Quote:
Originally Posted by llamaorama
DART rail isn’t as useful as a subway would have been, and it shows in ridership figures. Imagine something like MARTA burrowed under McKinney ave and other genuinely urban, dense neighborhoods where parking is not always free. A ton of people would use it.
Another cautionary tale is Austin. The DMU train ended up being expensive and nobody uses it. Building it as a compromise made nobody happy.
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I don't disagree, but as I pointed out earlier, the subway/metro proposal died a very quick and sudden death at the polling booths. DART was able to sell light rail vehicles as modern versions of interurbans that once ran in Dallas. DART was not able to sell metros seen in D.C., Miami, or Atlanta. Ridership numbers will probably show the metro systems are higher, but if you check out how far out these systems reach, DART's light rail system beats them. DART is half funded by suburban cities, they needed the trains to reach them. Golly, the old interurbans from Dallas reached as far as Waco (95 miles), Sherman (65 miles), and Corsicana (55 miles).
DART has over 90 miles of double tracks, DC has around 50 miles of double tracks, Atlanta 48 miles of double tracks, and Miami just 24.4 miles of double tracks.
For a train nobody uses, CapMetro is adding the number of trains just to meet today's ridership demand. By the way, eBART and DCTA are using the same trains as CapMetro, and there are DMU operations in the USA you might consider successful, like NJT's Riverline and NCTD Sprinters.
Some recent ridership statistics:
Riverline 8600 weekday
Sprinters 8500 weekday
eBART 7,000 weekday
CapMetro 2500 weekday
DCTA 1900 weekday
CapMetro spent less than $150 milion, and DCTA spent less than $350 million to build their DMU trains, Honolulu Rail is projecting over $8 Billion for its EMU metro style train, and its price tag keeps rising. Hopefully Honolulu Rail can achieve 5333% more riders than CapMetro.
Some math; 8,000,000,000 / 150,000,000 = 53.33 ; therefore 53.33 times more riders to break even ridersship per dollars wise, or 133,333 weekday riders. Only time will tell if they can or will.