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Dallas' Opposition to Elevated Downtown High-Speed Rail Line Won't Delay Environmental Review

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Dallas' Opposition to Elevated Downtown High-Speed Rail Line Won't Delay Environmental Review


The Dallas City Council’s last-minute opposition to the proposed downtown high-speed rail route to Fort Worth won’t stall the critical federal environmental process that’s already underway.

That’s a big deal. It keeps the current environmental analysis on track to wrap up next March, which, once approved by the feds, will allow the North Central Texas Council of Governments (COG) to begin pursuing funding and more in-depth engineering. The COG delivered the news during a meeting of the 45-member Regional Transportation Council on Thursday afternoon. The project itself is expected to cost $6 billion and shuttle riders between Dallas, Arlington, and Fort Worth within 30 minutes.

The COG began producing the Environmental Impact Statement last March, which triggers a 12-month deadline. Michael Morris, the transportation director for the COG, said he expects it to cost another $1.6 million to produce 30 percent of the new alignment’s design. Planning for the environmental statement has already cost the agency $12.1 million.

The end product from this analysis generally establishes the alignment for major transportation projects, so when the Dallas City Council passed a resolution in June opposing elevated rail lines through downtown—pending an economic analysis—the COG was concerned that it could delay its planning by a year or longer. It had to design a new route through the most complicated part of the entire 30-mile line: downtown Dallas.

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On Thursday, regional transportation planners said they received permission from the federal government to plan for two separate downtown alignments. Each would shuttle trains about seven stories high to the federally approved high-speed rail station in the Cedars, about a mile south of Reunion Tower. The older alignment has the tracks just east of the Hyatt Regency, splitting between the forthcoming $3 billion convention center overhaul through the heart of southwest downtown. The newer alignment misses downtown entirely, running just west of Interstate 35E along Riverfront Boulevard on its way to that Cedars station.

Morris said the alignment that misses downtown would likely result in losing a connection to Eddie Bernice Johnson Union Station, where Amtrak, Trinity Railway Express, and DART lines converge. But it wouldn’t require any maneuvering around skyscrapers. (Hunt Realty plans to build a $5 billion mixed use development in the corner that would house the other alignment. It contends its plans cannot coexist with the line.) Morris said the agency designed the first downtown route to include a “lobby” or a people mover that could shuttle riders to and from the Cedars station into the convention center and downtown’s Union Station.

If Dallas chooses the western alignment, the COG would no longer pay for that connection, he said. But Morris said it would still investigate ways to link the high-speed rail station with the convention center. Amtrak, which has taken over the separate Houston-to-Dallas high-speed rail project, has concerns about getting riders into downtown if Dallas picks the western alignment, said COG program director Brendon Wheeler.

“I think you’re gonna have your hands full trying to make that same connection in such an easy and graceful way that the high-speed rail system creates for you,” Morris said during Thursday’s meeting of the Regional Transportation Council.

Morris is no stranger to attaching big-dollar adjacent projects to his preferred plans. The city of Dallas has “paused” its support for the downtown alignment until an economic analysis can be completed, which is expected in October. Then it will establish its preference. But for now, the Council was nervous about sewing a high-speed rail line into its downtown.

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“I believe in placemaking, and we certainly wouldn’t put a highway for cars through downtown,” said Councilman Chad West, one of the members of the Regional Transportation Council. “This is very different obviously, but it still creates some challenges when you look at that whole area … that it would cut off. There is no perfect solution, as you point out, and we still must work through that.”

While some Dallas officials have questioned the need for a high-speed rail connection to Fort Worth, the COG believes the federal government envisions this corridor of North Texas as a nexus for rail travel. A separate line from Houston to Dallas is already federally approved, and extending the line to Fort Worth would open up possibilities that could run rail to Central Texas and the western United States.

That’s all a long way away. Amtrak has taken over the Houston project, but still has land to acquire, designs to complete, and funding to secure. The federal plan for a nationwide rail network is still a draft. But the COG is getting its house in order, preparing just in case this all comes to fruition and big buckets of money come available.

Dallas’ job is now to determine whether the tradeoff of connectivity between the Cedars and downtown is worth the risk of how an elevated rail line affects development near the convention center. It made a stand, and it didn’t derail the project.

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Matt Goodman

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Matt Goodman is the online editorial director for D Magazine. He’s written about a surgeon who killed, a man who…

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Dallas, TX

Dallas Snowfall Totals: How much snow fell on Thursday and Friday?

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Dallas Snowfall Totals: How much snow fell on Thursday and Friday?


North Texas got less snow than expected overnight.

FOX 4 Weather Meteorologist Evan Andrews said it was one of those crazy forecasts where some people got exactly what they expected, and others got the opposite.

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“Some of you got that heavier precipitation [on Thursday]. Others were waiting for some overnight, and the precip overnight really never got going. We got a little bit of light snow on the backend but not a ton,” he said.

For snow lovers, the snow that was on the ground from Thursday is still there. However, the total accumulation did not increase much overnight. 

Snowfall Totals (as of 4 a.m. Friday)

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Overall, the areas of highest accumulation were north of Highway 182 in Cooke and Grayson counties. Areas like Gainesville, Sherman, and Bonham got more than 6 inches of snow.

A lot of people in Wise, Denton, and Collin counties got between 3 and 6 inches.

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Fort Worth and North Dallas saw between 1 and 3 inches.

People south of Dallas got less than an inch of snow.

Thursday Snowfall (as of 9 p.m.)

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Future Snowfall

No additional accumulation is expected on Friday, with the exception of maybe a few light flakes early Friday morning.

The Source: The information in this story comes from the FOX 4 Weather team.

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Addison's WaterTower Theatre finds new stage for its summer musicals

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Addison's WaterTower Theatre finds new stage for its summer musicals


For its 2025 season, Second Thought Theatre is going all-in on world premieres written by Dallas-Fort Worth playwrights.

While exploring the question of “What space does STT provide in DFW?” executive director Parker Davis Gray says, “STT is a place where audiences intentionally attend to be challenged by and wrestle with sharp new stories and an electric take on reimagined classics.”

The company likens this perspective to the work produced by the independent TV and film production company A24, and says that has inspired this upcoming season.

Opening Second Thought’s 21st season is Blake Hackler’s Healed, which follows Gail, who has been sick for 25 years.

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Every doctor, every test, every treatment — none of it has worked. Now, with nothing left to lose, she sells everything and heads to a radical health center in the Texas Hill Country, run by the enigmatic and controversial Dr. T. Will this be her cure, her salvation, or something else entirely? It runs April 25-May 10, 2025.

Hackler’s previous work at STT includes the premieres of What We Were, The Necessities, and the 2018 Ibsen adaptation Enemies/ People.

Ringing in the summer is the sci-fi experiment Your Wife’s Dead Body, written by STT artistic associate Jenny Ledel in her playwriting premiere.

While Ledel is remembered for her performances in Belleville, Grounded, and What We Were, this shift to the other side of the table has been years in the making.

“Over the past few years, I’ve been reading Jenny’s plays and attending readings of her work,” says Gray, “she has such an accessible, inviting, and exciting voice that will resonate with Dallas as we begin to navigate the unknown landscape the next few years will bring us.”

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Your Wife’s Dead Body takes place in the near future, as Jane takes advantage of a new AI technology that would extend her lifespan … even if she’s not around to see it for herself. A play about relationships, the nature of self, and what may or may not remain of us when we leave this life behind, this story asks us to consider the new and difficult questions humans may face as new technologies emerge.

Ledel’s world premiere will be directed by former STT artistic director (and Ledel’s husband) Alex Organ. It runs July 11-26, 2025.

To close out the 2025 season, STT will dive into a new genre with INCARNATE by STT’s own Parker Davis Gray.

Trapped in her cell, Rosamund is hellbent on escaping her fate while the Man who kidnapped her struggles with the consequences of what grief can do, and how far he will go to escape it. Can they live with themselves? Or more importantly, who else is living with them?

A horror/thriller that follows two artists over the course of a year in their seemingly pointless pursuit of creation while suffering under great grief. Directed by Jenna Burnett, who also directed the original reading at Undermain Theatre, it runs October 17-November 1, 2025.

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In addition to a world premiere-packed season, STT will continue its year-long playwriting incubator program, Thought Process, andadd another development program to the docket.

2025 will be the inaugural year of Second Thought Theatre’s Associate Director Program, a year-long cohort aimed at providing professional development through education, exposure, and opportunity. Three early-career professionals will have the opportunity to assist on one production of the 2025 season, gain training and receive feedback from professional directors, spend the year working on scene study with STT artistic director Carson McCain, and then end their year with each director taking the lead on one to three readings.

“The purpose of this cohort is to fill a gap we currently see in the DFW arts community,” says McCain. “We want to offer early career directors a safe place to develop their craft and seek feedback from their peers and other professionals. We want this to be a group that allows directors to grow without the pressures of impressing a professional theater in order to be hired again. STT will serve as facilitators and educators, giving feedback, training, and a place to ask questions.”

Season subscriptions and individual tickets are now on sale at SecondThoughtTheatre.com. All productions will take place at Bryant Hall.

Second Thought Theatre Announces their new season centered around cost and consequence as they showcase the sharp and bold voices of local DFW playwrights.

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Dallas Mavericks game moved up due to weather

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Dallas Mavericks game moved up due to weather


The game between the Dallas Mavericks and Portland Trail Blazers has been moved up due to today’s weather.

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Weather changes Mavs-Blazers tip-off time

What we know:

The Mavericks announced on Thursday that the game will start at 6:30 p.m., an hour earlier than their scheduled 7:30 start.

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Doors to the American Airlines Center will open at 5 p.m.

The shift comes with the heaviest snow of the day expected on Thursday night.

The Mavericks are encouraging fans to check the latest weather conditions and consider riding the DART rail to Victory Station.

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Dallas Weather Forecast

The heaviest snowfall is expected to begin after dark and continue past midnight. Moderate snow is expected for several hours in the early evening, starting around 8 p.m. Snowfall should mostly be over by sunrise Friday morning.

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The Source: Information in this article comes from the Dallas Mavericks and the FOX 4 Weather team.

 

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