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.

Its incredible how you could read all of that and yet not have any takeaways to adjust your preconceived notions of the reality of life in this area.

> infrastructure has been under-invested in for 100+ years.

This isn't some subway built in 1920 that has barely even had a new train in the past 50 years. The Orange Line opened in 2010. The Red Line in 1996. Some of the stations opened in like 2014. The rolling stock is mostly stuff purchased post-2008. And with the Silver Line, those are all totally new stations on a totally new path with totally new rolling stock. Clearly, you don't know what you're talking about if you're thinking this is stuff that hasn't been invested in for nearly 100 years. But hey, you watched some YouTube videos, so you know exactly what the realities are like living in DFW and know precisely what would solve it.

> more modern and electric

The train in my example is pretty new and electric. Once again, you clearly don't know what you're talking about here.

> an electric train that leaves every 15min is apparently impossible.

The Orange Line and Red Line at its peak is like 7.5ish min intervals. Once again, you clearly don't know what you're talking about here.

> 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.

What, we're going to have 100mph busses going on surface streets or something? Dedicated bus lanes make sense in areas where there's lots of traffic and gridlock, they can do a lot of good there. The bus in the example isn't in one of those places. That road isn't normally very crowded. Forcing the light cycles for the bus would probably save a minute or two, but once again the overall trip is losing by well over a half hour. The overall trip time is worse because you're going to stop that train several times along its path, that bus is going to stop and pick up people. Whereas the car, even if it goes a bit slower because of traffic, is still keeping its average speed at like 50ish mph.

> The whole area seems like its pretty dense with a lot of people

That's the thing. It really isn't. Some people have a several minute drive jus to leave their neighborhood, just to get to the first place where a bus stop would even remotely make any sense to be. Some parts are decently dense, and those are the places where people can and do reasonably take transit as their primary way of travel. But it is definitely not the norm. But hey, once again, you're someone that's watched a few YouTube videos and poked around on Google maps, you definitely know more than the person who's actually lived in it for over a decade.

> It should NEVER take 30 min to swap from one train to another.

Sure. But those trains are going to be largely empty even with the 30 minute service interval. Running them every 5 minutes is burning billions of dollars and lots of energy rolling empty trains. And in the end, look at the math. Shave 15 minutes off the trip. Shave 30 minutes off the trip. The highway path still beats out on time.

> This is just about infrastructure choices

Its far more about city design overall than just "infrastructure". You could replace all the highways overnight in DFW with trains that run every 30 seconds. It'll just increase the overall transit times for all these commuters. Do the math. Look at actual average speeds for whatever design you might propose. It is a fundamental issue with how the cities are laid out and designed from the very foundations. Those average commuters would end up changing trains several times on their commutes. That train is going to have to roll through a bunch of stations and stops in order to actually be useful to the riders. Because its not "mostly people in this area going mostly to that area", its people from an absolutely massive area going to an absolutely massive area.

> 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.

The thing is, once again, the density and overall design of where I'd want to go. There's a bus stop right outside my house. The routes from there make a decent bit of sense, they go along through a few shopping areas and to the nice downtown Plano area and that bus station there. But I don't often shop at those shopping areas. I go to slightly different ones. So now there would need to either be yet another bus line that goes to each of those different shopping areas, or so much bus service the next bus is just a couple of minutes behind. Otherwise, each of those changes really adds up in time, and suddenly I'm spending 2-3x as much time taking the bus than just driving.

And I'm lucky, I live literally on the edge of my neighborhood. Someone deeper in the neighborhood, it is a 15 minute walk to the main road where the bus is. With the weather right now having a heat index of like 110F. That walk alone is longer than what their drive would be to that store. So then what, we have busses snaking through all the small curvy neighborhood roads? Gee, that'll really make the overall travel time higher. This is why I just completely ignored the travel time for that person to Parker Road Station, you include that and for a lot of people it really blows the travel time up.

And to think, I'm in kind of a small and compact neighborhood for DFW. There's a lot out there with much bigger lots and more separated from the main roads.

So you see how its not just a matter of "well, if only we had more modern electrc trains, and more busses, maybe dedicated bus lanes." It is the fact that person is weighing a 15 minute walk in 110F heat versus leaving their house in an air-conditioned car and getting to their destination in the same amount of time as before they even got on the bus. That bus wait could be 0 minutes, that bus could go practically right where they wanted to go, the bus isn't really stuck in traffic for their route, but because of the layout of their neighborhood and the sprawling nature of all the places they might want to go taking the bus just didn't make sense.

Its far more than just "invest in the infrastructure!" It is changing the mindset. Its building new forms of housing, shopping, and working. And yes, actually building the trains and buying the busses. But we could quadruple the bus fleet of DART and change the train service interval to 10 seconds tomorrow and we'd still have roughly the same ridership. In the end though, I do vote for that more modern city design. I do vote to expand DART. I do vote for bike lanes and better traffic calming. And I do ride transit when it makes sense. I just wish it made more sense more often.

> Potentially a 30 minute wait for the next train at peak times.

See, that's already an issue. Even in small European cities, you'd expect the trains at peak time to arrive every 5min, in larger cities even every 1-2min

A train every 30min is what I'd consider "3am on easter sunday" level of service, not peak service.

Sure, right now there's not enough demand for that. But as they say, if you build it they'll come.

I agree, the service level on that train is pretty bad especially for peak. Hopefully they'll be convinced to run it more.

But change that wait, do the math, and compare it to the drive time again. Ok, we shaved a 15 minute average wait to 2 minutes or so. 13 minutes saved, awesome. We're still comparing a well over an hour public transit trip to a 30 minute drive on the tollways.

In the end you'll need to convince people the costs of the drive (all the many different types of costs there) are worth the trade for more than doubling the commute time.

Just to throw something else into the mix: the Orange Line DART is at-grade in several areas (and around Las Colinas particularly). So you can't increase frequency too much without affecting traffic.

My in-laws live in Irving, near the Ritz (ex-Four Seasons). The only thing they would ever consider using DART for would be the Texas State Fair (including the UT/OU game), and only because the parking is so expensive and so far away if you drive down there that the time penalty is much smaller.

Then you have the facts on the ground that probably are older than DART: the North Lake College station is a perfect example of bad transit design, as the station is at the edge of the property while the buildings are centered. You could just as easily (with perfect foreknowledge) have put the buildings right next to the station and used the back of the property for parking lots, which adds almost no time to driving but makes transit much more appealing (as it is, those who disembark there have to walk across the entire parking lot to get to the school).

Even worse, the University of Dallas station that has almost no pedestrian access at all. It would take ten minutes walking just to get to the other side of the highway because of the convoluted route you would have to take.

Traffic has to be really bad before public transit with a lot of stops is faster than door-to-door in a car, assuming there's parking at the other end.

You can do many things to make cities more transit-friendly, pedestrian-friendly, bike-friendly. But drivers aren't epsilon-minus semi-morons, and while a car in central Paris or Amsterdam is a liability, in most of Dallas it's at best a minor inconvenience to find parking. And there's absolutely nothing that can ever beat the convenience of a private conveyance. There's a reason really rich people fly private. It goes where you want, when you want.

I took my wife to the airport the other day. There is no public transit that goes to our local airport; you have no choice but to get in a private car or taxi unless you've got serious stamina for walking on fully-exposed public roads (no shade, no rain shield) with no sidewalks and 60+ mph (100 km/h) traffic for tens of miles. On the plus side (for the passenger), I dropped her off more or less right outside the check-in counter and security. She didn't spend more than a minute or two, tops, for all her indoor walking around to the gate.

The question is whether that needs to be the case.

By combining train and car you can usually end up faster and cheaper if done well as trains won't be stuck in traffic and commuter trains can reliably run at 120-160km/h.

See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41309489 for examples and details on how to solve this long-term.

Once again it kind of comes back to the density. Without the density, you'll end up with a lot of stations to try and make the line useful to people. With lots of stations, you're not realistically going 120-160km/h average speeds.

These DART LRV trains do >100km/h peak speeds. But in the end if you halved the stations you'd really crush the ridership because there's just not enough stuff or people at any particular station.

> Without the density, you'll end up with a lot of stations to try and make the line useful to people. With lots of stations, you're not realistically going 120-160km/h average speeds.

> But in the end if you halved the stations you'd really crush the ridership because there's just not enough stuff or people at any particular station.

Of course there's enough people left.

First you build train stations near destinations. That's business parks, universities, airports, downtown areas, malls. Then you build train stations with lots of spacing into the suburbs so you can still hit peak speeds between them.

Typical station spacing depends on train speeds, but you can estimate with: 50km/h at 500m spacing, 90km/h for 2km spacing, 120km/h at 5km spacing, 160km/h at 10km spacing.

So you'll want to have 5km-10km spacing between the stations. That's not close enough for walking. But you can set up free parking at the station for anyone with a train ticket. At the same time you'll set up congestion charging for the destinations with stations.

Now the fastest and cheapest way to travel to these dense areas is to drive to the nearest station, park your car, and take the train. For the rest of the city the car remains the fastest option.

Nonetheless, at 2-5km average distance to the nearest station cycling becomes more viable, which primarily benefits teenagers and students.

Later on you can improve upon this by:

· creating bus and tram lines with cross-connections between the larger train stations to serve as distributor lines and connect more people

· changing the minimum setbacks for properties near the bus and tram lines to allow semi-detached and terraced housing. This makes cheaper housing available, increases density, makes transit more viable and still keeps the suburban lifestyle

· changing the zoning near the station to develop 5-over-1s, with 1 level of businesses, 5 levels of apartments and an underground parking garage. This would allow creating something resembling the "main streets" of foregone eras.

Overall you can make these changes over the span of a generation. This is how cities grew during the industrialization in the first place (including in the US) and how european cities have recovered from the post-war car-centric urban design which had destroyed more cities than the war.

Once again you're telling me how it should be instead of looking at the realities of what is.

Take a look at the route for the Red/Orange lines on DART. Tell me which stations get the axe to make that spacing. Do we kill Downtown Plano or Cityline? Do we kill the stop with the easy bus transfer to the Richardson library and city hall? Do we kill the station next to the massive apartment complexes and the concert hall and office park at Galatyn? Or all the mixed use at Spring Valley? Do people lose access to the hospital and medical facilities near Forest Ln? No more shopping at all the stuff at the Shops at Park Lane and NorthPark mall? Do SMU students lose access to the network by taking away Lovers Ln? Forget all the mixed use at Mockingbird? Tell me, who gets the axe? And you really think we're going to keep ridership up if we eliminate the stop at the hospital or eliminate half the apartment complexes on the path?

The only easy stops I see to eliminate are the ones downtown where it's acting like a streetcar. There were plans for a "D2" project to move these lines underground and change the number of stops.

And all of this is also still assuming there is the bus connections to take you East/West, because there's still so much you miss at each stop on just the train alignment a few miles either direction.