DFW High Speed News Issue Update

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acorneyes@reddit

to op: it’s trinity railway express, not trinity river express to the commenters: i see plenty of people ride the tre on my commute from dallas to fort worth and then back. and those are the people willing to make the significant addition to their commute time to do so, for whatever reason they might have. they don’t have a car, they don’t want to find parking, they want to be productive on their commute, etc. the amount of people willing to ride a 25 minute train instead of driving between the two cities is astronomically higher. as for the proposed plan, don’t love it. it’s clear arlington doesn’t want public transit, and even if they greenlit this, where are passengers supposed to go? the entertainment district is the most walkable, but in arlington that just means not walkable. i would much rather the train stop where people actually want to go, or to not stop at all. considering it’s following a major highway, transit focused development would be much, much harder, so just don’t have any stops at all until i-30 is torn down and you can start building around the sizable vacant corridor. i’m excited for this of course, but i don’t understand the reasoning for following i-30 or stopping in arlington…

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Dedwards_est_22@reddit

I think having a stop in Arlington entertainment district makes a lot of sense...you could finally take public transit to a baseball game, Cowboys game, concert downtown, etc. What I really don't understand is why Arlington is so anti transit but that's a whole other story I guess

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Snoo11331@reddit

I was always told it was a product of getting GM to build their plant in Arlington. More jobs, but no public transit was the agreement

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acorneyes@reddit

open up google maps and look at the land use surrounding i-30 in the entertainment district. the station would likely sit on e copeland rd and at&t way. if you want to go to the stadium, you would have to walk nearly a mile or 20 minutes through an 8 lane road with nothing but views of parking lots. you could also walk 30 minutes to six flags through an equally dangerous and boring route. or you could walk (thankfully only) 10 minutes to the water park but across the i-30 overpass.  as far as downtown goes, a 1 hour walk is out the question, so bring a bike with you and bike 20 minutes to get there, as all the drivers around you try to get a new highscore trying to run you over. there are gutters you can bike in but that's about it for biking infrastructure. i don't know, i can't imagine many people wanting to take a train to the entertainment district unless they just don't understand how bad the sprawl and lack of transit is in arlington, in which case they won't make the same mistake twice.

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pakurilecz@reddit

dont forget using uber/lyft

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acorneyes@reddit

what dystopian world do you want to live in where that's an actual solution?

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DonkeeJote@reddit

a mile is not far to walk.

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pakurilecz@reddit

it is when the temperature is 90+ and the sidewalk temperatures are above 100

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acorneyes@reddit

walking a mile through a park, or a bustling medium density neighborhood is not far to walk. i'd even say walking a mile through a suburban cookie cutter neighborhood, is a little tiring, but you wouldn't even notice if you didn't do that regularly. walking a mile through parking lots with the heavy sound of asphalt crunching under tires and the sun blasting on you because there's only some tiny areas of shade along the sidewalk in the form of dying trees, THAT, makes a mile too far.

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Dedwards_est_22@reddit

They have trolleys now on game days - no reason that couldn't be used to get to/ from an actual train station in addition to the parking lots.

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acorneyes@reddit

this [https://arlingtontrolley.com/](https://arlingtontrolley.com/)? it's limited to guests in participating hotels, otherwise they are SUPER tight lipped about the cost on game days. i can only assume it's because they charge extortionist prices so unless arlington agreed to let the HSR passengers ride free, and [it's reliable, which it doesn't seem to be](https://www.yelp.com/biz/arlington-trolly-arlington), it still wouldn't make sense for anyone to stop by arlington on non-game days.

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username-generica@reddit

Jerry Jones will never allow it. I was a community college librarian when the Jerry World referendum occurred. There was a public transit referendum on the same ballot and Jerry Jones helped fund the campaign against it. A few years later a student asked me for help with a paper on why Arlington doesn't have public transit. I found a quote in FW Weekly from a previous mayor in which he stated that he didn't want public transit because it would bring poor people to Arlington. There were already plenty of poor people in the city. That was a long time ago so perhaps things have changed.

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aajniojnoihnoi@reddit

Arlington has always been afraid that ‘those people’ I would come to town if mass transit was adopted.

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liberal_texan@reddit

They make way too much on parking for those events, and those shiny new hotels they built would lose a lot of business if you could stay in D and just take the train.

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BucketofWarmSpit@reddit (OP)

That's funny. I actually looked it up and had the website for TRE open while I was writing the post because I didn't want to put the wrong name down and I messed it up anyway.

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ZarBandit@reddit

I don’t understand the use case for this. What is the prototypical passenger for this service? Who are they demographically and what are that doing that this solves a problem for that driving would be the inferior choice? Frankly, even Dallas to Houston seems questionable as presented. I think it would work far better if they abandoned incredibly expensive electrification (that contributes significantly to high ticket costs) and had car loading like the Eurotunnel trains. Make it a viable alternative to that unpleasant drive instead of some bourgeois service for mythical high rollers.

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thedeadlysun@reddit

You really have no idea what you are talking about do ya? Honestly kind of impressive.

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ZarBandit@reddit

I’m still waiting for the use case. Not one person has come up with anything at all.

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thedeadlysun@reddit

Use case? Bruh. Read. The. Article. Current commute by car: over 1 hour, current commute by train: approximately 1 hour. New train: 25 minutes tops. I’ll make it baby simple for you buddy. Train can carry lot of people. Car carry not a lot of people, most car only carry 1 people. Lot of people need moving, lot of people in separate care make lot of traffic and make 1 hour commute even longer, 25 minute train have many many seats and the number of people does not affect timing. It’s simple fucking math dude. There’s a reason why we are the laughing stock of the world because of our transportation and it’s people like you.

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ZarBandit@reddit

As someone who’s lived in Europe, I’ve taken more public transportation. When the price of fuel goes up, they raise the ticket prices too. The ticket price is the same cost of taking a car for the same journey. Except it takes longer on public transport of course. Unless you live at the station and your destination is at the other station, it is guaranteed to take longer than a car.

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acorneyes@reddit

as someone that also lived in europe, i too can use the "i've lived there so you're wrong" argument. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox\_recovery\_ratio#Europe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#Europe) the only system i can't find the fare system for is milan, maybe they are the one single outlier for fuel based prices. that's not the case for every other transit system. let's take the highest frr as that would be the most elastic in terms of price changes, the london underground: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/304898/london-underground-single-journey-price-uk-united-kingdom/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/304898/london-underground-single-journey-price-uk-united-kingdom/) then look at the price of gasoline: [https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=emm\_epm0\_pte\_nus\_dpg&f=m](https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=emm_epm0_pte_nus_dpg&f=m) huh. interesting, looks like gasoline is cheaper in 2016 than it was in 2008 and yet, the fare price continued to climb??? could it be... affected by inflation rather than fuel prices??? impossible.

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acorneyes@reddit

i don’t know of ANY agency that uses fares to recover the initial cost of rail. fares are primarily used to recover operating costs instead. which you need higher ridership numbers for, not higher fares. for example it costs $12 for a passenger to commute between the two cities for work. dart recovers 7% of operating costs off that. compare that with sound transit where it would cost $5 both ways traveling the same distance. they recover 40% of their fares. so no, you are not likely to see higher fares, nor would lower fares cause a problem. it is legitimately insane that you think a car loading train is not for the elite and rich. do you know know how much cars cost?

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ZarBandit@reddit

So it's not greener, it's not cheaper, it's not more convenient, and all the blue collar workers driving their cars have to pay higher taxes so some mythical businessman earning north of $250k can ride a fast train. That's some sales pitch. The thing most socialists^(1) gloss over about ICE cars is they have a very long lifespan, in comparison to, say, batteries. The ***average*** car is 13.1 years old in the US. You know who owns those cars above 13 years old that are way down on the depreciation curve, yet still run? The working class. That's what gets them to work on time in order to work a meager job that allows them to eek out an existence on a tight budget. It actually drives our economy, literally and figuratively. They can't afford to live in prime real estate locations next to train stations. They have to live in the most inconvenient and undesirable places that have no service. Their difficulty and undesirability is exactly what keeps the price affordable to them. ^(1)Typically also the same people most fervent about trains and public transport. Yet, also those who would not actually be the riders of that service.

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acorneyes@reddit

kind of hilarious how you stereotype yourself by going off about socialists for no apparent reason. but lets go through your (unsupported) claims one by one regardless. > not greener [despite being 14-16 times cleaner](https://railroads.dot.gov/sites/fra.dot.gov/files/fra_net/15009/Carbon%20Footprint%20of%20High-Speed%20Rail%20UIC%202011.pdf) > not cheaper [at 17.99 cents / mile](https://newsroom.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2022-YourDrivingCosts-FactSheet-7-1.pdf) at 31 miles, that's $5.57. which is $0.50 less than the $6 for the regional tre. but it doesn't include ANY of the other costs, so in reality it's much much more than $5.57, to the point I'm not going to bother calculating it because something being half the cost is much, much, cheaper. > not more convenient what could be less convenient than not having to worry about other drivers? > all the blue collar workers driving their cars [it is quite literally the opposite](https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/0314_transportation_puentes.pdf) > have to pay higher taxes considering how absurdly costly highways are, and how much cheaper it is to maintain rail, that couldn't be further from the truth. i don't care about your fun facts about car lifespans because it has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand. > they can't afford to live in prime real estate locations next to train stations ... it's literally no secret that residential real estate near trains is cheaper because the assumption of disturbance caused by the trains. what are you talking about. in fact some [parts of downtown](https://www.apartments.com/downtown-dallas-dallas-tx/under-1600/) are cheaper to live in than most suburbs.

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username-generica@reddit

The referendum ballot for building Jerry World in Arlington also had a referendum for public transit. Jerry Jones helped fund the campaign against public transit because it would cut into his parking revenue.

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TCBloo@reddit

>have one stop in Arlington Never gonna happen.

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albert768@reddit

This person is more than welcome to raise the $30B+ it is going to cost to build such a vanity project.

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thedeadlysun@reddit

Well done not doing even the minimum effort to open the article to see that this is THE regional transportation planning organization, you know, the one that works in conjunction with TxDOT and all local municipalities on transportation projects…

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matt_havener@reddit

It’s NCTCOG, raising money for NTX infrastructure is part of their mandate. If I was vain I’d probably name a downtown park fountain after myself

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BorgeHastrup@reddit

Just so you know, this is not prepared by the same group that stalled out on the Dallas-Houston HSR project. This info flier was prepared by NCTCOG. Totally different groups, totally different development interests, totally different scopes of responsibility/authority and purview. NCTCOG is largely interested in regional connectivity - ie how to get potential rail passengers wherever else they need to go if a state-wide or nation-wide HSR system is on the horizon.

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DFW High Speed News Issue Update

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30 Comments

acorneyes@reddit

Dedwards_est_22@reddit

Snoo11331@reddit

acorneyes@reddit

pakurilecz@reddit

acorneyes@reddit

DonkeeJote@reddit

pakurilecz@reddit

acorneyes@reddit

Dedwards_est_22@reddit

acorneyes@reddit

username-generica@reddit

aajniojnoihnoi@reddit

liberal_texan@reddit

BucketofWarmSpit@reddit (OP)

ZarBandit@reddit

thedeadlysun@reddit

ZarBandit@reddit

thedeadlysun@reddit

ZarBandit@reddit

acorneyes@reddit

acorneyes@reddit

ZarBandit@reddit

acorneyes@reddit

username-generica@reddit

TCBloo@reddit

albert768@reddit

thedeadlysun@reddit

matt_havener@reddit

BorgeHastrup@reddit