This is hardly a unique situation. You might look into the mega billion dollar stakes out in the San Francisco Bay area over what is the proper buy-in amount for new counties to join the BART system and enjoy use of the 80 some miles of system built previously buy the money of original three counties.
There's always chislers trying to freeload off the hardwork and money of others. Its surprising to see someone with your handle support such welfarist tendencies.
To the contrary. They ARE paying to use those facilities when they buy a rail ticket. What kind of mode they use to get to the station BEFORE they purchase that ticket and BEFORE they use any of its facilities is not a matter of properly seated concern for the rail operators. Essentially all this ammounts to is that (1) denying them access is IDIOCY because it turns away what would have been paying customers and (2) the fact that a bus was turned away for bureaucratic reasons does not prove that the rail line has too many passengers, as the Chronicle contends.
You can't have something for nothing.
Yeah, that's why DART charges its riders fares to use their lines. They have no business telling bus operators that they can't drop off potential passengers on a public street near the station, because those people do not become rail users until they enter the station, whereupon they pay their own user fee for the "service" by purchasing a ticket.
Its not right to expect the core Dallas area to shoulder the burden of paying for the increased mobility of people from a much wider region who are freeloading on the inner area's financial sacrifice.
First off, those people are not "freeloading" - they buy tickets like any other rider and recieve the exact same service as any other rider. Second, that the people of Dallas proper and in the DART system have to subsidize rail so outrageously beyond the revenue raised by its users is reason in itself that the project should either be shut down or privatized. Third, the marginal cost of accomodating an additional passenger on a train that is already travelling to a given destination whether that passenger rides or not is negligable, meaning DART actually BENEFITS from the ticket purchases of those people being dropped off by the bus.
The purpose of a commuter rail line is, above all else, to sell tickets and carry passengers who buy those tickets. Sending potential passengers home because they rode to the station on the wrong bus is stupidity of an unimaginable level to be expected only from the ranks of a poorly managed and heavily subsidized government bureaucracy...in other words, exactly what DART is.
No, as I do not support them. You on the other hand apparently do, as tax-subsidized rail itself is a system of welfare. In essence it does nothing more than provide a welfare subsidized transit service to a few users at the burden of a greater many non-users.
For the record, I would have little problem with a rail system that was cost effective and did not require heavy taxpayer funded subsidies to operate. Who knows, I may even be willing to tolerate a slight deficit. But in reality, rail systems all over the nation are a wasteful mess of millions in taxpayer subsidies. Part of it has to do with the fact that most of them are run by bureaucratic government agencies rather than government-franchised transit companies. This is the case with the 7 mile line we're getting right now in Houston. To give you an idea of how wasteful and costly it is, that 7 mile line's annual operating expenses alone are set to exceed the entire operating expenses for Houston's 90 mile streetcar system in 1923 when the latter is adjusted for inflation to current dollars. Back then rail ran a slight deficit, but was run by a franchised company that for the most part tried to keep within a budget. Now we're getting the exact same system on 1/10th the distance for a price that is higher than the original, all thanks to METRO - the government agency that is building and will operate the thing. And, as always, the $13.5 million annual deficit their operation will run is picked up by the rest of us, the taxpayers, even though 90% of us will never use the thing.
You missed this one line in the original article:
and other cities, such as Sherman, are ineligible for membership
This looks like a catch-22 situation. The Sherman system isn't eligible for membership in DART, but they can't use the facilities until they become members.