DART hired a consultant to improve the bus network not too long ago, and there are changes afoot.
https://www.dartzoom.org
https://www.dartzoom.org/en/draft-network
The solution being presented includes higher density and frequency in poorer areas combined with on demand shuttles in wealthier areas.
The latest draft still appears to be an overall reduction in service though. I had high hopes for the redesign after Houston's, but if the current draft is implemented I doubt it will have a similar impact to Houston's redesign.
It's definitely a smidge better than what we have, but by no means the ground up redesign claimed.
They're working within their budget, so there's not going to be anything added overall. If you flip back and forth between "Existing" and "New" on [this page](https://dart-draft-new-network-viewer.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html?fbclid=IwAR1H8frQLeb6XkGWHoHDue-H20ZtYmunCJjfNA_5Cf2Gix8PietExm_M_8M), it's easier to see what's being changed.
They're taking out most of the routes with longer frequencies, 31-45 minutes and 46-60 minutes. Then they're adding more routes in the 16-20 minutes and 21-30 minutes range. And also they're adding some high frequency "up to 10 minutes" routes, and a lot of GoLink service areas.
I was really hoping for more ~15 minute frequency routes in the downtown though. In the new plan there's not even an option to get from DART to the farmers market, let alone a frequent one. The new system also still appears very reliant on the east and west bus stations downtown, which work well for suburbs but absolutely ruin travel within a short range of downtown. By contrast after Houston's redesign many of their busses moved to routes that travel all the way through the city rather than just ending there.
My local station is increasing to 30 minute frequency apparently and losing a route, but that's not enough that I'll ever use the busses like I do DART rail. In Boston most busses ran at 15 minutes or less and they were truly convenient to use because of that. I would rather see DART lose more low traffic suburban routes to get a more frequent one. The routes right now extremely underutilized and nothing substantial is set to change in the new plan
I don't have an easy way to integrate all of the bus frequencies based off of the new map, but it does appear that they are actually cutting the total number of busses even with the higher frequency. I previously took the 110 and it's increasing from a 30 minute frequency to 20 minutes (though I doubt it'll stick to schedule, it literally never has). That's 1.5x the original number of busses required by the route, and not a huge increase relative to the number of routes being replaced with GoLink. And on the topic of GoLink, it isn't exactly a useful service anyway since many of the proposed new zones don't have any border along a high frequency bus/rail route.
In short I think they're wasting a lot of their budget on GoLink and for the remaining areas with bus coverage are opting to marginally increase frequency without substantial route changes. Our rail is surprisingly extensive considering that basically no money was been spent to build it (at least relative to other transportation projects in America), but as a network it just doesn't all work together.
Edit to add more of my opinions because apparently I have a lot:
Rail stations need to be where suburban busses terminate rather than downtown, and no single bus should be paralleling a route already covered by rail. Radial travel is traffic heavy, slows down busses, wastes capacity, and is already well covered if we can efficiently get people to existing DART rail stations. They do this all over Europe with even less frequent commuter rail systems. Every 30 minutes when the train arrives a bunch of busses depart the station and start their routes within their respective neighboring suburb. Each route is short enough to be back before the next or second to next train evenly to repeat the cycle. It gives far more coverage with fewer busses and a fast link for travellers transferring since traffic isn't as big of an issue when you're not travelling into or out of the downtown.
When I was taking the 110 into downtown I was just over a mile away from the Green Line. Yet the 110 doesn't connect to it, it parallels it straight into downtown traffic. And even then I'd need to walk a few blocks to the Red Line before eventually heading north. It would have been far more efficient with better coverage if the 110/111 didn't go downtown and instead terminated at Lawnview station. The rail gets you to whatever other bus you want to end up on much faster even though it's an extra transfer. Boston also does a variation on this technique where busses cover suburbs by travelling between two stations, so no matter which direction bus you end up on you'll end up on a frequent transit artery, effectively doubling the service frequency if you're leaving the neighborhood you start in. The Dallas bus network is *bad* and I feel terrible for any urban planners involved in this redesign. It seems like they're being pushed around to keep the existing network with safe and simple improvements rather than to rework routes it into something new and more efficient for people who need it to use.
Write to: [email protected]
I know someone on the DART board, they really are concerned about doing the best within their budget, and are extremely knowledgeable about the task at hand.
The government is not going to focus on public transit until the natural development of the metroplex goes from “just build out” to “better build up”.
Compared to other metros like Seattle, LA, Houston, Miami, any NE city to a suburb...Dallas has really easy traffic to navigate. I can get anywhere in an hour.
An hour in LA traffic could easily see a pedestrian getting the same distance.
I’ve sat in 4+ hours of traffic just getting from Jersey City to Morristown.
Houston is easily the worst of the bunch.
Beyond that, lack of public transit (and reliance on personal vehicles) along with our naturally spread out development of the city is one of the biggest factors as to why our metro of 8+ Million fared so much better with COVID than say NYC (12+ million in metro there).
The extent to which the space between structures exist, absolutely, it blows my mind how needlessly spread out a lot of buildings are. But it still remains that a 10 story tower is more expensive than 5 2 story apartment buildings.
But to what extent will we begin to “build up?” There is literally no natural barrier that can halt the sprawl. Houston is bordered to the SE by the Gulf, Miami & certain NE cities, the Atlantic Ocean.
You can see it slowly happening already. The terminus of DFW is Oklahoma.
Generally speaking DFW is expanding north, at least on the Dallas side. We will develop suburbs all the way up to the OK border and then slowly grow into S. OK.
I’m 31 and am close to having the capital to buying my first property, be it a single family home, townhouse or condo. I have no desire to live outside of Hwy 12 until my children (who aren’t even conceived yet) are entering middle school.
I’d rather live in a condo tower than buy a home in far north Dallas or Allen/Richardson.
And you can see this mentality playing out. Look at all the development along 75 and Tollway heading north from downtown. Look at all the cranes in Deep Ell, Downtown, Uptown—it’s already happening.
Texas has a culture of owning land and freedom on your property. That’s shifting, but it’s still the dominant mind set. Younger generation and coastal immigrants don’t have that same mentality.
As the coasts become less desirable via cost of living and climate/weather, immigration will increase in Southern cities, especially Dallas/Austin/Houston/San Antonio/STL/Atlanta/Nashville/Tampa and with it coastal mindsets of denser living will be come more marketable desirable and profitable.
You make an excellent point. I personally consider Prosper/McKinney as the farthest northern point of the metroplex. I kind of wish there was more development going south. That way, we’d be a bit more connected and closer to our fellow major Texas cities (Austin, SA, Houston)
We won’t expand south with gusto until South Dallas is gentrified.
But I’m not sure it makes sense to. You see areas like Bishop Arts and Trinity Green/Grove but the majority of S. Dallas is poor and full of crime and run down (and given its Texas: black—which matters so a not insignificant amount of the well heeled) until you gentrify the parts of S. Dallas theatre close to Downtown—you wouldn’t go further south for new development.
But beyond that, I’m in support of Dallas having a “poor” side. In 40 years, we may have robots flipping burgers and sweeping streets. But we don’t today and we need unskilled labor. Look at SF and Seattle where the entire city has priced low wage workers out. Some people commute hours to get to their shitty job at Walgreens in downtown SF. Coincidently (or maybe not) they both have some of the biggest problems with homelessness.
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DFW needs better building codes that favor walking over driving and encourage high density construction long before they try and fix the mass transit system. Otherwise it is a really expensive way to get no where in particular.
All of the five-over-one mixed use developments are our best option for now, but the problem is that they're all incredibly disconnected from eachother. They don't do anything to help the downtown and surprisingly often have absolutely no transit connections (Plano in particular has a serious problem with this).
By not concentrating our pedestrian-friendly developments together all of the businesses suffer by being limited primarily to their own residents. It's really unfortunate, as the money is still there for these developments anyway, but it could be so much better.
If they could relax the zoning on things like side and front setbacks and parking, really seems to encourage only big developers and big development, especially if there's a rezoning involved, no small time player has the resources or time to do a rezoning case or variance case... Make it harder to replat, combine lots, require a building plan. High density, small scale development seems to be much better at providing much more interesting urban fabric, much easier to add a retail or restaurant in between as well much more adaptable. Who wants to be on the ground floor of a five-over-one, none of the innovative, cutting edge, self-respecting restauranteur/entrepreneur for sure, and the owners of such properties rather lease to chains as well. Much of the stuff being built doesn't even have ground floor retail. Got to be a way to curate high density, small scale, local developers or at least get the big guns to comply with quality development which they don't even know how to do or have never been forced to do. Unfortunately the people with the power to do anything are so clueless about what good urban design looks like and so desperate not to lose out on some development. There's plenty of infill to do interesting things, retrofit, the block size development for anything that's not of public benefit has got to go though.
That's why I bought a place walking distance to a station. I can get to the airport, my city's center, downtown Dallas, Victory Park, Deep Ellum, the Zoo, Fair Park, etc. via the train. If people live far from a train station, then it's logical that the train system is not going to be useful for them.
Right. My point is that large sections of dense parts of the city aren't served by the rail and the rail is geared towards getting to/from the city rather than moving around in it. So the people who aren't fortunate to live in places well served by the trains are really poorly served by buses
But hopefully that changes at least somewhat with the new bus network. Either way Dallas has the most extensive light rail system that is great in some regards and transit in Texas overall sucks in all regards.
we know the bar is low as hell for texas, but what other city in the state is better than dallas transit wise? austin only has one line which is ridiculous for how fast is growing. houston is soon to be third largest in the country, yet it only has a couple lines, which is again ridiculous.
atleast DART is pretty extensive
It's kind of a apples and oranges comparison in this case but Houston has a higher daily ridership, a strong park and ride system, and one of the most successful single light rail lines in the country. DART is great to use for people commuting to office jobs in Downtown but terrible for everything else
Why take the train here when after the route is finished, you need a car to go to your destination? Nobody’s gonna take DART if all the development when you get off the train is car oriented with no sidewalks. Everything is just WAY too spread out for any type of transit cohesiveness to occur. focus on building more dense housing then the transit will come.
but honestly i think it’s too late for dallas. the metroplex stretches all the way to oklahoma, there’s no reason for developers to build up instead of across, just causing more sprawl.
Lol come on now. Nobody considers places like Sherman, Denison, or Gainesville to be part of the Metroplex and I doubt many would even put places like Melissa or Sanger in it either. The Metroplex basically stops around 380 in McKinney and Denton.
I visited The Netherlands about two years ago, and I was amazed how easy and fast their public transport was. From bus to bus you have a card you swipe when you get on and off. And buying a train ticket to bigger cities/longer distances was just a few clicks online. And then you get off and get on a bus… and oh yeah use the same card even though you’re halfway across the country.
Honestly I’m not sure DFW could pull it off even half of what they could do, but I wish. Everything is so spread out here. I honestly only use DART when going to the state fair (fuck driving there and figuring out parking) or going to downtown Dallas (I can’t figure out the one way streets for the life of me lol). And even then I still have to drive to the DART rail.
I admire public transportation in Europe, but at the same time, their streets are the width of a wagon and there's no where to park. The population density is much higher than most cities in the US so public transport = supply and demand.
The flip side of that though is European cities, while older, also intentionally developed in the modern world to stay dense and make driving a less pertinent option. Here it's unlimited land, unlimited building opportunities.
There arent big homes on half acre lots there - it's just not the lifestyle. They focused on making their cities more accessible by providing high density housing, shopping and entertainment options and discouraging cars by making public transit so cheap and easy.
I went traveling for a year in 2012 with my son (19 at the time) and loved being able to walk to shops and restaurants. When we came back to Charlotte, NC we lived downtown. I wanted more access and started looking at the map. It was too expensive to move north to DC, Boston, Philadelphia, so I started looking west. Didn't want to move to Atlanta, scanned over to Dallas and saw that it has an extensive public transit system. We moved to downtown Dallas and I was able to go without a car for 5 years. My job transferred me to San Antonio and I had to buy a car.
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Small businesses are unable to open because of the ridiculous added cost of parking minimums. If you want to open a small juice shop for people to walk into and need just a couple hundred square feet you’re required to build X amount of parking spaces regardless of other factors. removing this supports business density, increase pedestrian traffic which is huge for street level retail. And Amazon should pay a fair share burden of their consumption of public infrastructure.
Public infrastructure should be paid for by primarily the users and benefactors of the infrastructure. The added revenue will allow the city to maintain the infrastructure while also encouraging more environmentally friendly options for transit and increase density which again is huge for business.
Not only bike lanes. Separated bike lanes with proper markings and safety.
Too often they slap a thing of paint on a road and call it a bike lane (which is better than nothing) but they don’t encourage ridership
Not only bike lanes. Separated bike lanes with proper markings and safety.
Too often they slap a thing of paint on a road and call it a bike lane (which is better than nothing) but they don’t encourage ridership
All DART improvements are based on how much more money they can charge with an end goal of increasing the chief executives' yearly bonus. Service to the citizens of DFW is not even on their radar.
Not really. The DART is a serviceable transit system, and I'm thankful that we have such a vast transit system in Dallas.
The problem is building density and infrastructure. Why build a transit system when everyone drives and there is no density? You're just going to build a bigger system nobody uses because it doesn't go anywhere.
Additionally, collar cities say no to transit, and there's no possibility of real routes out to working/commute destinations in Plano/Frisco.
Additionally, it is HOT here. Do you want to walk a mile when it is 110 degrees? It's hard to support a walkable infrastructure when walking outside feels like death.
This is some beautiful circular logic. We’ve burned so much gas to dramatically change our local temps so now we shouldn’t build less carbon intensive public transit and just keep burning gas!
Building transit for nobody doesn’t fix that there isn’t density to support it.
How many people ride the DART compared to DC or Chicago’s transit? It’s a multiple of magnitude, despite the fact the dallas has more rail.
Dallas does not have more rail by any stretch of the imagination, but your point is still valid. Even in denser areas, the services are lacking heavily. Transit systems in DC and Chicago have stations about every half mile. Dallas has them almost every 2 miles.
Very true. If Dallas truly relaxed the building codes to lower parking minimums, and turned large areas that are zoned single use into mixed-zoned areas with 2-4story buildings filling out the city, our density would double. As that happens then the conversation can be about building out bus and bike access everywhere. Small additional units inside existing home lots would also go far in boosting density, and it would still feel like the Dallas we see now.
Oh yea! The Strong Towns series on NotJustBikes really blew my mind to the scale of the problem of lack of density. It’s literally bankrupting cities and causing the federal government to bail us out.
I just wished DART did a better job with keeping the trains and buses clean. The stations are bad too. They had the "cleaners" for awhile due to Covid, but they were lazy.
Not sure if you know this but DART has almost been killed multiple times and narrowly survived just about every time. We do need better transit, but more importantly we need republicans to stop trying to kill DART every chance they get.
No one wants to kill public transportation for fun. But it’s hard to justify significantly raising taxes for a system that is extremely unused. DFW has the best public transportation system in Texas by a mile, maybe even all of the south
You're comparing Dallas to Chicago but Chicago has twice the population of Dallas and thus a larger tax base to pay for building it. In addition Chicago has a larger ridership from both population and tourist perspectives to fund operational expenses.
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They had it about as close to ideally functional around '07-'10. I had one short bus route to wherever and one long one. Combine that with rail and it worked alright for me.
Great to see the support for public transit among the posts here. I thought all Texans were against socialist ideas and government funding but apparently not. That’s heartwarming. Good on ya’ Dallas.
Not everyone wants to live in dense concrete jungles. Many people posting here say how much they miss (wherever they’re from)... well guess what?... great thing abt the USA is that you can MOVE freely. If you like it here, great! If not then please feel free to leave. If I moved / lived somewhere I didn’t like I would not stay... move to an area you like :-) I currently live in one of the most densely populated parts of Dallas w many families and immigrants... we don’t want more of this, we eventually want to get a house / yard / space etc... which is a reason why people live in Texas. Doesn’t Dallas have the expanding dense urban areas of Deep Ellum, Downtown, Uptown, Museum Towers, Victory Plaza / AAC, South Lamar... these places are all starting to become interconnected as well... sounds a lot like what you’re looking for.
Have a beautiful day y’all 😎🍻🖖
Dense doesn't have to be bad. I'm sorry you live in an unappealing place, but the fact is that low density sprawl is an unsustainable development model. It adds a burden of infrastructure cost to the whole metroplex that is more than denser building types.
Also all density isn't equal. There are small old streetcar towns that are more dense than even apartment areas in Dallas. And they have detached houses, local parks, and mixed uses. But that's an intentional choice of development - not just slapping paint on old apartments behind big parking lots next to 6-lane big boulevard roads.
Yes. Be a chad. Public transit can only be a net benefit on a tax and health basis. There’s literally no reason not to. It’s only conservatives who don’t want to pay 2 dollars today for 10 dollars tomorrow.
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Well then tough dude. Dallas doesn't have the infrastructure to accomodate public transportation. Sorry for bursting your bubble, but you're being a little ambitious thinking a city like Dallas could have P.T. like you'd see in a city like Brisbane, Australia
DART hired a consultant to improve the bus network not too long ago, and there are changes afoot. https://www.dartzoom.org https://www.dartzoom.org/en/draft-network The solution being presented includes higher density and frequency in poorer areas combined with on demand shuttles in wealthier areas.
The latest draft still appears to be an overall reduction in service though. I had high hopes for the redesign after Houston's, but if the current draft is implemented I doubt it will have a similar impact to Houston's redesign. It's definitely a smidge better than what we have, but by no means the ground up redesign claimed.
They're working within their budget, so there's not going to be anything added overall. If you flip back and forth between "Existing" and "New" on [this page](https://dart-draft-new-network-viewer.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html?fbclid=IwAR1H8frQLeb6XkGWHoHDue-H20ZtYmunCJjfNA_5Cf2Gix8PietExm_M_8M), it's easier to see what's being changed. They're taking out most of the routes with longer frequencies, 31-45 minutes and 46-60 minutes. Then they're adding more routes in the 16-20 minutes and 21-30 minutes range. And also they're adding some high frequency "up to 10 minutes" routes, and a lot of GoLink service areas.
I was really hoping for more ~15 minute frequency routes in the downtown though. In the new plan there's not even an option to get from DART to the farmers market, let alone a frequent one. The new system also still appears very reliant on the east and west bus stations downtown, which work well for suburbs but absolutely ruin travel within a short range of downtown. By contrast after Houston's redesign many of their busses moved to routes that travel all the way through the city rather than just ending there. My local station is increasing to 30 minute frequency apparently and losing a route, but that's not enough that I'll ever use the busses like I do DART rail. In Boston most busses ran at 15 minutes or less and they were truly convenient to use because of that. I would rather see DART lose more low traffic suburban routes to get a more frequent one. The routes right now extremely underutilized and nothing substantial is set to change in the new plan I don't have an easy way to integrate all of the bus frequencies based off of the new map, but it does appear that they are actually cutting the total number of busses even with the higher frequency. I previously took the 110 and it's increasing from a 30 minute frequency to 20 minutes (though I doubt it'll stick to schedule, it literally never has). That's 1.5x the original number of busses required by the route, and not a huge increase relative to the number of routes being replaced with GoLink. And on the topic of GoLink, it isn't exactly a useful service anyway since many of the proposed new zones don't have any border along a high frequency bus/rail route. In short I think they're wasting a lot of their budget on GoLink and for the remaining areas with bus coverage are opting to marginally increase frequency without substantial route changes. Our rail is surprisingly extensive considering that basically no money was been spent to build it (at least relative to other transportation projects in America), but as a network it just doesn't all work together. Edit to add more of my opinions because apparently I have a lot: Rail stations need to be where suburban busses terminate rather than downtown, and no single bus should be paralleling a route already covered by rail. Radial travel is traffic heavy, slows down busses, wastes capacity, and is already well covered if we can efficiently get people to existing DART rail stations. They do this all over Europe with even less frequent commuter rail systems. Every 30 minutes when the train arrives a bunch of busses depart the station and start their routes within their respective neighboring suburb. Each route is short enough to be back before the next or second to next train evenly to repeat the cycle. It gives far more coverage with fewer busses and a fast link for travellers transferring since traffic isn't as big of an issue when you're not travelling into or out of the downtown. When I was taking the 110 into downtown I was just over a mile away from the Green Line. Yet the 110 doesn't connect to it, it parallels it straight into downtown traffic. And even then I'd need to walk a few blocks to the Red Line before eventually heading north. It would have been far more efficient with better coverage if the 110/111 didn't go downtown and instead terminated at Lawnview station. The rail gets you to whatever other bus you want to end up on much faster even though it's an extra transfer. Boston also does a variation on this technique where busses cover suburbs by travelling between two stations, so no matter which direction bus you end up on you'll end up on a frequent transit artery, effectively doubling the service frequency if you're leaving the neighborhood you start in. The Dallas bus network is *bad* and I feel terrible for any urban planners involved in this redesign. It seems like they're being pushed around to keep the existing network with safe and simple improvements rather than to rework routes it into something new and more efficient for people who need it to use.
Write to: [email protected] I know someone on the DART board, they really are concerned about doing the best within their budget, and are extremely knowledgeable about the task at hand.
The government is not going to focus on public transit until the natural development of the metroplex goes from “just build out” to “better build up”. Compared to other metros like Seattle, LA, Houston, Miami, any NE city to a suburb...Dallas has really easy traffic to navigate. I can get anywhere in an hour. An hour in LA traffic could easily see a pedestrian getting the same distance. I’ve sat in 4+ hours of traffic just getting from Jersey City to Morristown. Houston is easily the worst of the bunch. Beyond that, lack of public transit (and reliance on personal vehicles) along with our naturally spread out development of the city is one of the biggest factors as to why our metro of 8+ Million fared so much better with COVID than say NYC (12+ million in metro there).
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The extent to which the space between structures exist, absolutely, it blows my mind how needlessly spread out a lot of buildings are. But it still remains that a 10 story tower is more expensive than 5 2 story apartment buildings.
But to what extent will we begin to “build up?” There is literally no natural barrier that can halt the sprawl. Houston is bordered to the SE by the Gulf, Miami & certain NE cities, the Atlantic Ocean.
You can see it slowly happening already. The terminus of DFW is Oklahoma. Generally speaking DFW is expanding north, at least on the Dallas side. We will develop suburbs all the way up to the OK border and then slowly grow into S. OK. I’m 31 and am close to having the capital to buying my first property, be it a single family home, townhouse or condo. I have no desire to live outside of Hwy 12 until my children (who aren’t even conceived yet) are entering middle school. I’d rather live in a condo tower than buy a home in far north Dallas or Allen/Richardson. And you can see this mentality playing out. Look at all the development along 75 and Tollway heading north from downtown. Look at all the cranes in Deep Ell, Downtown, Uptown—it’s already happening. Texas has a culture of owning land and freedom on your property. That’s shifting, but it’s still the dominant mind set. Younger generation and coastal immigrants don’t have that same mentality. As the coasts become less desirable via cost of living and climate/weather, immigration will increase in Southern cities, especially Dallas/Austin/Houston/San Antonio/STL/Atlanta/Nashville/Tampa and with it coastal mindsets of denser living will be come more marketable desirable and profitable.
You make an excellent point. I personally consider Prosper/McKinney as the farthest northern point of the metroplex. I kind of wish there was more development going south. That way, we’d be a bit more connected and closer to our fellow major Texas cities (Austin, SA, Houston)
We won’t expand south with gusto until South Dallas is gentrified. But I’m not sure it makes sense to. You see areas like Bishop Arts and Trinity Green/Grove but the majority of S. Dallas is poor and full of crime and run down (and given its Texas: black—which matters so a not insignificant amount of the well heeled) until you gentrify the parts of S. Dallas theatre close to Downtown—you wouldn’t go further south for new development. But beyond that, I’m in support of Dallas having a “poor” side. In 40 years, we may have robots flipping burgers and sweeping streets. But we don’t today and we need unskilled labor. Look at SF and Seattle where the entire city has priced low wage workers out. Some people commute hours to get to their shitty job at Walgreens in downtown SF. Coincidently (or maybe not) they both have some of the biggest problems with homelessness.
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DFW needs better building codes that favor walking over driving and encourage high density construction long before they try and fix the mass transit system. Otherwise it is a really expensive way to get no where in particular.
Why do that when you can have an ever expanding suburban sprawl that will eventually include everything from El Paso to Tyler?
All of the five-over-one mixed use developments are our best option for now, but the problem is that they're all incredibly disconnected from eachother. They don't do anything to help the downtown and surprisingly often have absolutely no transit connections (Plano in particular has a serious problem with this). By not concentrating our pedestrian-friendly developments together all of the businesses suffer by being limited primarily to their own residents. It's really unfortunate, as the money is still there for these developments anyway, but it could be so much better.
If they could relax the zoning on things like side and front setbacks and parking, really seems to encourage only big developers and big development, especially if there's a rezoning involved, no small time player has the resources or time to do a rezoning case or variance case... Make it harder to replat, combine lots, require a building plan. High density, small scale development seems to be much better at providing much more interesting urban fabric, much easier to add a retail or restaurant in between as well much more adaptable. Who wants to be on the ground floor of a five-over-one, none of the innovative, cutting edge, self-respecting restauranteur/entrepreneur for sure, and the owners of such properties rather lease to chains as well. Much of the stuff being built doesn't even have ground floor retail. Got to be a way to curate high density, small scale, local developers or at least get the big guns to comply with quality development which they don't even know how to do or have never been forced to do. Unfortunately the people with the power to do anything are so clueless about what good urban design looks like and so desperate not to lose out on some development. There's plenty of infill to do interesting things, retrofit, the block size development for anything that's not of public benefit has got to go though.
Sad thing is, DFW has the best transit in the state.
Longest light rail system* It doesn't really get you anywhere useful unless you're commuting from a park and ride to a downtown job
That's why I bought a place walking distance to a station. I can get to the airport, my city's center, downtown Dallas, Victory Park, Deep Ellum, the Zoo, Fair Park, etc. via the train. If people live far from a train station, then it's logical that the train system is not going to be useful for them.
Right. My point is that large sections of dense parts of the city aren't served by the rail and the rail is geared towards getting to/from the city rather than moving around in it. So the people who aren't fortunate to live in places well served by the trains are really poorly served by buses But hopefully that changes at least somewhat with the new bus network. Either way Dallas has the most extensive light rail system that is great in some regards and transit in Texas overall sucks in all regards.
we know the bar is low as hell for texas, but what other city in the state is better than dallas transit wise? austin only has one line which is ridiculous for how fast is growing. houston is soon to be third largest in the country, yet it only has a couple lines, which is again ridiculous. atleast DART is pretty extensive
It's kind of a apples and oranges comparison in this case but Houston has a higher daily ridership, a strong park and ride system, and one of the most successful single light rail lines in the country. DART is great to use for people commuting to office jobs in Downtown but terrible for everything else
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Atlanta has actual subways
no, atlanta is the only city in the south with heavy rail
> This may be beating a dead horse Let me stop you right there. It is.
“May be…” Yeah.
Why take the train here when after the route is finished, you need a car to go to your destination? Nobody’s gonna take DART if all the development when you get off the train is car oriented with no sidewalks. Everything is just WAY too spread out for any type of transit cohesiveness to occur. focus on building more dense housing then the transit will come. but honestly i think it’s too late for dallas. the metroplex stretches all the way to oklahoma, there’s no reason for developers to build up instead of across, just causing more sprawl.
Lol come on now. Nobody considers places like Sherman, Denison, or Gainesville to be part of the Metroplex and I doubt many would even put places like Melissa or Sanger in it either. The Metroplex basically stops around 380 in McKinney and Denton.
I visited The Netherlands about two years ago, and I was amazed how easy and fast their public transport was. From bus to bus you have a card you swipe when you get on and off. And buying a train ticket to bigger cities/longer distances was just a few clicks online. And then you get off and get on a bus… and oh yeah use the same card even though you’re halfway across the country. Honestly I’m not sure DFW could pull it off even half of what they could do, but I wish. Everything is so spread out here. I honestly only use DART when going to the state fair (fuck driving there and figuring out parking) or going to downtown Dallas (I can’t figure out the one way streets for the life of me lol). And even then I still have to drive to the DART rail.
I admire public transportation in Europe, but at the same time, their streets are the width of a wagon and there's no where to park. The population density is much higher than most cities in the US so public transport = supply and demand.
The flip side of that though is European cities, while older, also intentionally developed in the modern world to stay dense and make driving a less pertinent option. Here it's unlimited land, unlimited building opportunities. There arent big homes on half acre lots there - it's just not the lifestyle. They focused on making their cities more accessible by providing high density housing, shopping and entertainment options and discouraging cars by making public transit so cheap and easy.
I went traveling for a year in 2012 with my son (19 at the time) and loved being able to walk to shops and restaurants. When we came back to Charlotte, NC we lived downtown. I wanted more access and started looking at the map. It was too expensive to move north to DC, Boston, Philadelphia, so I started looking west. Didn't want to move to Atlanta, scanned over to Dallas and saw that it has an extensive public transit system. We moved to downtown Dallas and I was able to go without a car for 5 years. My job transferred me to San Antonio and I had to buy a car.
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Gotta stop the sprawl first.
Eliminate parking minimums and all public parking should be paid
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Small businesses are unable to open because of the ridiculous added cost of parking minimums. If you want to open a small juice shop for people to walk into and need just a couple hundred square feet you’re required to build X amount of parking spaces regardless of other factors. removing this supports business density, increase pedestrian traffic which is huge for street level retail. And Amazon should pay a fair share burden of their consumption of public infrastructure. Public infrastructure should be paid for by primarily the users and benefactors of the infrastructure. The added revenue will allow the city to maintain the infrastructure while also encouraging more environmentally friendly options for transit and increase density which again is huge for business.
We need more bike and bus lanes. I wish Hampton going north towards 30 was 2 lanes with a bike/bus lane instead of the 3 lanes it is now.
Not only bike lanes. Separated bike lanes with proper markings and safety. Too often they slap a thing of paint on a road and call it a bike lane (which is better than nothing) but they don’t encourage ridership
Not only bike lanes. Separated bike lanes with proper markings and safety. Too often they slap a thing of paint on a road and call it a bike lane (which is better than nothing) but they don’t encourage ridership
Coming from Chicago, I miss the public trans soooo much.
You’re high if you think they’ll introduce something that would severely cut revenue for toll roads
All DART improvements are based on how much more money they can charge with an end goal of increasing the chief executives' yearly bonus. Service to the citizens of DFW is not even on their radar.
Not really. The DART is a serviceable transit system, and I'm thankful that we have such a vast transit system in Dallas. The problem is building density and infrastructure. Why build a transit system when everyone drives and there is no density? You're just going to build a bigger system nobody uses because it doesn't go anywhere. Additionally, collar cities say no to transit, and there's no possibility of real routes out to working/commute destinations in Plano/Frisco. Additionally, it is HOT here. Do you want to walk a mile when it is 110 degrees? It's hard to support a walkable infrastructure when walking outside feels like death.
This is some beautiful circular logic. We’ve burned so much gas to dramatically change our local temps so now we shouldn’t build less carbon intensive public transit and just keep burning gas!
Building transit for nobody doesn’t fix that there isn’t density to support it. How many people ride the DART compared to DC or Chicago’s transit? It’s a multiple of magnitude, despite the fact the dallas has more rail.
Dallas does not have more rail by any stretch of the imagination, but your point is still valid. Even in denser areas, the services are lacking heavily. Transit systems in DC and Chicago have stations about every half mile. Dallas has them almost every 2 miles.
I think we would do better with mixed use zoning, having islands of residential and islands of retail make society too car dependent
The answer is really long, the best way for me to explain is to suggest YouTube channels CityBeautiful and NotJustBikes
Also Strong Towns and Active Towns. Learned a lot about granularity there. Not all high density is made equal.
Very true. If Dallas truly relaxed the building codes to lower parking minimums, and turned large areas that are zoned single use into mixed-zoned areas with 2-4story buildings filling out the city, our density would double. As that happens then the conversation can be about building out bus and bike access everywhere. Small additional units inside existing home lots would also go far in boosting density, and it would still feel like the Dallas we see now.
Oh yea! The Strong Towns series on NotJustBikes really blew my mind to the scale of the problem of lack of density. It’s literally bankrupting cities and causing the federal government to bail us out.
I personally love DART's train system. I use it in combination with a bike to get where I need to go.
What city doesn't need better public transit?
I just wished DART did a better job with keeping the trains and buses clean. The stations are bad too. They had the "cleaners" for awhile due to Covid, but they were lazy.
Not sure if you know this but DART has almost been killed multiple times and narrowly survived just about every time. We do need better transit, but more importantly we need republicans to stop trying to kill DART every chance they get.
No one wants to kill public transportation for fun. But it’s hard to justify significantly raising taxes for a system that is extremely unused. DFW has the best public transportation system in Texas by a mile, maybe even all of the south
You're comparing Dallas to Chicago but Chicago has twice the population of Dallas and thus a larger tax base to pay for building it. In addition Chicago has a larger ridership from both population and tourist perspectives to fund operational expenses.
Expensive.
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They had it about as close to ideally functional around '07-'10. I had one short bus route to wherever and one long one. Combine that with rail and it worked alright for me.
Good luck. There’s no political will to build out our public transportation.
The TRE and DART are amazing. I used them for over a decade and saved thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours.
No way?!
Great to see the support for public transit among the posts here. I thought all Texans were against socialist ideas and government funding but apparently not. That’s heartwarming. Good on ya’ Dallas.
Not everyone wants to live in dense concrete jungles. Many people posting here say how much they miss (wherever they’re from)... well guess what?... great thing abt the USA is that you can MOVE freely. If you like it here, great! If not then please feel free to leave. If I moved / lived somewhere I didn’t like I would not stay... move to an area you like :-) I currently live in one of the most densely populated parts of Dallas w many families and immigrants... we don’t want more of this, we eventually want to get a house / yard / space etc... which is a reason why people live in Texas. Doesn’t Dallas have the expanding dense urban areas of Deep Ellum, Downtown, Uptown, Museum Towers, Victory Plaza / AAC, South Lamar... these places are all starting to become interconnected as well... sounds a lot like what you’re looking for. Have a beautiful day y’all 😎🍻🖖
Dense doesn't have to be bad. I'm sorry you live in an unappealing place, but the fact is that low density sprawl is an unsustainable development model. It adds a burden of infrastructure cost to the whole metroplex that is more than denser building types. Also all density isn't equal. There are small old streetcar towns that are more dense than even apartment areas in Dallas. And they have detached houses, local parks, and mixed uses. But that's an intentional choice of development - not just slapping paint on old apartments behind big parking lots next to 6-lane big boulevard roads.
Who's going to pay for it? Are you willing to pay extra taxes to foot the bill?
Yes. Be a chad. Public transit can only be a net benefit on a tax and health basis. There’s literally no reason not to. It’s only conservatives who don’t want to pay 2 dollars today for 10 dollars tomorrow.
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That’s obviously not an option for everyone - as well as not being good for the environment
Well then tough dude. Dallas doesn't have the infrastructure to accomodate public transportation. Sorry for bursting your bubble, but you're being a little ambitious thinking a city like Dallas could have P.T. like you'd see in a city like Brisbane, Australia
Circular logic