ANSWER PAGE

Q. What are all these bill-.boards around town with slide shows? Are they new? They seem to have caught on recently. J.H., Dallas.

A. Those slide shows are A. called cinema billboards, and they’re the handiwork of Tom Douglas, president of Cinema Billboards Inc. The Dallas-based company put up its first billboard at the Knox-Henderson exit off North Central Expressway in October. The second sign is located in a parking lot on Greenville Avenue between Caruth Haven and Southwestern. By day, each billboard looks like a traditional billboard, but at dusk, a hydraulic boom raises a projector in front of the sign, which is then covered with a screen. Twenty advertisers can share the billboard at a time; each advertisement is flashed on the screen for 20 seconds, 18 times an hour. The advertising shows continue until dawn, when the sign changes back into a conventional billboard. Douglas plans to franchise his product across the country.

Q. Is The Village really the swingles’ haven that it’s reported to be? CD., Dallas.

A. The 1982 figures sup-A? plied by the Lincoln Property Co.’s central office for The Village show the average age of a Village tenant is in the early to mid-20s with 53 percent between the ages of 22 and 24. Twenty-nine percent of The Village residents are between 25 and 29; 9 percent are between 30 and 34; and only 4 percent are over the age of 35. (The 1983 figures so far seem to be staying neck and neck with those of 1982.) Where singles are concerned, The Village seems to be following the old saying, “Birds of a feather flock together” -as 87 percent of Villagers are unmarried. This could be attributed to the fact that the proportion of males to females in The Village is 52 to 48 percent. And, in case you were wondering, the answer is “sorry, kids.” Only one community in The Village, The Glen, allows children.

Q. How many restaurants .are there in Dallas? K.G., Dallas.

A. At the end of 1982, A? there were 6,452 restaurants in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, and those establishments hauled in sales of $1,851,602,000 from hungry diners. The number of restaurants in the area increased 8.6 percent from 1981. Dallas is second in the number of restaurants in Texas only to Houston, which has a total of 7,416 restaurants out of the 35,927 in the state. These figures come courtesy of Giles Spillar, food counselor for the Texas Restaurant Association.

Q. Are there really rail-. road tunnels under the Sante Fe warehouses downtown? Is there any truth to the rumor that another underground mall will open there? W.M., Dallas.

A.Yes, there are tunnels under the four original Santa Fe buildings located in downtown Dallas. The complex, which was completed in 1927, stretches from Commerce to Young streets on the city’s west end. About six years ago, there was serious talk of building underground malls in the tunnels, but, according to the Central Business District Association’s Mark Stein, those plans have pretty much landed with a thud. Currently, the space beneath the first and second buildings is being used for parking. Three of the buildings are currently occupied by various governmental agencies.

Q. How much money is . made from parking tickets in the City of Dallas? A.A., Dallas.

A Collections from parking tickets during the last fiscal year (October 1981 to September 1982) netted a whopping $1,015,256 for the city’s general treasury, according to Steven Reed, assistant court administrator for the city. A total of 181,690 tickets were issued in Dallas. The city projects that the revenue earned from parking tickets -and the number of tickets issued – will drop during the current year. The reason, says Reed, is two-fold. First, the Department of Traffic has changed the rush hour parking bans. Where once the bans restricted parking between 6:30 to 9:30 a.m. and 3:30 to 6:30 p.m., the bans are now in effect from 7 to 9 a.m. and 4 to 6 p.m. Sec-ondly, the ever-increasing amount of downtown construction has blocked many revenue-generating parking meters. But, the city does expect to gain another $750,000 at the end of the fiscal year from the nickels, dimes and quarters that pour into available meters.