Here are some photos from today’s excursion on Seattle’s South Lake Union Streetcar. Here, we’re boarding at one of the stops.

[Read more]

The new Best of 2008 Awards are out from the Fort Worth Weekly. I’m very, very proud to say that both West And Clear and sister site Fort Worthology found their way into the awards, thanks entirely to our readers. West And Clear won the Readers’ Choice award for Best Web Forum, and Fort Worthology won the Readers’ Choice award for Best Blog. I think I speak for everybody here at the shop when I give a very sincere and heartfelt “thank you” to all of you out there in Readerland. You’ve spoken and given us this honor, and we are very grateful to you for it. Really, guys and gals - thank you.

Now, I’d like to speak a bit about something that bugs me about the FW Weekly Best Of awards.

Amongst the various categories, the Weekly picks a “Sign of the Apocalypse” award. This time around, their staff chose the price of gasoline. Gas is expensive, costs a lot to drive now, and all that, right?

Seems curious, because the Weekly gave out countless awards to businesses that aren’t in Fort Worth, or even Tarrant County in some cases. It seems a bit of a mixed message - gas prices stink, so here’s a ton of places you should visit that require you to drive out of town to them! [Read more]

So, by now you may have heard that a group of 50 Fort Worthians, including Mayor MC Moncrizzle and the Official Streetcar Study Group (I’d pay up to and including a dollar to see a band with that name), took a trip to (Unnamed City To The East) yesterday to take a look at Mockingbird Station, the first TOD (Transit-Oriented Development) ever built in Big (UCTTE), to get some inspiration for Fort Worth’s planned streetcar circulator system. Of course, Mockingbird Station is built on a DART light rail line, which is not really similar to our proposed streetcar circulator, but their heart’s in the right place. The study group plans to take a trip to visit Portland next and have a look at their streetcar system, which is directly what ours would be based on.

I have to say, it warms the cockles of this New Urbanist’s heart when I hear that the Mayor dropped some fresh beats that he’d never attempted before. I never thought I’d hear him say this sentence:

[Read more]

While Fort Worth has made great steps forward on heavier rail systems, first with the Trinity Railway Express and now with the upcoming Southwest-to-Northeast Line, those systems are primarily concerned with moving across longer city-to-city type distances. What’s been missing is a proposal to do something greater for central city urban mobility, something beyond The T’s little-used (and in some ways rather lackluster) bus system.

Until now.

For several months now, a proposal has been working its way through the city’s ether to bring back Fort Worth’s streetcar system, silenced long ago and replaced with the bus. Decades ago, Fort Worth had one of the finest streetcar systems in the entire country, with routes linking downtown to many dense, walkable “streetcar suburbs” like the Magnolia/Fairmount/Ryan Place area, the west side, and places like the Stockyards. Now, with Fort Worth witnessing the success that modern streetcar systems are having in places like Portland, work is underway on returning these central city circulator vehicles to the neighborhoods around downtown.

[Read more]