You see all that brightness outside right now? It’s pretty great, isn’t it? It’s been like that all week. You might have made plans to spend a Saturday outside for the first time since The Great Ice Storm of 2013 obscured the sun and turned us all into shut-ins. Maybe…
It was a domestic violence call that first brought Dallas Police Department officers to the 4300 block of Crozier avenue on Thursday night. A witness who lived nearby said he saw a man “beating the shit” out of his girlfriend. The witness, later identified by family members as Rubin Brown,…
A teacher at Kennedale High School was washing his hands when a camera suddenly fell from the underside of the sink and landed on the ground. He handed it to Kennedale Vice Principal Jeff Krieger, who promptly turned it over to the cops. The cops found the camera contained footage…
You know how the Amazing Race works? Well, this is like that, but we could only get Observer staffers to do it if we promised alcohol at the end. Tracie, our art director, takes her car, Gavin, the web editor, takes a Yellow Cab, Catherine, our editorial assistant, takes Lyft,…
Don’t have a car but the bus isn’t your style? As part of our look at car-free Dallas living, Amy Silverstein weighs the pros and cons of other ways to get there from here. Taxi Pro: Even if you’re partying in a sketchy part of town, calling Yellow Cab guarantees…
As part of our look this week at what it means to live in Dallas without a car, Amy Silverstein put DART to the test to see how well it could get her from our offices at Oak Lawn and Maple avenues to D/FW International. There’s a United Airlines flight…
Critics of Uber say that without the heavy hand of city regulation, the app-based limo dispatching company won’t serve residents in poor neighborhoods. Critics of Yellow Cab complain that’s pretty much how things often work now. For our look at living car-free in Big D, Amy Silverstein pitted Yellow Cab…
For all the complaints about taxi service in Dallas — drivers often refuse to take credit cards, they dislike short hauls and sometimes they’re slow to arrive — making a living driving a cab in Dallas can be an iffy proposition. For our look at living car-free in Dallas, Amy…
The revelation last year that Dallas City Hall, in an effort to help its benefactors at Yellow Cab, was quietly working to put Uber out of business sparked a massive public outcry. Transportation hearings have turned into a referendum on the taxi industry. Uber has been called racist. And it’s…
If there’s any North Texas suburb known for having a healthy amount of pedestrian activity — Wait, is there? — it’s definitely not Frisco. Frisco is better suited for people in cars. But while the city’s sidewalks tend to be empty, it appears that the city is dealing with another,…
Every week, Managing Editor Patrick Williams disappears into his office and reemerges a cranky, anti-depressant-gobbling, third-person-referring superhero we like to call Buzz. Listen up, fellow leftist members of the conspiracy to destroy America. It’s time to lay off the Boy Scouts of America and other Scout-like groups. We had a…
Investigators had their eye on the group of skinny horses roaming a property outside Greenville since January. That’s the when the Hunt County Constable’s Office and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals say they met with the owner of the horses to discuss their living conditions. Apparently,…
Ever since his failed bid to be the Republican Party’s nominee for President in 2012, Governor Rick Perry has been busy selling the rest of the country on Texas’ economic policies, particularly as they relate to job creation. Perry’s message to businesses across the country has been clear: Move your…
Back in January, when we did very hard math in an effort to identify which cities write the most traffic tickets, Dallas was well off the leader board, writing far fewer tickets per capita than most big suburbs. Now, a bonus, courtesy of WFAA: Whatever traffic tickets police have written…
Shortly after a Dallas Police Department officer shot an unarmed teen last summer, there was a fairly simple explanation. The officers “responded to a burglary in progress,” police said. They found 19-year-old Gerardo Pinedo Jr. inside the house and ordered him to come outside and lie on the ground. He…
First off, we’d like to make a correction. Yesterday’s report that the Trafficpocalypse was upon us was premature. Yesterday’s bizarre configuration of vehicles stuck on LBJ did not augur a world-ending traffic jam. Commutes this morning were regular terrible, not apocalyptic. What actually happened was that at least seven cars…
The way that Azleway Charter School Superintendent Steve Lenz describes it, his students wouldn’t last long at a regular old public school. Even the ones that aren’t hospitalized or in special ed are often several grades behind where they should be. They also tend to move a lot. “Some of…
The 6900 block of Hemlock Avenue would have been dark at 9:30 Tuesday night. There are no street lights, just whatever light spills over from the adjacent apartment buildings. It would have been hard to see a couple of kids playing in the grass on the side of the road,…
It took more than two years following the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986 for NASA to launch its next manned space flight. Shortly before it returned to earth, a bouquet of roses arrived at Johnson Space Center in Houston. “I didn’t actually decide to do it until the day…
Leroy Nelson, it’s fair to assume, has never owned a “remote aircraft landing marker.” Or a “seismographic probe.” Or a “chemical pipeline examiner,” which sounds like it would be a person but actually appears to be a made-up piece of equipment. Nelson, though, is not the type to let bourgeois…
It’s a shame, really, that Dallas never got to know what 635 is like without massive amounts of construction and with those groundbreaking TEXpress lanes fully operational. Alas, the freeway has fallen, overtaken by a traffic phenomenon completely unknown to science. NBC 5 producer Ashley Lowell Doussard is tweeting photos…
Texas — or at least its lawmakers — is not fond of Tesla, the electric car seller. In 2013, lawmakers blocked a bill that would have allowed the company to bypass auto dealers and sell directly to consumers. For Tesla the car manufacturer — the one that just put Texas…
