Posted on 12/24/2002 11:42:12 PM PST by GOPcapitalist
DALLAS -- It's a problem that no one imagined the Dallas Area Rapid Transit Authority would ever have.
Too many riders.
When development of light rail lines began 20 years ago, critics and skeptics questioned whether anyone would actually ride the train.
When DART opened its newest, northernmost station in Plano earlier this month, a busload of commuters from Sherman, shuttled 55 miles south by the Texoma Area Paratransit Authority, was turned away.
"What a great problem for us to have," said DART spokesman Morgan Lyons.
For economic and planning reasons, he said, cities and regions that are not members of DART are required to have an agreement before they can bring riders to rail stations and "we have not developed a policy for dealing with non-member cities."
The TAPS bus service, which serves seven counties in North Texas, did not have an agreement. Not only had DART denied it permission to deliver passengers to and from the Parker Road station, the city of Plano has told the agency that it cannot load and unload buses on city streets near the station.
There are several issues involved; not the least is economic. An influx of passengers from non-DART areas -- those that have not contributed to the cost of the system -- could require the agency to purchase additional train cars or increase the frequency of trips. Those costs would be borne largely by DART members, communities that raised their sales tax rate to pay for the service.
Since the Parker Road station opened on Monday, Lyons said, the 1,300-space parking lot has been full every day and rush-hour trains fill up on the first few stops toward downtown Dallas. Allowing an influx of passengers from non-DART cities could strain the system and crowd out commuters who have been paying for DART development since 1983.
Ven Hammonds, executive director of TAPS, has told DART officials that, when allowed, his agency's shuttle buses would make six round trips each weekday, carrying a total of about 75 passengers.
"The issue is not how many people they might be bringing," Lyons said. "They work in our service area and they contribute to the sales tax (which partially funds DART). They also contribute to congestion (if they commute by car). We want to be responsive to that. The issue is letting non-DART agencies access our property. We still have to decide how to accommodate them."
"It's a very legitimate issue," Hammonds said. "We hope to have an agreement with DART soon. We would like to help with the air-quality situation and help decrease congestion on the highways."
Some Dallas suburbs chose not to join DART and other cities, such as Sherman, are ineligible for membership because they are too far away from the rail line or too sparsely populated to pay membership costs.
DART is still working on policies under which outlying areas could have access to the system and the cost they would pay. Besides the Texoma agency, at least four others are preparing to tie into DART.
The Trinity Express, the heavy rail line between Dallas and Fort Worth, has an agreement with nine cities along its route that requires them to pay $775,000 a year to help defray operating costs.
Lyons said that arrangement "could be useful" as a model for DART in dealing with non-member cities, but it is not necessarily the one the agency will adopt.
Hammonds said he hopes the policy DART adopts will distinguish between cities that chose not to join and those that were ineligible for membership -- an issue that he feels could affect the cost of access to the train stations.
Lyons said the issue of access is forcing DART and the entire region to "look more globally at transit solutions," including the possibility of creating a single agency to serve Dallas, Fort Worth and an expanded area of North Texas.
I don't believe I've ever seen riders jumping off train cars en masse at locations in between stations to use a commercial establishment that emerged there because of the tracks (though I do suppose it is possible, considering that many light rail systems average a crawling 10 to 15 miles per hour in speed).
But this is besides the point. The freeway itself gobles up land upon which taxes were once paid and now are not. The extent of development caused by freeways vs. overall development that would have occurred anyway is probably negligable. Most freeway miles are through rural areas (thus, less taxable farm and forest land in relatively poorer rural districts).
Your argument is still fallacious. For starters, freeways already exist in most urban areas and were built there long before those properties were valuable. Second, the ammount of freeway mileage in downtown is a tiny fraction of the freeway mileage in any major city, with the vast majority of it existing outside of downtown and in areas where those supposed properties do not exist. Third, when freeways are built they normally emerge in the place of or on top of an existing road that was never on your precious tax roles to begin with. When all things are considered, the loss in property taxes from freeway expansion is (1) offset by the growth of commerce around the freeway, (2) so small to begin with that it is not of significant matter, and (3) virtually negligable in comparison to the costs of rail. In short, you are picking at the speck while ignoring the log.
In the suburbs, properties abutting the freeway, if already developed, also lose value because of noise and pollution.
That's why you build a sound wall.
The freeway itself gobles up land upon which taxes were once paid and now are not.
To a negligable degree. And for the record, your precious rail does the exact same thing...or do they lay the tracks on top of the telephone pole wires?
I don't care what you've heard before. If you show up on a thread here and start spreading intellectually dishonest, factually unfounded, and statistically unsupported nonsense in support of a wasteful government project, be it welfare or light rail, I will call you on it.
90% of your arguments have the same strong stench of these tactics
That's a bold claim for somebody who has not even bothered to specify which arguments he is referring to or why they are "dishonest" as he suggests. Would you care to do that anytime soon? Or are you going to simply sit there and loft generalities and other unsubstantiated allegations at me because you do not like what I stand for and you do not like what my facts say about your precious rail.
so I'm not going to waste time chasing circular and selective logic.
You wouldn't have to do either if you'd simply address the issue at hand and support your case for rail with some substance.
Catch me at a public meeting, and we'll duke it out with stats.
In the event that we're in the same region when one is being held, it will be my pleasure. I must note as an aside though that I do not anticipate much of a challenge, seeing as you have indicated yourself to be short on the stats and specifics as it is in this thread. If indeed your "it looks full to me" argument is all that you have, this should be a piece of cake.
But I don't get paid to post here.
Nor do I.
Besides, I already blew a hole in one of your 'statistics'
No you didn't. You made assumptions about them, ranted incoherently about those assumptions, and dismissed them in a sweeping generalization without further consideration. When I responded, you ignored it.
(generality lumping capital and operating expenses to paint a misleading expense picture)
Is that what all the ranting was about? If so, allow me to break it down for you.
Highway capital investments: 64.6 billion
Highway operating and maintanence expenses: 59.4 billion
Rail capital investments: 1.2 billion
Rail operating and maintenence expenses: .6 billion
If you recall, rail user fee revenue was .2 billion. It barely even covered a third of the operating expenses alone!
It is pretty representative of the rest of your arguments.
What is? The fact that rail revenues can't cover rail expenses? The fact that rail revenues can't even cover operating expenses? Well, then I'll take that as a compliment because it demonstrates, like the rest of my arguments, that rail is a wasteful money hole.
Here's another: you value freeway frontage development while ignoring station development
No. As I noted previously, rail does not encourage development along the tracks in between stations. Freeways encourage it all along them. Now tell me - what do you think represents more development. 10 miles of freeway with feeders that are accessable at all times, or 10 miles of rail with 4 stations on it, each with businesses but nothing in between?
But that ignores total value of induced development, assumes continuous freeway frontage roads(rare in many states
...which is all the more reason to build the things! Believe me, while living outside of Texas the I have come to conclude that fact that they don't have frontage roads is both inefficient and annoying.
and the reality that even in dense urban areas there are large stretches of non-commercial frontage.
...which is all the more reason to build frontage roads!
But again, you present rail/freeway as an either/or, which in most cases is a false dichotomy.
Not necessarily. I am simply noting that in almost all cases, rail is a waste of time and money. We can have freeway and something else if that something else works. But the fact is that light rail simply does not work and heavy rail works only in limited cases.
That's precisely the issue. In NYC, and in the dense city centers of Europe, subways and the sort can work. But in spread out cities with large and widespread suburban regions, it does not work.
There are people out there, the so called "smart growth" types, who push rail as the fix-all solution to everything. If the moon collided with the sun tommorrow, for example, I guarantee you the Houston Chronicle would run an editorial blaming it on the moon's lack of a light frail solution. Those types push rail for the sake of having rail, and it's always under the sales line of making whatever unfortunate municipality they descend upon into a "world class city" or some other such nonsense. Translated, that means remaking our cities in the image of a San Francisco/New York/run-of-the-mill-socialist-euro-mecca collage of "progressivism," urban planning, and rail rail rail.
Damn, that's a toughie. I dunno if Willies head will explode.
But you would surely be called both a "Neo-Con" and an "Anti-Semite" shortly thereafter. Quite possibly in the same post!
(Sounds like a universal piss off to allot of folks round here..)
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