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#1 · (Edited)
Dart - Dallas Area Rapid Transit(lots of picutres)



Current Stations

Mockingbird Station:
Probably the most successful station so far.
http://www.selzerarch.com/MixedUseMockingbird.asp

Park lane Station:

Just a rendering but is has gotten a go ahead on the construction.

Downtown Plano


Future Stations
Farmers Branch
Valley View station:




3 Carrollton Stations:
Beltline Station:




Trinity Mills/PGBT Station:



Frankford Road Station:




I couldn't find any renderings but Dallas has future TOD planned at medical city/market center that will be very big. Irving will add a station to current urban development at Las Colinas, which is very close to DFW airport. These stations are both on the future Northwest line and have the potetnial and most likely will be more successful then the ones I could find pictures of. I believe Market center/Medical City and Las Colinas and are the 2 biggest job centers outside of downtown.
 
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#180 · (Edited)
Green Line service (and Lake Highlands Station on the Blue Line) began today!

New Green Line 'starts to complete' DART vision
09:08 AM CST on Sunday, December 5, 2010
By MICHAEL A. LINDENBERGER / The Dallas Morning News
mlindenberger@dallasnews.com
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/120510dnmetgreenmain.1bf8a3c.html

After nearly 30 years – and $7.4 billion in sales taxes collected – Texas' most ambitious experiment with public transit enters a new era Monday, when Dallas Area Rapid Transit trains begin running full-time on the new Green Line from southern Dallas all the way north to Carrollton.

The new line makes DART the largest light-rail system in the United States, an accomplishment that comes just a generation after the agency's creation. With larger trains, a longer route and stops at two of Dallas' largest medical centers, the $1.8 billion Green Line is more than just big: It begins to deliver on three decades of promises to make rail relevant throughout its service area.

"The Green Line really starts to complete the rail service" as envisioned in the 1980s, said DART president Gary Thomas, who has overseen the agency for nearly a decade. By connecting southeast Dallas, the Parkland hospital district, Love Field and beyond, "it really starts to complete the system."

...

INTERACTIVE MAP: http://www.dallasnews.com/database/2010/greenline.html



DART INFORMATION: http://www.dart.org/news/news.asp?id=942









 
#189 ·
Dallas Morning News
http://www.dallasnews.com/sports/su...t-rail-frozen-out-of-service.ece?ssimg=115192


Photo: Jim Mahoney/Staff Photographer
A Dallas Area Rapid Transit police car blocked a track crossing Tuesday as a light-rail train sat stopped along Scyene Road. For the first time, DART was forced to close the entire light-rail system as a result of severe weather.


Photo: Andy Jacobsohn/Staff Photographer
A pedestrian navigates frozen DART tracks at Pearl Station in City Center on Tuesday. The ice storm struck more quickly and intensely than transit officials expected.

DART loses weather gamble, with light-rail frozen out of service

By MICHAEL A. LINDENBERGER
Transportation Writer
Published 01 February 2011 10:51 PM

Dallas Area Rapid Transit bet big that its trains would avoid being frozen out of service Tuesday morning, and it lost.

As news of the coming ice storm galvanized transportation planners Monday across North Texas, DART officials said they would be ready, and, if necessary, would run empty trains all night long to keep the rail system from freezing.

But they never did. DART officials believed that the worst of the storm wouldn’t arrive until after most trains were already on the tracks, warmed up and ready for morning service. So they kept to the agency’s regular weekday schedule.

That decision proved to be a bad one, when temperatures plummeted shortly before 4 a.m., turning the rain to blanketing layers of ice just as the rail yards were beginning to stir.

Some early trains made it out of the yard, only to stall with passengers on board. Most others simply never got going. A handful of the switches on the tracks froze solid, and ice encased overhead power lines across the 72-mile rail network.

As a result, all light-rail service was suspended through the morning and didn’t resume until midafternoon. It operated on a reduced schedule Tuesday evening.

It was the first time in DART’s almost 15 years of train service that the entire light-rail system was suspended.

“It was an operational failure,” said Ray Noah of Richardson, DART’s longest-serving board member. “You and I both know that the warnings that were coming down were calling for severe conditions — I think the words I saw were ‘radical drops in temperature.’”

But DART president Gary Thomas said a test of the rails that began at 2 a.m. showed conditions were normal, with a light rain falling and above-freezing temperatures.

That jibed with the agency’s expectations that the coldest weather wouldn’t arrive until after 6 a.m., he said.

Fast and intense

Temperatures instead began to plummet before 4 a.m., turning the rain to deep layers of ice.

“This storm came in so quick, and the timing was unfortunately just at the right time that it made it very problematic for us,” he said. “The temperatures dropped very quickly.”

He said crews arrived to begin moving the trains from the rail yard onto the tracks about 3:30 a.m.

“It takes a while to get all the service out of the yard,” Thomas said. “When we started pulling the trains out, between 4 and 4:30, that’s about when the storm hit. But I couldn’t pull out any faster.”

The storm was so intense and the temperatures dropped so fast, he said, that he’s not sure that the rails would have remained ice-free, even if he had moved trains onto the tracks before the storm.

“Hindsight is always easier,” he said. “But I can’t even say for sure with hindsight that it would have been better. It might have made a difference. But you can’t really know now. Given the intensity that it came at us this morning … who is to say it wouldn’t have frozen anyway?”

DART’s senior vice president of operations, Todd Plesko, said he has worked at other agencies that did run trains all night to prevent freezing, but that it didn’t always work.

“We routinely operate trains all night when we are certain we are going to get freezing rain,” he said. “Even when we did this, about half the time we were unable to keep the trains operating everywhere because the freezing rain came down too hard and too fast.”

Running trains every 15 minutes overnight would have cost DART at least $55,000, he said.

Extra crews

Transportation agencies throughout North Texas had been on high alert for the severe weather, thanks in part to reporters from around the world being on hand Tuesday as events for Sunday’s Super Bowl in Arlington began in earnest.

Texas Department of Transportation officials brought dozens of workers Monday night from as far as Amarillo to help crews treat the roads for ice. The North Texas Tollway Authority mobilized its entire maintenance staff.

Michael Morris, transportation director for the North Central Texas Council of Governments and transportation chief of the Super Bowl host committee, said both those agencies assumed the weather would turn bad by 3 a.m. and had crews begin work by midnight.

Other transit agencies deal with cold routinely.

In Denver, transit officials operate 157 light-rail vehicles with overhead power systems similar to DART’s. For the past two days, that city has been inundated with ice and below-zero temperatures.

Daria Serna, spokeswoman for the transit agency, said the trains haven’t missed a single stop because of the cold — and that the weather there has never caused the light-rail service to be suspended.

“Never,” she said.

When temperatures fall in Denver, she said, trains are run every 30 minutes all night long to keep the switches from freezing on the tracks.

In addition, the agency has equipped some of its rail cars with heated carbons — the piece of equipment that touches the overhead power lines. Others have small metal blades that allow the unheated carbons to act as ice-cutters as they move along the power lines.

“Our operations manager tells me he won’t even let the cars sit in the rail yard in cold weather,” she said. “He keeps them constantly moving.”

The stranded

Dallas resident Stan Aten, a daily DART rider, said he’s frustrated that cold weather knocked out the service Tuesday.

“Why does DART seem to have so much trouble with ice and their switches on the light rail? Ice is a regular part of winter in North Texas. … You design a system for the worst possible outcomes to keep your system moving.”

Meanwhile, the light-rail shutdown forced Sam Francis to take two buses from the DART station on Ledbetter in south Oak Cliff to Union Station downtown.

There the Lancaster resident, an engineer for Oncor Electric Delivery, planned to take a train to Fort Worth for a meeting with other members of the North American Electric Reliability Corp.

“We thought we’d have it in a warmer climate,” he said of the gathering.

But the Trinity Railway Express also wasn’t running, leaving Francis and about 15 other would-be riders waiting uncertainly for their next move.

“I’m going to work,” said Francis, sitting on the floor, engaged with a laptop and an apple. “As long as I have a plug, I can go all day.”

Thomas said Tuesday that he’s asked his staff to look at equipment changes that might make sense and to review how agencies like Denver’s handle cold conditions.

He also said DART patrons should know that the agency is working hard to keep service going, despite difficult circumstances.

“This morning it didn’t work like it was supposed to, and surely there are a lot of disappointed people — including me,” Thomas said. “We hope tomorrow will be better. There are a lot of people working very hard right now to make that happen.”

As of Tuesday night, DART officials said they expected to run light-rail service on all three lines Wednesday, but with trains arriving only every 20 minutes.

“We don’t expect any more precipitation, so we think the (light-rail power lines) should be fine,” Thomas said, though he warned that riders can expect delays if conditions are bad.



AT A GLANCE

DART service on Wednesday
Bus: Regular schedule, but expect delays if roads are icy
TRE: Regular schedule
Light rail: Open but trains running less frequently than usual
 
#197 ·
Those figures may be wrong because a massive new extension(second phase of the Green Line) added 24 more miles in Q4 of 2010. The Wikipedia list cites Q3 of 2010 as the latest ridership numbers released, and at that point the DART system was only 48 miles.
 
#200 ·
Love Field station is a joke, and a bad one at that. Petty politics wins out over common sense.

As far as ice storms go, take it from a transplanted New Yorker. Rarely did New York experience the kinds of ice storms we get in Texas. I went through just a few in the 22 years I lived there. Short of a blizzard, Texas ice storms are much worse and much more debilitating. And because of their infrequency, the infrastructure is not well prepared for dealing with them when they do happen.

So much for global warming.

Had Dallas built a subway - DART has all of one subway station - I suspect any interruptions in service would have been minimal. As they say in Texas, some would prefer to trip over a dollar to pick up a dime.
 
#201 ·
So much for global warming.
Does an ice storm in Texas disprove the theory of gradual climate change?

In other news, this shitty transit system still can't get its shit together

Dallas Morning News
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/comm...-fresh-challenge-snarling-rail-lines-anew.ece

Snow deals DART a fresh challenge, snarling rail lines anew


Photo: Ryan C. Henriksen/Staff Photographer
Commuters waited for the DART train on Friday at the St. Paul Station in Dallas. The snowfall dealt a fresh challenge to DART, which was unable to restore its bus and rail line system to normal.

By MICHAEL A. LINDENBERGER
Transportation Writer
Published 04 February 2011 10:50 PM

Friday’s unexpectedly heavy snowfall rebuffed efforts by Dallas Area Rapid Transit to restore its light rail and bus system to normal, as once again passengers endured long waits in cold temperatures and commutes that in some cases stretched beyond three hours.

Up to five inches of snow had fallen by noon, triggering a whole menu of operational problems for the already hard-hit transit agency. Trains were stopped by frozen doors, by snow that covered navigational switches on the tracks, and by other mechanical problems.

Service was never stopped entirely, as it had been on Tuesday morning after an overnight ice storm. But it took DART until midafternoon to field enough trains to reliably operate a much-reduced schedule. It ran shorter-than-usual trains every 30 minutes beginning at about 2 p.m., and kept to that schedule through the night.

Friday’s troubles came on the fourth day of what many are calling one of the most serious, and certainly most unusual, winter storms in recent history. First came rain Monday night, then ice early the next morning, and on Wednesday the largest planned series of power outages in Dallas history.

Making all those problems worse, a deep freeze settled in Tuesday morning and wasn’t expected to end until Saturday, providing four straight days of temperatures that never got above the 20s.

But despite the unusual weather, which slicked over highways and left many neighborhood streets all but impassable for the week, DART’s chairman of the board said the agency’s management had let the public down this week.

DART executives needed to say sooner, and with more details, just how bad the week’s weather and other problems had affected the agency, especially its light rail, Oak Cliff businessman William Velasco said.

Too often, he said, the agency’s vague messages that trains were delayed by 20 minutes or “30 minutes or more” did too little to prepare riders for the cold, wet and long waits they faced.

He said he heard from DART president Gary Thomas midafternoon Tuesday, but only learned the full extent of the problems — that light rail had been shut down entirely for the first time in the agency’s history — later on from the news media. Other board members said Tuesday they were never contacted.

“I want to apologize to our ridership for this weather that came through this week,” Velasco said. “We have a responsibility to the public to make sure our buses and trains are somewhat on time even in these conditions. I understand there were times this week when that was simply not the case. As chairman of the board, I will get to the bottom of this. We will get this right.”

Velasco said he gives the agency’s nearly 4,000 employees credit for combating unusually severe weather

“To be fair, this was extreme weather, which we haven’t seen in what, 14, 15 years?” Velasco said. “Did DART make a mistake? You know they did. That goes without saying.”

His biggest disappointment, he said, is that this storm shows just how little progress DART has made in developing technology to communicate in real-time with its customers.

DART was hardly alone in having problems Friday.

The biggest problem was icy and newly snow-covered roads that simply were not cleared. Most cities, from Dallas to Little Elm, do not attempt to clear small or neighborhood streets.

Texas Department of Transportation officials continued their work around the clock treating the interstates, highways and major roads. By mid-morning, state officials had ordered reinforcements from as far away as Amarillo. By midday, North Texas had a contingent of some 75 snow plows and scores of other pieces of equipment.

Even so, many areas of even the biggest highways remained slippery and slow to travel.

And on the area’s growing network of toll roads, the news may have been even worse, though not for lack of effort on the part of the North Texas Tollway Authority. Like TxDOT, NTTA worked its maintenance crews around the clock for a fourth straight day.

But unlike their state counterparts, NTTA has no snow plows. Instead, it repeatedly put down sand and de-icing chemicals on every mile of the road throughout the day and night. But in most cases, the snow couldn’t be pushed aside and drivers were left with roads so covered that lanes were invisible.

By early morning Friday, NTTA had briefly closed southbound Dallas North Tollway, its most heavily traveled toll road, at Keller Springs Road.
 
#211 ·
I honestly have to give it to Dallas. A city that contains the largest Light Rail system(and still expanding it) AND has the High Five Interchange with an extensive freeway system to go with it? Transportation wise Dallas seems to have everything.

Question though, how are they running 4 light rail lines through one single stretch of track in downtown? Headways must not be all that great. I think Dallas needs a second downtown connector.(Blue and Red Lines would not move, but Green and orange lines would have a new subway following a North-South direction crossing the current downtown tracks)
 
#216 ·
Dallas' low rail ridership is hardly surprising given its low density, excellent highway and arterial system, and continued expansion of tollways along the outer edges of development. That's what happens when rail transit is viewed more as a trophy than as a functional necessity.

Back in the 80's, a bank offered MARTA a commercial loan at a favorable interest rate to complete the entire referendum rail system ASAP. It's a good thing that MARTA declined, because we wouldn't have been able to fund its operations, especially since the original system included several short branches that would've made it difficult to provide service headways that were adequate on the branches without being excessive on the common sections. And the bank that offered the loan should've known that. Boosterism is no substitute for good planning. :eek:hno:

That said, if/when peak oil hits, Dallas will be in a very enviable position. :)
 
#220 ·
I would imagine that the downtown core stations would have 5 and 3 minute headways, since they are running 3-4 lines on the same tracks. Stations that only have 2 lines running through would have 10 minute headways, but It's the stations that belong to individual lines that have the $hitty headways. Looking at the Map, the Red Line(Northern Half) during peak when the orange lines trains are running through would probably be the best it gets for a single line.
 
#223 ·
I can't help but think that instead of light rail, Dallas should be running these:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kekQ1AvmLJo&feature=related

I think Dallas should try 30 minute EMU commuter rail service. Denver has the same issue as Dallas-trying to build a rail system in a city that's just not dense. Look at Denver's Fastrack Map: http://www.rtd-fastracks.com/media/maps/index.html

Notice that mostly the denser southern areas get Light Rail. The more spread out North and East get EMU Commuter Rail. Dallas' Light Rail acts halfway between light and commuter-Longer headways and very spaced out stations.
 
#229 ·
Dallas Area Rapid Transit Website said:
Representatives from Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) and the North East Texas Regional Mobility Authority will work together to explore rail connections between North and East Texas. DART President/Executive Director Gary Thomas and Jeff Austin, Chairman of the North East Texas Regional Mobility Authority signed an interlocal cooperation agreement marking the commitment.

The agreement recognizes the importance of coordinated transportation planning and advocacy as the two agencies work to expand rail in the area. Multi-jurisdictional cooperation is often cited by federal officials as a key to securing project funds. The agreement encourages the two agencies to identify "potential issues of mutual interest in the development of plans" for future rail service between the North Central, North East and East regions of Texas.

Information about the rail plans for the North East Texas Regional Mobility Authority are available at NETRMA
Source
 
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