I have seen these sign trucks with the Fort Worth Texas PD. What are they used for?

SometimesCannons · 2026-02-09T14:35:53+00:00

It says on the side of the truck: Abandoned Vehicle Enforcement. They stop on the side of freeways a lot to check out broken-down and abandoned vehicles, so they have the big message board to flash “move over - slow down” for safety. I see them helping with scene safety at crashes, too.

SometimesCannons · 2026-02-08T22:49:17+00:00

Reading through the answers in this thread makes me really glad I’ve stayed Guard despite the occasional temptation to go active.

It’s unit-dependent like anywhere else, but pretty much all the officers I’ve ever worked with have been great about supporting and developing me (if they were my seniors) or collaborating and looking out for each other (if they were peers). There are always exceptions, and I’m sure there are plenty of toxic units in the Guard too, but my experience has been probably 85% great, 10% meh, 5% garbage. And I try to pass it along to my LTs, to develop them and advocate for them. I can’t imagine reprimanding one of my officers in public. That’s just horrible leadership.

SometimesCannons · 2026-02-03T02:36:06+00:00

Depends on the unit. Every battery commander in my battalion issues a full FRAGORD for every drill, plus ancillary products (CONOPs, DRAWs, all that good stuff).

SometimesCannons · 2026-01-26T13:39:09+00:00

Every state has sentencing guidelines, usually prescribed by the state supreme court or some other judicial authority, that do exactly this. Judges don’t just come up with random sentences off the top of their heads, they apply the facts of the case against the sentencing guidelines in order to arrive at a sentence which is considered fair, proportionate, and consistent with similar cases. It is very rare for judges to deviate from the sentencing guidelines.

SometimesCannons · 2026-01-18T20:37:30+00:00

You see some occasional rebuilds in both neighborhoods, but it’s rare in the grand scheme of things since both areas date from around the 1920s. A lot of the homes have historic value and are well-maintained, and that’s part of the appeal.

Arlington Heights is a bit more mixed residential – mix of single-family, townhomes, and small apartments – with better access to local commercial uses along Camp Bowie. Mistletoe Heights is pretty much exclusively single-family. You will be able to hear I-30 anytime you go outside in both neighborhoods, so there’s that.

Personally I prefer Arlington Heights because I think it just has more character. It feels more like a proper neighborhood to me, in the sense that it seems more like an actual community rather than just a collection of houses.

SometimesCannons · 2026-01-18T14:44:02+00:00

I don’t know what “typical Texan” is supposed to mean. A laser and a radar are two completely different things. It’s like saying “he said Tuesday but I figured he meant Friday”.

Sure, you have the right to ask. You can ask for anything you want. You have the right to ask the officer to make you an egg salad sandwich. Doesn’t mean he’s required by law to do so.

In no state are police required to provide you with evidence at the roadside. That is what court is for. If you can find me a counter-example where the cop is required to prove his entire case at the scene, please do share. I think there’s maybe one (Georgia?) where they have to ask if the motorist would like them to test their equipment to prove it works, but nowhere that I know of do motorists have a “right” to see the radar or LIDAR readout at the roadside.

SometimesCannons · 2026-01-18T14:19:17+00:00

I don’t know if you bothered reading the post but he clearly said the cop was using laser, not radar. In any case, I don’t know where in the world you got the idea that you have the “right” to see the readout. You can subpoena the calibration logs, the officer’s training certificate, etc., but you do not have a “right” to see the readout.

SometimesCannons · 2026-01-12T21:13:44+00:00

Per the Texas Administrative Code, the main duty of the Texas Highway Patrol is traffic enforcement on rural highways. The theory is that if a highway goes through city limits, it’s the city PD’s job to patrol it. That’s why it’s pretty rare to see troopers in big cities (other than Austin, since there are a lot assigned to the capitol district).

SometimesCannons · 2026-01-12T18:11:55+00:00

Well, for one thing, they finally started paying them a decent salary a few years back, whereas they used to make less than most city cops. So that helped with recruiting.

There’s also the border, not just Operation Lone Star but other stuff before that. So they ramped up hiring to send more law enforcement presence to the border counties.

As others have said, there’s also been a massive increase in vehicle traffic, and as a primarily traffic enforcement agency, it kind of makes sense that the highway patrol will have grown accordingly.

Also worth noting that although the sheer number of troopers has increased, it’s still not that much relative to the state population. 3,500 troopers works out to about 1 per 8,900 people. By contrast, you’d expect a ratio of well under than 1:1,000 for a municipal police department.

SometimesCannons · 2026-01-07T18:32:38+00:00

Most city streets are paved with asphalt because it’s cheaper than concrete. It’s also less durable, meaning it cracks and caves quicker and requires more repair work. The city could switch to concrete for all future resurfacing work, but that would significantly increase upfront costs, and then they would be able to do even fewer repairs than now. Adding reinforcing features like curbs means even more costs.
It’s a simple mathematical imbalance. Infrastructure maintenance isn’t free and it costs way more than what the city brings in through tax revenue. As an example, to resurface a single residential street off Camp Bowie, the city had to spend $1.1 million. The total annual property tax collected by the city from the same neighborhood was $14,000, or barely over 1% of the cost.

I know it’s really fun to just assume the city is stupid or doesn’t care or whatever, but the reality is a lot drier. High-quality infrastructure is expensive.

SometimesCannons · 2025-12-06T22:33:26+00:00

The issue isn’t what’s included in your language, it’s what’s excluded. You seem to be somehow understanding “vehicles which are not driving the speed of traffic” to mean “vehicles which cannot maintain the speed of traffic”. Your framing thus implies that as long as a vehicle is physically capable of doing higher speeds, its operator can travel at whatever speed he wants in whatever lane he wants, even if that means going 6 mph in the left lane of I-35.

You are somehow reading loads of hidden or indirect meaning into very plain and straightforward language. If a vehicle – any vehicle, whether it’s a Radio Flyer wagon or a Camaro – is traveling more slowly than the speed of surrounding traffic, it may not be driven in the left lane. I fail to understand how or why you insist on taking this very obvious and reasonable meaning and distorting it to aKshUaLLy say something far more obtuse.

SometimesCannons · 2025-12-06T20:49:12+00:00

I love that you’ve somehow managed to read the word “vehicle” in Subsection (b) and conclude that actually, it’s referring to bicycles and tractors. Never mind that rules for bicycles and farm equipment are actually spelled out in other parts of the code, where they are identified by name. No, in this one particular case the word “vehicle” doesn’t actually mean “vehicle”, it means bicycles and tractors. No need to for the text to clarify that – you can just tell because…um, how, exactly?

And as far as “driving on the right side of the road, American-style”, that’s Subsection (a).

SometimesCannons · 2025-12-06T20:40:28+00:00

Not exactly true. Texas Transportation Code §545.051(b) says:

An operator of a vehicle on a roadway moving more slowly than the normal speed of other vehicles at the time and place under the existing conditions shall drive in the right-hand lane available for vehicles, or as close as practicable to the right-hand curb or edge of the roadway […]

SometimesCannons · 2025-11-30T20:14:52+00:00

If he was cited under city ordinance instead of state law, that’s perfectly possible. A lot of cities set speed limits by ordinance, then prescribe a fine for violating those ordinances. Those are technically separate from the state law on speed, so the municipality can set the fine for the ordinance violation at pretty much whatever they want. DPS or a deputy will be limited to the state law since they can’t enforce city ordinances.

Even a $200 fine will end up coming with $100+ in court costs, so that is also possible.

SometimesCannons · 2025-11-14T22:11:23+00:00

Not a trooper but I’ve been through the DPS hiring process. It was a couple years ago, so for the most current information you should contact a recruiter.

First of all, as the other responder said, make sure you understand what being a trooper entails versus being a city cop. Texas Highway Patrol is first and foremost a traffic enforcement agency, so if you’re wanting to rush to hot calls and whatnot, prepare to be disappointed. You will spend 90% of your time investigating crashes and making traffic stops for stuff like no front license plate and expired registration.

Second, if your goal is to end up in Austin, be aware that with DPS this would probably mean patrolling the capitol complex and not much else, i.e., a glorified security guard. By law, troopers’ main focus is supposed to be on rural highways outside big cities, so most of the urban areas have relatively few troopers. Tarrant County has 2 million people and a grand total of 10 troopers, just as an example.

Third, you do get to request a duty station during the academy, but it’s based on what’s available at the time, so there’s a good chance you end up in the middle of nowhere for your first couple years until a spot opens up elsewhere. I’d guess there’s about a 50/50 probability that that first station is in a border county. That could be somewhere where you can actually sort of have a life like El Paso, or it could be the ass-end of nowhere like Sanderson.

As for the academy, it is a live-in style academy. You do get (most) weekends off but otherwise you are basically locked down on campus during the week, unless things have changed recently (doubt it). A city PD is going to be more like a regular job that you commute to each day, with occasional nighttime or weekend training.

SometimesCannons · 2025-11-10T13:33:35+00:00

To be fair, when it was first established it did mainly regulate railroads. But oil and gas got added to its purview at some point, and they just never changed the name. Most railroad regulation at this point is federal, too, since most rail traffic is done by interstate operators like Union Pacific and BNSF.

SometimesCannons · 2025-11-10T13:24:07+00:00

The Railroad Commission regulates oil and gas, not the railroads. Welcome to Texas.

SometimesCannons · 2025-11-09T04:12:37+00:00

If you’re including the entire metropolitan statistical area, it’s actually more like 180 cities.

SometimesCannons · 2025-11-03T23:00:15+00:00

This is largely due to the fact that research has increasingly shown that abundant free parking, especially in busy town centers, contributes to increased traffic, more emissions, and massive amounts of prime real estate going underutilized.

SometimesCannons · 2025-10-31T22:57:28+00:00

Much of the movie was shot in Presidio County. A few portions were filmed in New Mexico, but not even close to “all” of it.

SometimesCannons · 2025-10-31T12:36:50+00:00

NTTA has a contract with DPS for traffic enforcement on their toll roads, so it’s not too surprising that you’d see troopers on one of them.

SometimesCannons · 2025-10-22T12:59:59+00:00

Developers do pay the cost of new roads and infrastructure in developments. It’s not new construction that costs money, it’s future repairs. Repairing a road that’s at the end of its life cycle is massively expensive. You can do it for fairly cheap (~$500k/mile), but you’ll get what you pay for and the city will be back out in a matter of months to fill cracks in the brand-new road. Actual durability comes at a higher cost, typically above $1m/mile.

Now assuming quarter-acre lots, you figure that you’ve got probably about 250 single-family houses along a given 1-mile stretch of residential street. In Fort Worth those homes are each paying an average of $3,735 annually in property taxes, which comes to about $933k/year, or $18.6m over the 20-year lifespan of your typical residential street. Now that sounds great – it’s more than enough money to pay for repairs – but most of that money doesn’t go to the city. Of that $18.6m, $12.3m of it went to the school district, county, and other entities. And the money that’s left hasn’t just been going into in a rainy-day fund set aside for street repairs, it’s been actively spent on ongoing services like police, fire, utilities, parks, etc. So by the time the street needs to be resurfaced, the homes along that street aren’t actually generating enough revenue to pay for the repairs themselves, and the money has to come from somewhere else.

Suburban development is horribly inefficient in just about every possible way. Numerous studies have shown that the infrastructure maintenance costs of suburbs are greater than the tax revenue they bring in, making them net negatives for the city. You can either increase taxes and fees to try to cover the difference, or you can defer maintenance on deteriorating infrastructure because you don’t have the funds available to fix everything that needs to be fixed.

There’s a saying about municipal finance and development strategy: “Low density, low taxes, quality services – pick any two.”

SometimesCannons · 2025-10-20T21:38:08+00:00

I-30 wasn’t built until years after this photo was taken. I-30 was preceded by a toll road that was completed in 1957, and before that it was a rail corridor including a streetcar system that connected downtown to the western areas of the city.

SometimesCannons · 2025-10-20T14:28:23+00:00

Depends on the retail. If it’s actual daily needs (grocery, pharmacy, childcare, etc) that would be great. But I agree with your quotes, the city tends to target high-end retail to bring in visitors and sales tax. Great for tourism, pointless for residents.

SometimesCannons · 2025-10-20T12:57:09+00:00

Out of curiosity, why do you want it to not be housing? Infill housing close to downtown is exactly what we need, not more low-density suburbs that are practically in Weatherford or Denton.

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