the short film above, also made by Miller.
UPDATE: Uh-oh. Despite the big party on March 2-4, looks like Marge won’t be ready for prime time for another month or so.
If We Don’t Get Large Marge Into TNT’s Dallas Credits, We May Have Wasted $182 Million
Photo by Scot Miller. Look for many more lovely photos of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge in the upcoming March issue of D Magazine.
The Dallas Morning News added up the full cost for the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge and found that it’s greater than $182 million. That number is higher than earlier estimates of about $117 million. The city’s share seems to have been about $28 million, which is “in the ballpark of earlier estimates,” according to the (paywalled) story today.
Large Marge is about to have her grand opening on March 2. (And West Dallas is hosting its own happenings the same weekend — called Bridge-o-Rama — not part of the official Trinity Trust events.)
A little while back I had breakfast with Lynn McBee, the super-fundraiser and volunteer who was heavily involved in planning the bridge’s opening celebration. She’s most excited about Saturday, March 3, when the Trinity Trust expects 30,000 people to come to the bridge for a street fair.
What does she believe we’re getting for our $182 million?
Behold the D Magazine Newsstand at Love Field
A rendering of the proposed D Magazine store at Love Field. We leave it to our readers to photoshop a picture of Tim standing behind the counter.
We’ve been sitting on this information for awhile because the business interests of the D Magazine Empire were involved, but since Unfair Park mentioned it over the weekend: Yes, it looks like there will be a D Magazine Newsstand in the new terminal of Love Field.
Our humble store, on which we partnered with HMS Host to beat out other companies — like Hudson News and Paradies — that sought that deal, should be completed sometime in the middle of 2013. Texas Monthly and CNN are also going to have branded stores at the airport.
We don’t make any revenue directly from this store. So if you’re fearful of funding the creation of our 10 Most Beautiful Women in Dallas list every time you buy a stick of gum there, don’t worry. Obviously the big benefit to us is the brand exposure, and it saves a tiny bit (like $30 a month) on what it would cost normally to place our magazines in a store like this one. Plus we’ll get some free advertising for our own purposes on the LCD screens in the store.
Yes, we’re all very much hoping we can convince Wick to take the first shift at the cash register.
Leading Off (2/20/12)
Texas Senate Race Expected To Be One Of Most Expensive in the Nation: Tom Leppert has already raised $6 million, which trails Lt. Gov. David Dewhurt’s $8.2 million, but puts him ahead of Tex Cruz, who has raised $3.9 million. Leppert has already lent his campaign $3.1 million. I’ll let Zac speculate on what he’s spent it on.
Khloe Kardashian’s Reality Show’s New Season Kicks Off: Last night the first episode in the new season of “Khloe and Lamar” premiered, and most of it was apparently spent dealing with a broken sex swing that the celebri-star rigged in the couples Dallas’ Victory Park apartment. If you are at all concerned (and apparently many of you are), Khloe just doesn’t quite feel settled into Dallas yet.
Watch a DART Bus Burn: It hasn’t been a good month for the regional transportation system. On Sunday, a bus caught fire along North Central Expressway in Uptown. Luckily, no one was hurt.
DFW TSA Agents Targeted Women for Nude Screening
Ginger Allen at CBS11 broke this story two weeks ago. Two days ago, as a result of Allen’s reporting, Sen. Charles Schumer (D, NY) said he would introduce legislation requiring passenger advocates at every airport. So good work, Ginger.
The TSA has responded:
“All of our millimeter wave technology units including those in Dallas have been upgraded with additional privacy enhancements that no longer display passenger-specific images,” the TSA said in a statement. “To further ensure passenger privacy and anonymity, a privacy filter was applied to blur all images.”
So far, so good. A clear victory for the good guys based on good reporting from Ginger Allen.
But I have a question. The TSA knows the general times and the specific gates at DFW where these incidents took place. That means they know which male employees were on those particular shifts. So why haven’t the goofs been fired?
Could Yesterday’s DART Arapaho Center Station Shooting Have Been Prevented by More Cops?
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.
Media Horde Descends Upon Arapaho Center Station
That is, if a “media horde” can be defined as two TV crews, a Morning News reporter, a Morning News photographer, and me. I was the only one not asking commuters how they felt about yesterday’s deadly shooting. I was just trying to commute, while wondering why someone would open fire on a cop rather than spend less than $5 on a day pass.
Meet the New Dallas Bus
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.
Leading Off (2/6/12)
DART Light Rail Ridership High, But Bus Numbers Falter: Last year was the busiest year ever for Dallas Area Rapid Transit light rail, but ridership on bus lines as well as the oldest light rail lines decreased by a combined 5 million trips (paywall). Why the drop? Officials say it is due to 1) DART bus passengers switching to new light rail service, and 2) the reduction in the frequency of blue and red line trains during rush hour. Both claims I believe, point again to how simple public transit really is. People will take public transit if it is fast and convenient. That’s why DART’s bus system needs an overhaul.
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.”
‘Shower of Affection’ Greets Emirates Flight
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.
American Airlines on Bankruptcy: We Need Fewer Workers, More Consultants
Bankruptcy is complicated, no doubt. But when American Airlines’ parent company sought to hire four additional law firms (in addition to its lead bankruptcy counsel) and eight consulting firms to advise it on how to navigate through the Chapter 11 process, the United States Trustee overseeing the bankruptcy objected. There’s a court hearing on the matter set for Friday.
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:
The Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge: So, What Are We Actually Going to Call This Thing?
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:
A Morality Lesson on The DART Red Line
A few evenings ago, after a long day of producing Texas’ best weekly newspapers, I boarded a Red Line train. Sitting directly behind me was an obese blond woman whose phone conversation provided an entertaining ride for her fellow commuters. If you like Jerry Springer, soap operas, and Cops, then you would have wanted to be sitting next to this lady.
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.
Southwest Airlines Posts Annual Profit Again
Almost put up a post yesterday about the new interiors that Southwest Airlines will be installing in most of its 737 fleet. Take the tour:
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.
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