Dallas Fort Worth Urban Forum

electricron

You don't understand what is happening. Using your DART analogy, imagine if the DART Board members were selling DART all their buses,trains, bus stop shelters and uniforms. Can't do that under the law. Plus the DART management were working side deals to own parking lots and privatizing the parking ...

electricron

^ That has nothing to do though with building an actual park. The TPC was supposed to build a park between the levees. That's not happening. I find it super weird that the TPC has created their own development corporation as well that is chartered with the state. Why would a 501c3 non profit tasked...

electricron

I personally would think they would want to downplay the fact that an electric substation is across from a rail station, instead of things that people riding a train might want to go to. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, having worked for a local utility over 30 years, electrical substations ha...

electricron

To my surprise, the law in question was changed in 2013. Read https://www.transit.dot.gov/funding/grants/grant-programs/art-and-non-functional-landscaping-federally-funded-public-transit To keep it simple as much as possible, classic art like statues are now prohibited, but art like functional desig...

electricron

That Shiloh Road station rendering looks like a hidden level in GoldenEye or something. Kind of hilarious, but I suppose a kitschy theme isn't the worst thing. I have a feeling the UTD Station is going to be heavily utilized. I really hate that DART feels compelled to make each station have a uniqu...

electricron

Forbes: Waymo Taps Texas As Its Robot Truck Hub With Dallas Depot. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2020/08/25/waymo-taps-texas-as-its-robot-truck-hub-with-new-dallas-depot/ "Waymo, the leading U.S. self-driving vehicle company, is expanding its robot truck program by moving into Texas...

electricron

I have no idea who is actually doing better, small shops in large shopping districts or large stand alone stores. Both attract their own style of shoppers. In Texas during the hot and humid summer season, outdoor shopping will never be popular. We need air conditioning. That's why indoor malls becam...

electricron

What most of Austin's metro at grade level will look like https://www.railjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Austin-texas-Capital-metro-Project-connect-transit-1.jpg Basically similar to what DART did on South Lancaster for the Blue Line and in Las Colinas for the Green Line. You know, the very ...

electricron

I took a closer look at the plans, and if DART truly intends to "wall off" Silver Line access from the south and make the only pedestrian ingress/egress via the new parking lot or elevated Green Line platform, that's even worse. All of the existing bus bays are to the south, so any Silver...

electricron

Hopefully, the city can fast-track some of the park improvements since the pandemic is gifting the park with time to work. Get in there and double as much of the work as possible. I would love to see a dramatic expansion of working greenhouses with Fair Park approved art deco architecture - vocatio...

electricron

I'm shocked that there is not yet a high enough median income to justify a decent grocery store in the area yet. Sprouts would be great in Oak Cliff! And they seem to open in more mixed income areas, but for whatever reason it doesn't look like it gonna happen anytime soon. Cox Farms is ok for some...

electricron

Great information, that's something Ive always wondered about the Boring Company and why he is so focused on people movers as opposed to rail. Follow the money when wondering why companies do what they do. Elon Musk heads the Boring Company which digs tunnels. Elon Musk also heads Tesla, which make...

electricron

In the image showing a Frisco line, all other previous images for 15-20 years show that going to DT Carrollton and jetting down the west side of the green line down towards an Irving TRE station. Is this drawn correctly? I realize it's not really the subject matter and perhaps it wasn't in line w/N...

electricron

Saw this article about the Boring Company and their project in San Bernardino that will connect the Ontario Airport to the nearest rail station. https://www.dailybulletin.com/2020/05/27/elon-musks-boring-co-proposes-tunnel-to-ontario-airport-as-alternative-to-light-rail/ Might be time to inquire ab...

electricron

Doesn't CNN have a bureau in Dallas? If they still do (because I've heard they had one in Dallas before), it would be silly of them to put Dallas down like that if they go to the trouble of having a bureau here. I guess they can present news and data how they want, but you'd think if they really di...

electricron

Beyond station TOD partnerships or ground leases of CapMetro’s own land, is there a scope of TIF / TIRZ in Texas that can appropriately allow public investment to share in the property valuation that it increases around transit lines? Not within the Texas Transportation Code. The Texas laws allow i...

electricron

Pocket tracks aren't strictly necessary for turning a train - almost every station has crossover rails, so as long as there's a back up driver ready at the platform and next train isn't due for more than ~10 mins, it's possible to turn a train at the platform (plus the signaling/ATP will prevent a ...

electricron

As a reminder where DART has pocket tracks, there are just a few on the system. Green south at Lawnview, Green and Orange north at Bachman, Blue line north at LBJ/Skillman, Red line north at LBJ/Central, Red and Blue south just before spur to maintenance shops. There is also one just north of Victo...

electricron

Yes- when I say Parker Road, I mean the entire corridor. Regardless of whether the extra trains are meant to ease crowding, or just increase frequency, there's no benefit to running every single train *through* downtown when the rush-hour ridership patterns are so heavily weighted to the northern p...

electricron

Yes, thanks for sharing!! The elimination of 'beg buttons' seems to be a no-brainer for me. I've honestly never understood why we needed to have a button to begin with. Beg buttons for signal lights for pedestrians are located outside, usually exposed to the sun for most of the day. Covid-19 has a ...

electricron

I think the state is being derelict by not putting a billion dollars into the second downtown route. Every penny DART collects in sales taxes cycles through the State of Texas. The State in the next legislature could null DART's ability to collect any sales taxes. All it would take is a bill passin...

electricron

That's a good point. And it's not just the initial expense of purchasing the car, you also have maintenance, gas, insurance, etc. All true! The key point being that individuals pay 100% of the cost of owning, running, and maintaining the vehicle. I suggest public transit would be almost as expensiv...

electricron

DART does not invest money. DART spends money. Nothing it does has any expectation of achieving a profit. Example: DART is currently paying $30 million per year in interest on money it has borrowed for the silver line, which their own projections say will only generate $3 million per year in fares....

electricron

There's no ramp for the existing elevated Green Line platform though - the required ADA redundancy is provided by having two elevators (three if you count the one at the south end of the ped walkway over Belt Line). What is special about the Silver line that it needs a ramp connection in addition t...

electricron

The latest Silver Line briefing has some interesting nuggets on the design of the Downtown Carrolton station and how it will interchange with both the existing Green Line, as well as potential A-Train and "Frisco Line" commuter rail extensions... https://dart.org/about/board/boardagendas/...

electricron

Austin Metro has released a nearly $10 billion transit plan to include new Rapidbus routes and a subway through downtown. It is likely to be put to a vote in November. https://www.statesman.com/news/20200306/cap-metro-recommends-downtown-subway-system-in-multibillion-dollar-light-rail-system?utm_so...

electricron

By the time it's open, the two population centers will have grown by a combined one million residents. by the time the train is up and running, it will be time to double the service. Is there any hope the I-35 redo through Austin will give some room for HSR? There is not room for express-managed-ho...

electricron

Probably some on this forum have seen the area around Sears Tower where the city streets are all overpasses above ground level, with the buildings' underground service levels actually built in the open air at ground level. The development of Illinois Center, Lakeshore East and Millennium Park over ...

electricron

How about we just start by taking the "x" off the road where JFK was shot? That has always seemed to me like a pretty tactless tribute to a horrible event. A fools errand. Neither the city nor any museum paints those "x"s on the Elm Street. Vendors or hawkers do. As soon as the ...

electricron

Who owns the Dallas Morning News today? Some history per Wiki "Dealey Plaza was built on land donated by early Dallas philanthropist and businesswoman Sarah Horton Cockrell. It was the location of the first home built in Dallas, which also became the first courthouse and post office, the first ...

electricron

Not to mention the fact that, aside from the TODs that have been purposely built up around existing stations, the existing DART lines don't pass many neighborhoods that would be conducive to transit anyway. For example, the only exception I can think of on the Red Line, within the city proper, is K...

electricron

The only possible usage of space over the DNT that I see would be some future HSR (or hyperloop) extension to the North. Obviously, that wouldn't be for the next 30 years or more... But when considering a Northern route out of the city, it kinda makes sense. I would assume such a system would have ...

electricron

The North Texas Tollway south of LBJ follows the route the Cotton Belt used to get to Union Station in Dallas. The ONCOR transmission line was built within the railroad right-of-way. When the Tollway replaced the railroad tracks, ONCOR rebuilt the transmission line using taller metal poles replacing...

electricron

Thank you Overdog for helping answer my question. I figured the arrangement at Cityline/Bush would be pretty much like this.Screenshot_20200115-134414_Drive.jpg 12th Street looks a little different than I would imagine. Looks like they won't have a combined Silver and Red/Orange station there. Hard...

electricron

I assume you worked on the engineering design aspect, not the transit planning aspect, but do you know any specific reasons that station was added to the plans in the first place? Transferring at Bush instead of 12th Street would only add something like five or 10 minutes to a Parker-Shiloh trip, a...

electricron

Technologically, it isn't a bad idea for the company that built the trains be the one to provide maintenance. And I wouldn't call it experimental like the streetcar; the FLIRT and the smaller but similar GTW (what the A-Train uses) are used all over Europe, over 1500 trainsets sold in total. Number...

electricron

I apparently missed the news that the First Responder Bowl moved out of the Cotton Bowl Stadium, after the City just last year agreed to large subsidies to keep the game at the Cotton Bowl. (It's being played at the Geral J Ford Stadium on SMU's campus this year. At least the 9 or 10,000 people won...

electricron

DART is Light Rail and while I generally support a below-grade option I prefer it with the right tech and DART isn't ready to change its operation around different technology yet. The one thing I constantly explain to transplants is why DART isn't like some of the bigger city transits they are used...

electricron

Only 3 underground stations?? What's even the point Is there a must have need for more? Have you priced the costs to build and maintain a subway station? Since the very first alternate proposals with the EIS planning process, the subway build has always had fewer stations than a surface build. Yet,...

electricron

If Texas Central breaks ground next year, I would place it very high on future impacts to the Dallas economy for decades to come. But I'll readily admit, it will not be open for business in 2020.

electricron

The word tunnel doesn't appear anywhere in the article nor in the TxDOT meeting powerpoint. Hopefully going forward they will mention it. Or I figure they will just keep throwing bad options at us until we get tired and give up TXDOT has not built a single tunnel ever! All tunnels within the state ...

electricron

Interesting tidbit from the latest DART board presentation on D2. The plan for light rail lines downtown from 1988...... It had to take you time to find such an old map, thanks of the effort. But it is a planner's map before those little and large pesky details get in the way. There were probably o...

electricron

October numbers are now available. They are now up 27% over the first full month of regular service: February 2019 ridership: 32,998 March 2019: 39,093 April 2019: 33,589 May 2019: 35,878 June 2019: 39,154 July 2019: 41,818 August 2019: 42,637 September 2019: 43,757 October 2019: 41,943 Monthly num...

electricron

The not-very-ambitious projection was 9,000 daily by the end of year one - at least 4-5 times the number they appear likely to achieve. When seeking FTA funding, FWTA projected back in 2015 the following: https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/docs/TX_Ft_Worth_TEX_Rail_Profile-FINAL.pd...

electricron

I wonder how much of this LED light addition is an ADA-related thing, and how much of it is a I'm-too-distracted-by-my-phone-to-watch-for-the-train thing. I've seen video or pics of inlaid LED strips on sidewalks in other cities (maybe outside the US? Can't remember) that light up red or green so t...

electricron

Thanks for the data!, mine were more back of a napkin calculations, That being said, it's always great to see input from members who have access to more qualified information Is there any info on the load capacity of Silver Line trains? since they are obviously not going to be SLRV's DART's Silver ...

electricron

Prior to the Texas OU fiasco I posted the numbers here. Unfortunately that post was lost in the site crash. But the bottom line was that if you dedicated every piece of rolling stock that DART owned at the time to serving that one event, filled every car to theoretical capacity, and ran them throug...

electricron

Am I really the only one who seems to think an above ground train through Victory Park is a bad idea? I just can't see this working well. I really hope I'm wrong. Maybe there's something I don't understand that hasn't been explained to me yet? The land under Victory Park is fill, made up of small a...

electricron

Glad to see this moving along but still painfull that it will only take you to the perimeter of Houston and not directly downtown. I wonder if there is any chance that there could be a future extension from the perimeter to downtown. I'm sure if it was the other way around, there would many promine...

electricron

By neglecting the inner city mobility, the transit agencies (TXDoT being the biggest perpetrator) fail to serve both populations, commuters and city dwellers. Overlooking inner city mobility is just as bad for the suburban commuter as it would be to omit suburban neighborhood connecting streets for...

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