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Originally Posted by electricron
DART's light rail was designed to be a cheaper light rail version of the Bay Area's BART heavy rail system, not a MUNI's streetcar/cablecar system. I'll agree it isn't urban enough in most of Dallas and suburbs, but it is urban rail in downtown Dallas running through the Bryan/Pacific streetmall where there is high density urban districts.
DART's light rail corridors go over and under obstacles, follow abandoned railroad corridors, and run down the center of city streets. Taking advantage of what light rail trains do best. As for the slower speeds on the streetmall downtown, all street running urban rail runs as slow, including Houston's Metro. At least DART trains run slow only on the streetmall, Metro's light rail trains run that slow over its entire 5 mile corridor to IH 610.
How can anyone truthfully state that DART's light rail is slow downtown and not state Metro's light rail is slow too? You can't have it both ways, fast and urban rail. Having far more stations per mile that urban rail, by what most of us would define, automatically makes it slower. The "R" in DART stands for "Rapid". It achieves its faster speeds mainly by having less stations per mile.
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Dallas, with its DART mass transit system of heavy and light rail, is moving forward to its future status as a "World Capital of the Future" (named by Forbes in September '09 as a select city to become a "world capital").
Even with all of the substantial work already completed for a Southern/Southwestern city in the U.S., DART is in an early to an early-middle stage of its developement.
Atlanta is much further along in its mass transit compared to Dallas but it benefited much earlier on in its development from SUBSTANTIAL Federal grants that Dallas has only minimally benefitted by.
The best is yet to come for Dallas and DART even in recognition of all of the incredible achievements already under its belt!
Anyone can be critical of its every step at this juncture, but the bottom line is that it is bringing an incredible "world class" effort at developing mass transit, both light and heavy rail, for Dallas and its metro area at a time that so many cities are struggling to even keep buses on their streets.
DART may not be perfect in every way at this specific point in time, with the economic challenges facing all cities, but it is focused on bringing light and heavy rail to the Dallas metro in a way that will benefit the whole.
Dallas has permanently lept ahead of every competitior city in Texas and the Southwest with its far reaching mass transit vision that has been in development for a very long time.
The D2 line in Downtown Dallas will only further that goal.