commuter rail/subway

zork

zork

2,500+ Posts
some examples:

Washington DCThe Link

DallasThe Link

HoustonThe Link

ParisThe Link

NYCThe Link


Compare, contrast, extrapolate, predict, comment, you make the call?

What if gas gets to be 5$ a gallon? What about 8-10$ per gallon? How about if it stays about 2.50-3.50$?

Will the lagging cities put forth more rail and mass transit?

My commute in Dallas is about 18 miles each way. To attempt to do that I would have to bus until the green line is completed in 2010-2011, at which point my farecard will be 80$ a month.

36 miles round trip per day commute for me. if I had a car that did 36 miles to the gallon that would be 21 days at whatever gas price for a gallon plus teh depriciation on the car per day.(.48$ per mile)

Of course there is a time component too. Buses are not particularly fast. And my 18 miles would entail driving about 1-2 miles to a park and ride, changing trains, then taking a bus for the last 1-2 miles.

whiteflag.gif
I don't think it would work for me till the grid system is developed like Paris. By that time I'll be long gone.

What say you? Have you examined your mass transit choices?
 
I'll be taking the red or blue line in Dallas to Union Station tonight to catch the Trinity Railway Express home.

It's cheaper and less stressful than driving.

That said, I'm moving to less than 4 miles from downtown and will begin riding my bike to work -- to get in better shape, not save money.
 
I could live without a car for the most part. I don't even mind paying a little extra in rent to live close to work/bus lines. Really most of my driving consists of going to San Antonio or Dallas to visit family. It's gotten more expensive, but it is still cheaper for me to drive myself than to take the greyhound.
 
My car is basically non-existent and seldom used. I won't get a new one because a car payment is useless and silly for me. I pay my 45 bucks for insurance and I am done with it. I bike, bus or walk where I need to go for the most part.

If it is a road trip of good distance I rent a car. I would do that anyways so I don't put wear and tear on my own car.

I could care less how much gas goes up. I don't pump watch. I don't need to. I feel sorry for those that do though. Especially those with commutes longer than one mile. That must really suck.
 
18 miles(36 RT) is not that long in the metroplex or any large city I don't think. Most of it is on interstate or fwy travel so it can be as little as 15 or as much as 1 hour each way depending on traffic. Even at that I think it would be at least 45 min to 2 hours to try and mass transit unless I hit all 3-4 legs perfectly.

Not workable, but maybe the population will clamor for more as the price of oil continues to skyrocket.
 
I'm in Dallas and I've checked out my transit options. I would love to ride DART rail or bus but it's just not feasible for me. I live in the M Streets but I work up by the Galleria. If I worked downtown I could literally walk out my door and hop on the 24 bus to downtown and then take the exact same bus back home and only spend about 15 to 20 mins on the bus. Great commute. But if I want to take the bus to Galleria in order to be at work by 8am I would have to be on the bus at 630am. No thanks.

My hope is that employers will start to realize that their employees want their offices located next to transit options and they will start to migrate that way, particularly towards DTD.

I think as the central Dallas area continues to grow in popularity and people continue to move in and increase density that office will follow. From my limited understanding everything follows rooftops(residential). Wherever people move to is where the office will follow and the retail as well but not until you get the residential.

DT Dallas is making huge strides right now and 2008 will be a watershed year. I think the downtown population is scheduled to double (something like that) in 08 due to the completion of several large residential projects in the works.
 
I was constantly driving while I was living in LA. I would load up my car with every option available on the weekends because I didn't know when I would make it back home.

During the week, the last two places that I worked for extended periods of time were definitely doable by bus (one by walking), but I often needed my car for work.

Now I am in Buenos Aires and I don't have a car. I prefer to walk because of the freedom, the exercise, and saving money. Everytime I look at a place I take all those things into consideration in addition to "Will girls want to come back here?"

I am a big fan of not driving a car to work. And if/when I move back, I think that I might want to check out NYC or DC to see if I could continue to live car-free.

hookem.gif
 
The only way to get people out of their cars and onto mass transit is to make mass transit:

1. the fastest option
2. the cheapest option
3. the only option.

In Houston, cars will always rule. The vast majority of the time, it's just WAY too easy to drive yourself where you want to go. Cars are used for lots more than commuting to work. If you can avoid the freeways during rush hour, getting around Houston by car is a breeze.

Unless you live in the far suburbs and use Park-n-Ride buses on the HOV lanes, it's always MUCH faster to drive your own car to your destination than use Metro.

Houston has lots of parking. The city building code requires every development to have enough on-site parking to satify its projected needs. This means there's almost always plenty of parking available at your destiantion. Usually it's free to boot. This in not the norm in many other big cities where they go out of their way to limit parking spots. When parking is severly limited (few spots or high cost, usually both), which is the case in many other large cities, other forms of transit become the either the cheapest or only option.

The vast majority of people who use Metro in Houston are just too poor to afford a car. Sure, there's the Park-n-Ride crowd from the suburbs that take the bus so they use the HOV. There's a few yuppies who live along the Red Line that take the train to work. The vast majority, however, only ride Metro because they have no other choice. This is a relatively small group of citizens compared to the overall population.

One of the problems we have right now is that our tax system encourages people to make irrational choices about driving. The taxes on fuel are largely used to finance road construction and maintenance. The problem is, they don't cover the entire cost. The lion's share of expense is paid from the general account of state and local government. If we paid for all road maintenance and construction with fuel taxes a gallon of gas would certainly cost more, but then people would make more rational choices about driving. Maybe they wouldn't live so far from the office. Maybe they'd take fewer trips. Maybe they's use more mass transit. Maybe they's buy a more fuel efficient car.

Bernard
 
One thing people tend to forget is that a lot of the cities with the best systems began before the car was in wide use.

Paris, London, and New York all had systems by 1905. The cities have had a hundred years to grow into them.
 
If I had a route to cycle into work without putting my life at risk, I'd ride three or more days a week. It's under ten miles each way.
 
I have to wait for orange line to get done. Even then, it looks like it would take 2 hours to get to work. Which means, I would have to be on the train at 5am.

I think I would get some type of commuter car or a Vespa. I read where Honda is coming out with a sporty 2 seater hybrid.

At this point in my like I don't care about the sporty, I just want to get to work in a reasonable amount of time and be as green as possible.
 
celis, hybrids aren't any more 'green' than a fuel efficient gas powered car. In fact, probably less green. But I disgress.

I lived in Chicago, actually out in the burbs and had to take the Metra, full size train, from Highwood into Evanston. It actually didn't take me much longer to take the train than to drive. I also had no headaches, frustrations from traffic, AND I got the extra 45 mins or so to study on the train. I also used the trip home as a moment of 'downtime' I am a huge fan of urban density so that mass transit of all forms is much more plausible. That being said, I didn't get on a single city bus in Chicago, and don't think I would.
 
Chicago express buses are great if you live near a spot on either end.

Belmont/Sheridan to CBOT was awesome.(actually it dropped you off on michigan so you had to walk 3-4 blocks. But if you don't live on one of the express stops you stop every few blocks.

I never rode the 'el' while I was up there.
 
The Dallas Rail is promising, but is so lacking.

My car has to go to the shop to replace a door handle (damn American car quality) this week. I have wanted to do this for a long time, but I am going to take the train and bike to work the next couple of days.

Just like drycreek, I live in East Dallas and work near the Galleria (Beltline and Midway), so I am going to jump on the Mockingbird stop and get off on Beltline. I have reviewed my options for this commute many times and found this route to be more friendly than Arapaho or Spring Valley.

Only problem;none of these routes are friendly whatsoever to the cyclist. That is what is completely lacking in Dallas; true bike lanes. These do not exist and that makes me very angry. Until then Dallas will rank near the bottom of my list for best cities for a rail commute.

I will report on what I expect to be a complete failure when the experiment is complete.
 
I work in DC and take the train from Northern Virginia to work every day and it costs me $1.85 each way, $3.70 a day, $74 a month. Because I work for the federal government, they pay the $74 a month. Therefore, it costs me nothing to go to work. Actually, a lot of companies in the DC pay for their employees metro costs because they get tax breaks and other benefits. When I first moved up here 8 years ago, I had a car but when the lease ran out I turned it in and never bought another. Therefore, I'm saving $400 a month on a car payment, $100 on insurance, $150 on gas and $1200 a year on the car tax. Of course, I find other ways to spend this savings. I missed my car at first when I wanted to travel outside the city but its easy and inexpensive for me to rent a car from enterprise or use a zip or flex car.
 
RemoveRowdy--

Next year, there is going to be a completed veloway connecting the bottom of White Rock Lake to downtown. That doesn't help you, since your office is up at the Galleria. But for those of us who work downtown, it means that we could actually ride to work without getting killed.

I've been riding my new Vespa to work for a week now. I put about 70 miles on the thing, and still have a third of a tank left. Since the tank only holds a gallon, I'm pretty pleased with that performance. The best part of it is that I can park it in my gym's parking garage downtown and the attendant doesn't really care, since it doesn't take up a space. So I went from paying about $200 a month to get to work and park downtown to paying virtually nothing.
 
My company is forcing our department out of the Galleria and into downtown Dallas. Just so happens that my roommate is trying to sell his house at the same time, so I need a new place to live. I'm going to move a little over a mile from my new office, and since my company won't pay for us to park, I'm just going to walk to work every day. I would ride the Dart if I lived near a station, but the Dart lines don't run anywhere close to my new apartment. At least I will be saving money and getting exercise though.
 
I used to ride my bike down Swiss to get near downtown. The end of that route is now blocked -- by construction of a new DART rail line.

Looks like the most bike friendly area to cross into DT now is near the Live Oak Lofts, on the sidewalk.
 
I was unaware they were also moving their operation downtown. That's certainly good news for downtown. And more to the point, if the Metroplex is going to attain its EPA-mandated clean-air goals, then it's going to have to encourage a lot more businesses to move downtown as well because the entire DART system is geared toward serving downtown workers.

zzzzz--my recommendation may be to go all the way down to Main to enter downtown. You're right that anything northeast of the DART tracks is a mess, and is going to continue to be a mess for the next year. But Main is always quiet because Elm and Commerce are the main streets into and out of that part of downtown. So Main stays relatively free of traffic.
 
Thanks for the suggestion. That's how I used to go. There's a bottleneck there now that looks intimidating, but I'll probably give it a go because my office is off Main.
 
Echo what DC Horn said. The subway system in DC is great and the government pays for your commuting expenses. It's a much better alternative than paying $300/month for parking and sitting in horrendous traffic all day long.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Weekly Prediction Contest

* Predict HORNS-AGGIES *
Sat, Nov 30 • 6:30 PM on ABC

Recent Threads

Prediction Results Threads

2024 Schedules

Back
Top