The Federal Highway Administration will ponder – until next spring, least – where the Trinity toll road should be built. This is the latest indication that the toll road is dead, which everyone but Mayor Park Cities and the city staff realize.

You can wade through the news report here, but here are the highlights:

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• The highway agency doesn’t want to approve building the road inside the Trinity levees until the levees are repaired, and we aren’t quite sure when that will be.

• The agency’s original report that recommended the levee route for the highway assumed the levees were safe. This has turned out to be a costly assumption.

• The Margaret Hunt Hill bridge may be finished before the tollway is even started, which means we’ll have a bridge going nowhere. That will be fun, won’t it?

And, for those of us who try to parse the real meaning of a story by how it’s written, there is an interesting line in this one: ". … building the route between the levees appeared less expensive than running it along Industrial Boulevard, as some in Dallas have suggested." Is this a sign of a change of heart by the city’s elite to switch the route to Industrial?