Do we want to be like Dallas?
The design top speed of Houston’s light rail cars is 66 mph. Why? Because the top speed of Dallas’ is 65 mph.
Houston is seemingly doomed to endless comparison with Dallas. So once Dallas started construction of a light rail system in 1990, it became inevitable that our rail transit efforts would be compared to theirs.
Sometimes comparisons are helpful — before 2004, one of the best ways to refute “nobody will ride light rail in a hot, sprawling city like Houston” was to point to Dallas. But the parallels only go so far.
The latest version of the comparison goes like this: Dallas doesn’t run its light rail lines in streets. So neither should we.
First of all, it isn’t true. This is Lancaster Road in South Dallas:
While the two DART light rail lines that run north from Downtown Dallas are designed as fast transit to get people into the city from from the suburbs, the two light rail lines that run south from Downtown serve urban neighborhoods, much like METRO’s North, Southeast, and Harrisburg lines will.
Secondly, A city’s transit system is ultimately shaped by the city itself: how it has grown, what transit is in place already, and local politics. In this regard, Dallas is different from Houston in some significant ways:
- Dallas has no equivalent to METROExpress. They didn’t start building HOV lanes until after they started building rail, so the suburban bus service there was was stuck in freeway traffic along with everyone else. We already have high quality non-stop suburban commuter transit, so there’s less to be gained by building suburban rail.
- While Downtown Dallas is as big as Downtown Houston, Dallas does not have the equivalent to the Houston Medical Center, Uptown or Greenway — dense secondary urban employment centers that account for a significant part of Houston’s employment.
- Dallas has a lot of abandoned or underused railroad lines, some of which happened to be in the right places. One — now the northern Red Line — followed the North Central Expressway, surrounded by office buildings (see below). Another — to be used by the Green Line starting in 2010 — goes from Downtown to the Southwestern Medical Center
- The Dallas metro area is politically fragmented. DART is made up of 15 different cities. To get their representatives to vote for rail projects — and to keep those cities from dropping out of the system — DART needed to commit to serving them with rail. The DART map is driven as much by political realities as by transit priorities.
Thirdly, do we really want to be like Dallas? This is a city whose most prominent landmark is a big sphere on a stick.
Consider this: DART built 45 miles of line for $2 billion and has an average weekday ridership of 59,000. Houston built 7.5 miles of line for $320 million and has an average weekday ridership of 40,000. Maybe Dallas could take some notes from us.