With Loose Purse Strings For Public Transit, Will DART Hit Up The Feds For a Subway?
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On December 15, then-President-elect Joe Biden announced Pete Buttigieg as Transportation Secretary. Within Transportation is the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), dedicated to urban public transportation, with an estimated 2021 budget of $14.5 billion. Buttigieg and the FTA are already penciled for a $20 billion raise as part of Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 aid package – more than doubling the budget for public transportation.
I wrote in June that a Democrat would invest more in infrastructure and here we are. So what should DART do first?
Dallas Needs a Subway
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it until I’m blue in the face. The future of Dallas’ public transit system is underground. I mean, has anyone ever visited a global city without a subway or one that only ran for a mile or two? No. Every city with a subway adds to that subway. Certainly, no city has closed a subway and filled it in from lack of use.
With D2 seemingly about to become funded reality at City Council (and the fed contribution having already been earmarked), it’s time for D3, D4, D-as-much-as-you-can-get.
D2 is the seed that gets Dallas underground. There’s now a once-in-a-generation shot to get more. Not since LBJ’s Great Society and the creation of the Department of Transportation and specifically the creation of what became the FTA, have we seen such Federal largess for public transportation.
D3, D3a D4, D5 …
This is the easy part. In northern Dallas, there needs to be a subway between Central and Stemmons freeways. The hard part is that it’s built-out and expensive to acquire land – that’s why we have to go underground.
What I’m calling D3/D5 is a LONG segment that I divided because it would likely require phases due to budget. South of Northwest Highway, is what I’m calling D3 the north of Preston Center is D5 (because D4 is more important).
D3: Serving Density
The route for D3 is obvious. Hit the high points of existing businesses that also have higher density residential nearby. No one can deny the density of Oak Lawn, Uptown, and West Village.
Have D3 begin at the underground D2 Metro Center station (to connect with other train lines) and go north to the Crescent Court. There are tons of potential riders here and you can connect with the McKinney Trolley to West Village. There are also several proposed buildings that have yet to begin construction. Secure enough space NOW for the station pop-up at ground level and work the subway needs with their underground plans.
Next up is the Oak Lawn and Cedar Springs area. Same deal on the station. Finagle either with Streetlights at Lemmon Avenue and Cedar Springs or whatever the Ablon/Caven venture turns out to be on Cedar Springs – or maybe Hillwood’s empty lot at Cedar Springs and Turtle Creek?
Move north to Highland Park Village where there’s an adjacent surface parking lot across Mockingbird Road. The perfect place to negotiate for enough extra parking and space for the subway pop-up at ground level. If When Highland Park gets snooty about a subway, drop the stop and detour around.
Then we meander over to Inwood and Lovers Lane. Same deal as with Highland Park Village, use their parking lot and perhaps bury added parking along the way.
From there it’s Preston Center. The ugly central parking garage is begging for a transit stop to serve the office and area residential. Build an underground station with a ground-level pop-up – burying all the parking and covering it with a park while you’re at it.
From there pick a spot that will service Galleria and maybe-in-my-lifetime-Midtown. Plenty of land to acquire there.
And onwards north until it connects with the in-process Silver Line.
East Meets West
Dallas is good at moving cars east and west. It needs an east-west subway to connect its existing eastern and western lines. I know because I said it last month (ha!).
It would connect Park Lane/North Park station with Preston Center and Love Field. It would also let eastern riders change to the Orange Line and get all the way to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport or Grapevine, or Denton, or North Richland Hills – without having to go all the way through downtown – and from North Richland Hills to Rowlett.
Southern Dallas
Bet you thought I’d forgot? Well, believe it or not, Southern Dallas is better off than northern Dallas for two reasons.
Looking at the map above, you can see the existing service doesn’t extend as far south as it does north (which needs to happen to bring in southern suburbs – but somehow a multi-municipality negotiation seems as prolonged as it does problematic. And because of the existing service, there isn’t a huge V-shaped wasteland without service. At some point, it will need its own east-west connector, but the service needs to move further apart first (in my humble, unqualified opinion).
DART: Ready Your Plans
I don’t know anything about planning a subway – I just see obvious gaps in service and the Feds with a huge open purse. What I do know is that Dallas would be a different place today had it secured a subway in the 1960s – the last time the Feds were so generous. I urge the city to not miss this opportunity to transform how residents move throughout the city.
After all, if it takes another 50 years for this funding bonanza to come around again, I’ll be dead and then who will complain about it? Hmmm?
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Jon, this entire post is beyond stupid on so many levels. Subways are incredibly expensive to construct and maintain, and very rarely make any kind of economic sense in even densely populated areas. In DFW rail lines at any level make no sense whatsoever. They exist only so the politicians and the local Chamber of Commerce can have bragging rights: “We’ve got got a rail line!”.
I noticed that the only place in your entire column that a dollar sign appears in the first paragraph, and that was referring to the FTA budget. Nowhere do you really mention what subways cost. So let’s talk the numbers: DART is currently looking at spending $1.3 billion to build a subway that by their own estimates will only add about 50 new riders a day to their system. That’s right: $1.3 billion to add enough people to fill one bus. And that’s using DART’s numbers. Has a transit system’s ridership projections ever been even close to realistic?
And keep in mind that’s just the construction costs. Do you remember in the 1990’s when DART was building the subway under NCX? They had to suspend construction for awhile due to underground gas pockets. While briefing the DART board one of the board members, apparently a newbie, made the mistake of asking if the delay would hurt the agency’s finances. The staff has to explain that from a financial standpoint the delay was a great thing. Once the line opened was when it would really start costing the big bugs. Depending on how how you figure things, it costs the taxpayers $50+ every single time someone rides DART rail.
“Every city with a subway adds to that subway. Certainly, no city has closed a subway and filled it in from lack of use.”
You really didn’t research this at all, did you? There’s this thing called Google, and a 10 second search would have pulled up articles like https://www.loveexploring.com/gallerylist/81623/incredible-abandoned-subway-stations-from-around-the-world and https://ny.curbed.com/maps/nyc-subway-secret-tunnels. Hell, you only have to go 30 miles down the road to find a closed (if not filled in) subway. https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/fort-worth/article17124035.html
“I don’t know anything about planning a subway”. Well, at least you got one thing right.
Riddle me this. Between the I-35E and Central, how do you increase public transit availability? Light rail up Preston Road? Maybe you’re a fan of TXDoT’s plans for a double-decker Northwest Highway? Or are you waiting for flying cars?
Yes, stations within subway systems are sometimes closed, but not the whole system. Your links to a few closed stations within the New York City subway – a system that transports hundreds of thousands of passengers per day and is the most built-out subway in the country. So your argument is that since New York has abandoned a few stations because of changes over the past CENTURY, Dallas shouldn’t build a subway? Now who’s being stupid? But hey, maybe your Google has a link to New York City’s planned closure of their entire subway system.
But hey, it’s Texas where in 1993 we abandoned a partly-finished 54-mile underground super collider in Waxahachie leaving it to the Swiss and the 27-mile Large Hadron Collider opened in 2009 (where it’s replacement – only slightly larger than Waxahachie – is already being planned). Had we finished it, Texas would’ve been a global science epicenter for decades – but I digress.
Yes, subways are expensive. They can cost between $200 million and $1 billion per mile. For whatever reason, like prescription drugs, the US tends to pay 2-3x more than everywhere else. But subways the world over continue to be expanded, including in New York City with those pesky closed stations.
As for money, existing policies (when you can get it) split the cost 50/50 with the Feds, while road construction can see the Feds paying up to 70-80%. Does Biden switch that formula? At 20-cents on the dollar, we’d be fools not to take it.
One of the reasons D2 is expensive is because of its shortness. There are certain sunk costs that are required regardless of whether it’s 1 mile or 100.
And as has been reported by DART, pre-Covid, close-in DART ridership was growing better than the national average. Unfortunately, Dallas is expanding DART in sparely populated areas that have poor potential (Quiz: Who’s more likely to fill a train, Downtown/Uptown/Oak Lawn or the Silver Line?).
Certainly if Dallas wants to be a dense city it needs public transportation where density is – Uptown, Oak Lawn connecting to downtown. And given the dozen+ already-approved high-rises and future build-out and land values, it won’t be aboveground unless it’s more buses on existing roads.