3 ms·

How fast can you drive? Even on the open highway in Texas, it's probably unreasonable to assume you'll be doing more than 90 mph. A train could easily do 200 mp

How fast can you drive? Even on the open highway in Texas, it's probably unreasonable to assume you'll be doing more than 90 mph. A train could easily do 200 mph over the same terrain and probably push 300 mph if we put in the effort. If you could get from Dallas to Houston in an hour on a train, why would you want to drive?

davidw 17y ago
> If you could get from Dallas to Houston in an hour on a train, why would you want to drive? Because once you got there, you'd need a car again. Texas is a bad example though. I think public transportation can work just fine if you look at where it's being applied. It's insane, for instance, that the BART stuff in the bay area (which is fairly densely populated) doesn't go down and around through San Jose.
- DanielStraight 17y ago
  Why would you want a car there when you could, from anywhere, hop on a train or bus and get where you're going without having to worry about parking in the city?
  - davidw 17y ago
    I don't know Houston very well but a cursory look at Google Maps indicates that it's extremely spread out, which would make what you describe difficult.
  - sokoloff 17y ago
    Having your own car is extremely convenient. It can carry all your stuff and be reasonably secure against theft. If you're worried it's going to rain, toss an umbrella in the trunk. If it turns out not to rain, you didn't have to carry an umbrella all damn day, etc. In most Texas cities, there's ample easy and free/cheap parking. Parking in NYC or DC is a nightmare. Those two cities also have very high densities and reasonably good public transit systems. It seems there's a naturally inverse relationship between parking convenience and public transit convenience. I believe that's driven from environmental factors (cutting it back to only one factor, it's probably the cost of land as #1 driver). If your public transit system has to cover all of Dallas/Fort Worth at the same transit density/convenience as Manhattan is covered, you're going to spend an ENORMOUS amount of money on that infrastructure and that's not likely to be paid back by the moderate/low level of usage that would occur. (Because parking would still be plentiful and convenient in those cities...)
    - elblanco 17y ago
      Plus to pay for a system like New York's or D.C.'s in Dallas, the fare would be astronomical, such that people simply wouldn't ride it.
      - maukdaddy 17y ago
        Most systems in the country have flat-fare daily, weekly, monthly passes. $5.75 for a daily pass here in Chicago. That is an AMAZING value considering that pass allows unlimited rides on trains and buses.
        elblanco 17y ago
        Which is true. Don't know about Chicago's, but the ones I've seen have restrictions on time of usage, usually after rush-hour, which makes those types of fare systems unusable to the majority of riders. I can't remember if NYC also raises rates during rush hour, but D.C. does as well. I think I stopped taking the D.C. system when a single day's transit and parking started topping $13/day.
- mtalantikite 17y ago
  I guess you could compliment it with a service like Zipcar, but you're right, it makes a lot more sense going city to city in a place like the northeast. In France you can do Paris to Lyon in a little under 2 hours, and a similar system (a relatively slow one at that) would get you between NYC and Boston in about 1.5 hours. The current options are 4 hours (no traffic) on a $15 Chinatown bus, or 4 hours on a $100 Amtrak train. When you're stuck on a bus in a gridlock in Manhattan trying to get to Boston, and it takes you 1.5 hours just to get out of Manhattan and over the bridge, is really the time you start to wish the public transit infrastructure wasn't so far behind every other modern nation in the world.
  - davidw 17y ago
    That's my point: why waste time trying to make places like Houston work with public transport. Concentrate on the places with a high enough population density to make it function.
    - alxp 17y ago
      Well if you are Houston and you don't want to end up like Detroit when the cost of owning and operating a personal car becomes out of reach for most people, you'll want to do something to ensure people will still want to live there.
- blackguardx 17y ago
  BART was always planned to go to San Jose, but one of the municipalities down there didn't want to pay for it 20+ years ago, so it didn't pass through. These days everything seems more expensive and voters are leery of bond measures. It probably will eventually go to San Jose, but not in the next few years.
- j_baker 17y ago
  Texas also happens to have the biggest city in the US without any form of public transit (Arlington).

davidw 17y ago

> If you could get from Dallas to Houston in an hour on a train, why would you want to drive? Because once you got there, you'd need a car again. Texas is a bad example though. I think public transportation can work just fine if you look at where it's being applied. It's insane, for instance, that the BART stuff in the bay area (which is fairly densely populated) doesn't go down and around through San Jose.

DanielStraight 17y ago
Why would you want a car there when you could, from anywhere, hop on a train or bus and get where you're going without having to worry about parking in the city?
- davidw 17y ago
  I don't know Houston very well but a cursory look at Google Maps indicates that it's extremely spread out, which would make what you describe difficult.
- sokoloff 17y ago
  Having your own car is extremely convenient. It can carry all your stuff and be reasonably secure against theft. If you're worried it's going to rain, toss an umbrella in the trunk. If it turns out not to rain, you didn't have to carry an umbrella all damn day, etc. In most Texas cities, there's ample easy and free/cheap parking. Parking in NYC or DC is a nightmare. Those two cities also have very high densities and reasonably good public transit systems. It seems there's a naturally inverse relationship between parking convenience and public transit convenience. I believe that's driven from environmental factors (cutting it back to only one factor, it's probably the cost of land as #1 driver). If your public transit system has to cover all of Dallas/Fort Worth at the same transit density/convenience as Manhattan is covered, you're going to spend an ENORMOUS amount of money on that infrastructure and that's not likely to be paid back by the moderate/low level of usage that would occur. (Because parking would still be plentiful and convenient in those cities...)
  - elblanco 17y ago
    Plus to pay for a system like New York's or D.C.'s in Dallas, the fare would be astronomical, such that people simply wouldn't ride it.
    - maukdaddy 17y ago
      Most systems in the country have flat-fare daily, weekly, monthly passes. $5.75 for a daily pass here in Chicago. That is an AMAZING value considering that pass allows unlimited rides on trains and buses.
      - elblanco 17y ago
        Which is true. Don't know about Chicago's, but the ones I've seen have restrictions on time of usage, usually after rush-hour, which makes those types of fare systems unusable to the majority of riders. I can't remember if NYC also raises rates during rush hour, but D.C. does as well. I think I stopped taking the D.C. system when a single day's transit and parking started topping $13/day.
mtalantikite 17y ago
I guess you could compliment it with a service like Zipcar, but you're right, it makes a lot more sense going city to city in a place like the northeast. In France you can do Paris to Lyon in a little under 2 hours, and a similar system (a relatively slow one at that) would get you between NYC and Boston in about 1.5 hours. The current options are 4 hours (no traffic) on a $15 Chinatown bus, or 4 hours on a $100 Amtrak train. When you're stuck on a bus in a gridlock in Manhattan trying to get to Boston, and it takes you 1.5 hours just to get out of Manhattan and over the bridge, is really the time you start to wish the public transit infrastructure wasn't so far behind every other modern nation in the world.
- davidw 17y ago
  That's my point: why waste time trying to make places like Houston work with public transport. Concentrate on the places with a high enough population density to make it function.
  - alxp 17y ago
    Well if you are Houston and you don't want to end up like Detroit when the cost of owning and operating a personal car becomes out of reach for most people, you'll want to do something to ensure people will still want to live there.
blackguardx 17y ago
BART was always planned to go to San Jose, but one of the municipalities down there didn't want to pay for it 20+ years ago, so it didn't pass through. These days everything seems more expensive and voters are leery of bond measures. It probably will eventually go to San Jose, but not in the next few years.
j_baker 17y ago
Texas also happens to have the biggest city in the US without any form of public transit (Arlington).