Check out a recent article of mine in the April issue of Urban Land, entitled Getting Around in the Heart of Texas. It discusses tollways, transit-oriented development, bridges, and even logistics hubs. There is a lot going on in the Dallas/Fort Worth area with regard to transportation. I hope you find it interesting.

In the course of researching this article, I stopped at Las Colinas in Irving, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Las Colinas was started in the 1980s as a master planned mixed use area with office, hotels and residential. It is built on a lake and canal system, so it has this vague Venice/Japanese theme, weirldy cool. But the wild part of it is the people mover system, which is an elevated mini-monorail designed to link the major destinations at Las Colinas.

Granted I was there on a weekend, so it was already pretty quiet, but Las Colinas sure had this feel of a good idea gone awry. The thing is, if the monorail can be linked in to the light rail station planned nearby, suddenly the whole thing has new life and a multimodal link is formed. I hope it works!