Then we say thanks. Thanks to you Jim, it seems to keep the dirt from flying on this ludicrous toll road by keeping the dust stirred up by just finding and reporting the facts.

The Additional Credits in the Balanced Vision Plan going to Hargreave make this award a real gem. Your earlier reporting of Hargreave Associates president Mary Margaret Jones says, "When I hear tollways being described as the answer to many transportation problems, this is one of the places where a tollway is not the answer." Jones' company was hired by the City a couple years ago to help develop the new Trinity River "Vision Plan." http://www.dallasobserver.com/2006-05-11/news/double-decherd/

I'm tired of the cranky Trinity articles. Why can't Jim write fun stuff any more? He is ignoring all kinds of good stuff at city hall.

I'm tired of the Trinity River project in general. Have more words ever been wasted over less action?

It is indeed a tiresome subject, but it must be kept in the public eye to provide the pressure to force a vote on the "new" plan. This one issue affords us voters the chance to "just say no" to the standard Dallas politician bait and switch scam. Let the project survive and we might as well have Ron Kirk back to bleed more tax dollars to channel to the developers, vote harvesters, sports team owners, and others of that ilk. It WILL continue until the voters wise up, and the pressure has to be maintained until they do.

Same for the AIA — a bunch of architects on their hands and knees like truffle hogs snouting through musty leaves for fees. Between the lot of them there's about enough integrity to run a half-bad whorehouse in Arizona.Your legal staff must be perspiring bullets over the complaints of the Arizona half-bad whorehouse industry being inclued in anything mentioning the Trinity project. There is getting screwed and then their is the Trinity project.

specially since it will certainly be done the way the developers want it to be done...

Can anyone name one project in Dallas that was stopped or changed because of any grass roots effort?

jim... please... take a break from writing about some road and the river. we need some juicy new articles.

If Jim doesn't write and say what needs to be said, who will?

Well, we could always depend on your crazy blog. Hehe.

I am finding that just a small group of people are into the Trinity subject. Most think we should just move on and follow the project plan. We voted and lets move on.

Wait a minute on dissing the AIA. These are good guys who do community service. To call them out as hogs at the trough is disengenous at best....

The political gossip is that the big campaigns have polled voters on the Trinity and the response is that people want it built and no more discussion. We shall see if that pans out.

The TRP is a waste of time, money, emotions, paper space and bandwith. I wish it would all just go away.

Jim, please keep writing about the boondoggle called the Trinity River Project. The only way to stop it is to shed as much light as you can on this corrupt travesty.

Where can we get a look at the tollway authority's engineering drawings? It would be great to compare them to the original vision.

Why don't you see what Krieger and Eager say before commenting for them. Give them a call and you will be surprised -- they are against the highway that has been designed by Halff but in favor of a narrow parkway that was part of the Balanced Vision Plan.

For the record, the above comment is not, in fact, from the mayor. I asked, and she said, in short: What comment? Which doesn't mean it ain't true, just that it ain't from Laura Miller.

Krieger doesn't seem to have a problem with the status quo on this project. See about 3/4 the way through video:
http://cbs11tv.com/video/?id=16602@ktvt.dayport.com

Where is the Mayor on all of this? The voters approved a road project in 1998. To her credit, the mayor was elected and decided to do something to save this project from itself so she enlisted the help of Alex Krieger regarded as one of the great urban planners of our day. What came of this was the Balanced Vision Plan which called for a narrow low-speed beautifully landscaped context sensitive parkway limited to 4 lanes to run alongside the Trinity Lakes. Four years later, NTTA and Halff have disregarded Krieger's Vision and designed a highway that is not context sensitive. The parkway and the park can co-exist if the road is designed just as Krieger imagined it, yet that doesn't seem to be happening...

The NTTA doesn't levy taxes to build its roads; it issues debt that gets paid by tolls. Drivers pay tolls only if the road gets them from A to B faster than non-tolled alternatives. Building a road is an incredibly expensive project. A parkway "designed just as Krieger imagined it" won't draw or handle volumes of drivers that will raise enough money to pay for the road.

If the city, county, state, and feds believe a Krieger-type road is what's best, they'll need to pay for it, and the NTTA will need to bow out. But if the city, et al., want drivers to pay for the road with tolls, the road can't be what Krieger envisioned.

In any event, don't blame the NTTA for designing only the kinds of roads that can be paid for by tolls.