4 ms·

>That's 1½-2½ commuter rail lines or about 3-4 subway lines. Assuming every single commuter is coming from and going to the same place, sure.

panick21_ 2y ago
Tell me you don't understand how rail network work without telling me you don't understand how rail networks work.
- vel0city 2y ago
  Preface: I don't like this architecture. I think things need to change. I'm just describing what is. These are people coming from several dozen square miles and dispersing into several dozen square miles, flowing through these chokepoints. They're commuting 40, 50, or more miles. You'd need these people to change several bus lines and several train lines. Those busses would be snaking through messy suburbs for them to be actually useful. Those neighborhoods to pick them up are sprawling with poor walkability and a 15 minute+ walk just to the major road bus stop for a lot of those people. And when they get off the train, they're probably going to need a bus to navigate the sparse fields of giant empty parking lots to their actual workplaces. In fact, for a certain group of people this path practically already has a train service. US-75 runs parallel to the Red/Orange line. Assuming the person starts from Plano to go to their office job in Las Colinas/Irving (a massive assumption here, but practically best case), they won't even need to change trains. Let's ignore how they get to Parker Road station for now (Park and Ride? 15 minute walk through their neighborhood + same time as the park and ride?) and start the clock from there. They're going to commute to the Microsoft offices. They need to get in by 9:00 AM. So they instantly warp to the Parker Road Station, hop on the orange line at 6:46 AM. They get to North Lake College station at 8:07 AM. They then wait for the 229 bus at 8:21, take that 8 stops, hop off, walk a half a mile (~11min), and get there at 8:40. Nearly two hours and they only had to change once. And once again, that's instantly warping to Parker Road Station. Add another several minutes of drive or even more for a bus to connect to the train. Next, they're going to take the highways, including toll ways. They leave from Parker Road Station, head down US-75, hop on Bush Turnpike, and it is an ~30min trip on average. Or they want to avoid tolls. They take US-75 to 635 (taking this High Five talked about here), and it takes 30 minutes to an hour. Now, theoretically this should get a little bit better. There will be a new train line with more of an East-West path that would be useful here. But it'll be a train change at Bush Turnpike Station, and service on this new Silver Line won't be great at first. Potentially a 30 minute wait for the next train at peak times. And it'll still take 50ish minutes after that transfer. So you'd look at maybe a 5 minute train ride from Parker Road to Bush Turnpike, wait 15 minutes for the next train, then still 50 minutes. Plus the 30 minutes for the bus ride and walk. Over an hour and a half, magically warping to Parker Road immediately when the train was about to leave and hopefully only waiting 15 minutes for the Silver Line train. We'll see that it is really like when it opens in late 2025 (hopefully). I'm still excited for it, I'm looking forward to not needing to drive and park all the way out to the airport for travel and having another way to Addison Circle for things like Oktoberfest and other events there will be great. But this is also kind of a best case of someone taking the train versus driving. This is assuming someone lives close to the train lines in Plano. Their office is one bus line away from the station. Tons of people live even further out from there. Lots of people work at places which would require multiple bus transfers. The train doesn't even go halfway out into the sprawl, and the surrounding cities don't want to join DART. But honestly, it makes little sense to me to have people living in Fairview, McKinney, Prosper, and Melissa trying to commute to an office job in Dallas/Irving/Grapevine/Westlake/etc. It's insane to me, but people choose it. But a lot of people here just have a big aversion to taking transit. You're seen as an oddball to many for acknowledging it exists. We live right next to a bus stop that goes to a nice train station. My wife was looking at taking a job that would be immediately outside a train station. She looked at me like I was insane for suggesting she think about taking the train. I usually take it when I go into Dallas and people think it is incredible I survive. I take the bus to the city park with my kids and people wonder what happened to my car.
  - panick21_ 2y ago
    I was replaying specifically to the 'all people go to the same place'. Just as you have highway interchanges, you have railway interchanges (that are much cheaper). Railways can go into multiple directions and intersect with other modes of transports. I do understand the problem in the way the infrastructure is build in the area and that it isn't easy to just change and go to trains, that's not what I was suggesting. I was specifically responding too: "Assuming every single commuter is coming from and going to the same place, sure." And that if of course nonsense. The whole point of a network is that you can route from one place to another. I didn't propose a whole new transport plan for the whole area. And I am not pretending that within 1 year you can change all of Texas infrastructure. I was simply pointing out a fundamentally flawed argument. > But this is also kind of a best case of someone taking the train versus driving. Well, this is the best case in particular situation you are describing where that kind of infrastructure has been under-invested in for 100+ years. Its not the best case for public transit. It should NEVER take 30 min to swap from one train to another. In all of Switzerland you 90% of all connections are 10min or less. That's for the whole country including buses. If the train infrastructure was more modern and electric, trains could likely be faster. If the buses had their own lanes (not like Texas doesn't have enough lanes) the avg speed of the bus could likely be improved quite a lot. This is just about infrastructure choices, apparently Texas can build tons of super complex incredibly expensive highway interchanges but an electric train that leaves every 15min is apparently impossible. DoT in Texas is still on that 1960 highway building mania and is still destroying black neighborhoods so that subburban wight people can get to their office jobs at the oil company or whatever. The first step is recognizing the problem, and they are still working on that. The whole area seems like its pretty dense with a lot of people, I don't see why it couldn't have good transit. Even just with buses on existing roads. As long as you make some room for them and give them the appropriate priority and so on. A lot could be done for not that much money, if people actually wanted. On of the biggest problem in the US is that your tax system if fundamentally unfair and massively subsidizes suburbia. That's arguable one of the most important things that need to change. I strongly suggest looking at the work done by Urban3 and Strong Towns.
    - vel0city 2y ago
oblio 2y ago
During rush hour most people are going from their homes to places of employment, which are generally highly concentrated. The "homes" part is distributed, true, but guess what, once you have a good rail network, it provides decent coverage for that (which you can complement via walkability/bikeability/scooterability :-p, which makes for more liveable environments). And "train commuter rage" is much less frequent than "road rage" plus a lot more people die or get maimed driving a car/getting hit by a car than they do because of trains.
- eightysixfour 2y ago
  > During rush hour most people are going from their homes to places of employment, which are generally highly concentrated. This isn't as true in Dallas as in other places. The QoL associated with some of these problems in Dallas is part of the reason I left, so you're preaching to the choir, but the sprawl is intense.
- bsder 2y ago
  > places of employment, which are generally highly concentrated. This is not true and is one of the problems with getting mass transit to work in the US. Most of the employment in the US is now smeared across the city. I'll give Austin as an example. Austin employment has spaced out clumps. Downtown. The UT campus. The Domain (old IBM/NI area). The Arboretum. Oak Hill. The "new" airport. Austin housing has similar clumps, generally dictated by how much you earn. You're probably further out than you would like since the real estate in the center is ridiculous. So, Leander, Hutto, Garfield, or Dripping Springs. Now, plot the flows on a map. Note the massive pileup in the center as people attempt to change sectors across the city. Most modern cities are like this. There are not two or three obvious points that would get a big chunk of the traffic. I chose Austin, but San Diego, Pittsburgh, Nashville, etc. all look similar. And, the news is worse than that. The "white collar" jobs that could be concentrated have also been the most displaced by surburban office parks or by WFH. The types of jobs that most people are employed in (service and warehousing--Walmart/Amazon/FedEx/UPS/etc.) are generally specifically positioned where real estate is cheaper which is almost by definition off of any mass transit connector.
- vel0city 2y ago

panick21_ 2y ago

Tell me you don't understand how rail network work without telling me you don't understand how rail networks work.

vel0city 2y ago
Preface: I don't like this architecture. I think things need to change. I'm just describing what is. These are people coming from several dozen square miles and dispersing into several dozen square miles, flowing through these chokepoints. They're commuting 40, 50, or more miles. You'd need these people to change several bus lines and several train lines. Those busses would be snaking through messy suburbs for them to be actually useful. Those neighborhoods to pick them up are sprawling with poor walkability and a 15 minute+ walk just to the major road bus stop for a lot of those people. And when they get off the train, they're probably going to need a bus to navigate the sparse fields of giant empty parking lots to their actual workplaces. In fact, for a certain group of people this path practically already has a train service. US-75 runs parallel to the Red/Orange line. Assuming the person starts from Plano to go to their office job in Las Colinas/Irving (a massive assumption here, but practically best case), they won't even need to change trains. Let's ignore how they get to Parker Road station for now (Park and Ride? 15 minute walk through their neighborhood + same time as the park and ride?) and start the clock from there. They're going to commute to the Microsoft offices. They need to get in by 9:00 AM. So they instantly warp to the Parker Road Station, hop on the orange line at 6:46 AM. They get to North Lake College station at 8:07 AM. They then wait for the 229 bus at 8:21, take that 8 stops, hop off, walk a half a mile (~11min), and get there at 8:40. Nearly two hours and they only had to change once. And once again, that's instantly warping to Parker Road Station. Add another several minutes of drive or even more for a bus to connect to the train. Next, they're going to take the highways, including toll ways. They leave from Parker Road Station, head down US-75, hop on Bush Turnpike, and it is an ~30min trip on average. Or they want to avoid tolls. They take US-75 to 635 (taking this High Five talked about here), and it takes 30 minutes to an hour. Now, theoretically this should get a little bit better. There will be a new train line with more of an East-West path that would be useful here. But it'll be a train change at Bush Turnpike Station, and service on this new Silver Line won't be great at first. Potentially a 30 minute wait for the next train at peak times. And it'll still take 50ish minutes after that transfer. So you'd look at maybe a 5 minute train ride from Parker Road to Bush Turnpike, wait 15 minutes for the next train, then still 50 minutes. Plus the 30 minutes for the bus ride and walk. Over an hour and a half, magically warping to Parker Road immediately when the train was about to leave and hopefully only waiting 15 minutes for the Silver Line train. We'll see that it is really like when it opens in late 2025 (hopefully). I'm still excited for it, I'm looking forward to not needing to drive and park all the way out to the airport for travel and having another way to Addison Circle for things like Oktoberfest and other events there will be great. But this is also kind of a best case of someone taking the train versus driving. This is assuming someone lives close to the train lines in Plano. Their office is one bus line away from the station. Tons of people live even further out from there. Lots of people work at places which would require multiple bus transfers. The train doesn't even go halfway out into the sprawl, and the surrounding cities don't want to join DART. But honestly, it makes little sense to me to have people living in Fairview, McKinney, Prosper, and Melissa trying to commute to an office job in Dallas/Irving/Grapevine/Westlake/etc. It's insane to me, but people choose it. But a lot of people here just have a big aversion to taking transit. You're seen as an oddball to many for acknowledging it exists. We live right next to a bus stop that goes to a nice train station. My wife was looking at taking a job that would be immediately outside a train station. She looked at me like I was insane for suggesting she think about taking the train. I usually take it when I go into Dallas and people think it is incredible I survive. I take the bus to the city park with my kids and people wonder what happened to my car.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  I was replaying specifically to the 'all people go to the same place'. Just as you have highway interchanges, you have railway interchanges (that are much cheaper). Railways can go into multiple directions and intersect with other modes of transports. I do understand the problem in the way the infrastructure is build in the area and that it isn't easy to just change and go to trains, that's not what I was suggesting. I was specifically responding too: "Assuming every single commuter is coming from and going to the same place, sure." And that if of course nonsense. The whole point of a network is that you can route from one place to another. I didn't propose a whole new transport plan for the whole area. And I am not pretending that within 1 year you can change all of Texas infrastructure. I was simply pointing out a fundamentally flawed argument. > But this is also kind of a best case of someone taking the train versus driving. Well, this is the best case in particular situation you are describing where that kind of infrastructure has been under-invested in for 100+ years. Its not the best case for public transit. It should NEVER take 30 min to swap from one train to another. In all of Switzerland you 90% of all connections are 10min or less. That's for the whole country including buses. If the train infrastructure was more modern and electric, trains could likely be faster. If the buses had their own lanes (not like Texas doesn't have enough lanes) the avg speed of the bus could likely be improved quite a lot. This is just about infrastructure choices, apparently Texas can build tons of super complex incredibly expensive highway interchanges but an electric train that leaves every 15min is apparently impossible. DoT in Texas is still on that 1960 highway building mania and is still destroying black neighborhoods so that subburban wight people can get to their office jobs at the oil company or whatever. The first step is recognizing the problem, and they are still working on that. The whole area seems like its pretty dense with a lot of people, I don't see why it couldn't have good transit. Even just with buses on existing roads. As long as you make some room for them and give them the appropriate priority and so on. A lot could be done for not that much money, if people actually wanted. On of the biggest problem in the US is that your tax system if fundamentally unfair and massively subsidizes suburbia. That's arguable one of the most important things that need to change. I strongly suggest looking at the work done by Urban3 and Strong Towns.
  - vel0city 2y ago

oblio 2y ago

During rush hour most people are going from their homes to places of employment, which are generally highly concentrated. The "homes" part is distributed, true, but guess what, once you have a good rail network, it provides decent coverage for that (which you can complement via walkability/bikeability/scooterability :-p, which makes for more liveable environments). And "train commuter rage" is much less frequent than "road rage" plus a lot more people die or get maimed driving a car/getting hit by a car than they do because of trains.

eightysixfour 2y ago
> During rush hour most people are going from their homes to places of employment, which are generally highly concentrated. This isn't as true in Dallas as in other places. The QoL associated with some of these problems in Dallas is part of the reason I left, so you're preaching to the choir, but the sprawl is intense.
bsder 2y ago
> places of employment, which are generally highly concentrated. This is not true and is one of the problems with getting mass transit to work in the US. Most of the employment in the US is now smeared across the city. I'll give Austin as an example. Austin employment has spaced out clumps. Downtown. The UT campus. The Domain (old IBM/NI area). The Arboretum. Oak Hill. The "new" airport. Austin housing has similar clumps, generally dictated by how much you earn. You're probably further out than you would like since the real estate in the center is ridiculous. So, Leander, Hutto, Garfield, or Dripping Springs. Now, plot the flows on a map. Note the massive pileup in the center as people attempt to change sectors across the city. Most modern cities are like this. There are not two or three obvious points that would get a big chunk of the traffic. I chose Austin, but San Diego, Pittsburgh, Nashville, etc. all look similar. And, the news is worse than that. The "white collar" jobs that could be concentrated have also been the most displaced by surburban office parks or by WFH. The types of jobs that most people are employed in (service and warehousing--Walmart/Amazon/FedEx/UPS/etc.) are generally specifically positioned where real estate is cheaper which is almost by definition off of any mass transit connector.
vel0city 2y ago