Dallas Fort Worth Urban Forum

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Texas has had plenty of laws put in place only to have them removed in the daylight of reality. Every legislature can rewrite the laws of Texas every two years. That's true of every democracy. Nothing is set in stone. Even the US Constitution can be amended as the needs arise, as long as you got a ...

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While the state has studied expanding intercity passenger rail service in Texas, it has yet to commit any funding for them. In fact, in just the last session the Texas Legislature passed laws prohibiting TXDOT funding HSR. Per https://www.expressnews.com/news/local/article/Texas-lawmakers-didn-t-sto...

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It's hard for me to think about the Dallas to Houston trains without including the rest of the triangle, so.... I'm okay with a state funding contribution to get San Antonio and Austin hooked-up. Neither probably has the traffic potential yet, and are too far apart (distance and existence) for a co...

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While I am really happy that DFW is now connected to both cities, still a little bummed they couldn't figure out the engineering needed to make the trains pull in through the same station. We need to make public transport more convenient. Even if they pulled into the same station, they could not sh...

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10 years is also a long time where we could have had a better rail system serving Love Field directly. Again, the tunnel to the airport would not have increased the total amount of federal dollars that were already awarded to the Green Line project. It's disingenuous to suggest otherwise. The local...

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As you can probably tell I'm still not over this :P It just seems so shortsighted and even cruel to deny the city such a key connection, especially when they raised the funds and didn't ask for more federal money. One can only wonder if the same result would've occurred under another administration...

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I agree, that would be ideal, but I think it would be over double the length of the "spur" idea and prohibitively expensive. With the spur, it's about the same amount of digging as a people mover but of course would likely cost more to lay rail than lay a moving sidewalk. However, the cos...

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I think in that case it would make more sense to just reroute both the orange and green lines through Love Field to a subway station underneath the terminal as was originally envisioned, before returning to the surface and connecting to the current Burbank and Inwood stations at the northern and so...

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Idea dump..... if they are exploring digging underground for a people mover to connect the terminal to the DART Orange Line..... why not just create it as a single track "spur" off of the Orange Line where a train spurs off from somewhere to the orange line underground to the terminal, dr...

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I really wish the stretch of Addison along Belt Line rd were more walkable. Addison is kinda the 'anti-urban' suburb. It seems that they are built around the automobile and have little interest in getting away from that. I know some may say that its because they don't have rail, but I don't buy tha...

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What a terrible thing to suggest, having more victims to prey upon doesn’t increase crime. Having more greedy criminals is the major reason for increasing crime rates, imho.

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It wasn’t until 1961 with the opening of Thorton Freeway (I-30) before US-67 and interstate trucking traffic left Gaston. Can you imagine all those semi trucks using Stemmons to get through Dallas today on Gaston instead? That’s where they were before 1961. That would be like US 75 traffic still ha...

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It wasn’t until 1961 with the opening of Thorton Freeway (I-30) before US-67 and interstate trucking traffic left Gaston. Can you imagine all those semi trucks using Stemmons to get through Dallas today on Gaston instead? That’s where they were before 1961. The Bankhead Highway was also routed over ...

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Why did the residents not want the stations? Were they scared people would ride it, break into their homes and steal their TVs? Probably a combo-meal of that, and also that neighborhood thinks there is a loud-noise factor with the train operation as well. Maybe both suggestions are correct somewhat...

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Both Preston and Coit stations have been “deferred”, sort of a mix between delayed and cancelled. Which means DART has no intentions to build these stations anytime soon, but like Lake Highlands they could be built later without much ado because the EIS has already been performed on them. So the onl...

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Greenville Avenue isn’t that far away from North Central Expressway by car, but it is by foot. Dallas as it exists today is built around the car. I would suggest even a light rail station located over Greenville Avenue wouldn’t serve all of the possible destinations on it. To service it effectively,...

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Streetcars haven't been built in Dallas to serve commuters as much as to serve developers - improving real estate values. Some will suggest DART built the light rail lines in the wrong places, but not from me. Every single line parallels a heavily used freeway, at least in part, although the distanc...

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Tunneling a moving sidewalk from the terminal to the train station and SW HQ would be the quickest route, but I still prefer an elevated people mover. Elevated with big windows so people get a good look at the Dallas Skyline, whooped around the runway with a Mockingbird @ Denton Drive so that retai...

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Can anyone build 40 miles of streetcar lines for just $1 Billion? You would have to average $25 Million per mile to do so, including the costs associated with buying the streetcar vehicles themselves and building an entirely new maintenance facility or expanding DART’s existing light rail maintenanc...

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They wouldnt even have to get rid of those massive embankments but instead simply plant tons of trees on those to make them more appealing and only rework the ones close to access points to the "lake" or near prime real estate areas. That is the option that should be pursued. Wow, if they...

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You’re not going to be able to eliminate all street traffic off Bryan. To the north you have the over $100 million Plaza of the America’s complex with two 25 story and a third 26 story towers, with a historic 13 story atrium. To the south you have the “historic” Dallas High School now being used by ...

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Yes, it could be done - but DART would have to add crossovers and pocket track near or at the stations they would turn around at. There are already Orange Line trains that only run up the Red Line to LBJ Central station and stop, and come back through downtown as 'Out of Service'. Operationally, it...

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Is there any evidence that adding a people mover is going to increase usage? I'm not even talking about increasing it enough to justify the cost -- that's beyond pie-in-the-sky. Let's be realistic: how many people are there really who don't rider DART to Love Field now that would start just because...

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A good public transport link would reduce the amount of Uber/Lyft cars going in and out of the airport. Just saying!!! Which is why building the people mover system to Burbank and SW Headquarters makes sense. SW employees can either park out there or ride DART and then take the people mover to the ...

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A good public transport link would reduce the amount of Uber/Lyft cars going in and out of the airport. Just saying!!! Which is why building the people mover system to Burbank and SW Headquarters makes sense. SW employees can either park out there or ride DART and then take the people mover to the ...

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It's been almost a month now, has anyone been able to get their tap card to work?
I dislike threads that leave things or issues like this unfinished.

electricron

What works elsewhere will probably not work in Dallas. While I think it is great to look around the world and see what other cities have done with floodways, Dallas should decide for itself what it wants. What works best in Dallas, usually what has one or more champions proposing, running, and willi...

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When MARTA built its mostly subway lines there was no, or at least less federal requirements to spend as much on art as DART had to meet to qualify for federal funding. DART rarely spent more than the minimum required by the federal government, which is why it was done but done as cheap as possible....

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Just got this link to an update on DART projects today Buried in the description for the D2 subway is this: Although DART did not receive funding from the FTA, DART is currently reviewing potential funding sources to keep development of the D2 Subway on track. http://dartdallas.dart.org/2018/06/29/...

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The tiny percentage of transit funding dollars devoted to building public transit systems is criminal but I'm not surprised considering our current state leadership. What a disservice to the public. Dallas is ever densifying in the urban core neighborhoods. Traffic is already getting to the point o...

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There are better, more impactful ways to spend $1.2 Billion besides a "look at us, we're a big city" subway for Dallas's insecure city council and DART board members... As long as city councils appoint DART board members, and as long as insecure citizens vote for city council members, loc...

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Between this and Matt777's proposed streetcar plan, I think DART could manage both for less than the additional costs of a fully underground D2. There's even enough left over for the DART board to take a field trip to Portland or Denver to see how street-level LRT can work. The DART board wouldn't ...

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Colleyville is likely acting like Corinth did about the DCTA A-Train and Knox-Henderson about the DART light rail subway section. They'll figure out later on (probably too late) that it'll be an asset, not a liability. You're probably correct, a decade or two from now they will probably wish they h...

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Wow - what a shame we threw that away. Yes, a real shame. Up until 1964, the bus/streetcar system(s) was/were privately owned and operated for a profit. Here's a Wiki page listing all of them; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_transit_companies_in_Dallas Note that the City didn't purchas...

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Heading towards north Dallas, the only streetcar to reach farther north than Mockingbird Lane was on Hillcrest, presumedly to reach SMU. Other lines heading further north towards Denton and Sherman were interurban lines, not streetcar lines. Here's a link to an old Dallas streetcar map dated 1925. h...

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You can still see where the old Dallas streetcars turned around even though any signs of the old tracks are long gone. Few, if any, streetcars reached as far out as Loop 12, for several reasons. That's where the city limits reached, and that was also the limit where streetcars provided a great servi...

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It makes complete sense to cut out the additional traffic conflicts (since trains would be heading north and south from the portal), however I've got to wonder how much realigning the tracks along Good-Latimer is contributing to the project cost, and why the original Green line design had the Deep ...

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Building on some earlier comments, couldn't DART address their "congestion" issues quite easily and for probably at least $1.3 Billion less money by sending only some of each lines trains through the transit mall and turning others back to provide more service on each end of each line? As...

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Rail ridership through low-density suburbs in North Dallas (which would also require a transfer to get to the primary destination) has a very high likelihood of being overestimated. How may ridership estimations has DARt made in the past, and how many of them actually overestimated ridership signif...

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That's absolutely true but I would imagine that hurdle could be overcome (if there were any political will for it) with a cooperative agreement between DART and DCTA for trains between Dallas and Denton, similar to how the Trinity Railway Express operates between Dallas and Fort Worth and is funded...

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Arguments based upon getting federal funds, and by what percentages, is slightly jumping the gun because neither project is guaranteed matching federal transit funding or low cost federal loans. And projects can change to get them, like the Green Line Love Field subway station being dropped during t...

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A routing through Irving could physically be done, but not politically. Downtown Dallas is just too far into Dallas County for a transit agency based upon taxes from Denton County to support. Likewise, it's just as unlikely politically for DART to extend the Green Line into downtown Denton. I can se...

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Whether ridership is high or low, it gives far more people more options than they have now. From central Dallas, you can ride the trains in many directions: SW, S, SE, NE, N, NNW, and WNW. Outside of let's say Loop 12 to keep it simple, you can only rdie the trains in one direction - toward central ...

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I have a feeling that it's easier to drop stations after the initial Environmental Impact Report, than to not have them on there, and try to include them afterward. That is probably why we always see more initially, and they get deferred later. But most of these stations are marked as 'deferred' in...

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It's an EIS, every possible construction item that might be built within the next 20 years is included. Not everyone of them will be built at startup. The idea that there will be train stations built spaced just one mile apart is very unlikely. One will most likely be set aside to be built later and...

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I thought I'll show you what is really required to have an express train service. Here's mostly a rear window 40 minute video from White Plains to Grand Central in New York City. The cameraman moves to the back of the train around 7 and a half minutes. Pay close attention to the number of tracks, an...

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Is it too much to hope that enthusiastic partnerships will extend TRE to Kaufman County, using that subway plan? DART is not going to extend the TRE into Kaufman County anytime soon. First, no city in Kaufman County pays DART sales taxes. Second, even if the entire county paid DART a full penny sal...

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Presumably via the BNSF line from Irving to Carrollton. Would be quite out of the way though, not to mention having to deal with freight trains. I wonder why Carrollton is so opposed to the site that was proposed as the Cotton Belt yard facility. While the BNSF may be the major user of this section...

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With frequencies of 8 trains per hour on the red/orange line in north Dallas, there should be a train every 7. 5 minutes. Without additional passing sidings, a third track, the most savings in time an express train can make is at most 4 minutes - depending upon the size of the signal blocks. When tr...

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Well, I guess it's good we don't have express trains then..haha. I had not considered how unfair it would be to certain paying cities of DART, and also how it would encourage even more sprawl up north, so, with that said, I'm thinking this isn't my best idea. I think, even with all the points outli...

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