The North Texas Corridor

Today let’s take a look at how High-Speed Rail service could connect to North Texas. The Dallas/Fort Worth area is one of the more interesting places to consider rail deployment, because they’ve got by far the most existing rail service. Not only does the DART network (existing and under construction) connect many of the city’s key suburban areas to Downtown and the airports, but the Trinity River Express serves as a regional commuter rail link between Dallas and Fort Worth.

Comparing the Dallas and Houston areas is interesting. Houston is very spread out, but the Metroplex covers an even wider area. At the same time, the Metroplex is organized around a large number of medium sized cities, many of which have a historic city center that is somewhat denser and more connected to its surroundings than what’s typical of contemporary suburbia. Put another way, there are more ‘destinations’ in the Dallas region than in the Houston region.

What difference does this make? Well, on the one hand it’s a little easier to imagine routes that would generate two-way traffic in D/FW. On the other hand, when trying to create initial service it’s a little harder to decide where to go – there are more viable centers in D/FW, but not many of them are as big as the core destinations in Houston (Downtown, Uptown, TMC, etc).

This is where a multi-tiered system really comes into play. Fortunately, Dallas is already doing a great job linking up its many centers, and a high-speed regional / intercity main line mainly needs to hit the biggest destinations and connect to the rest of the system.

From an outsider’s perspective it seems that there are three primary destinations that should be covered in order to set the stage for inter-city traffic: Downtown Dallas (which connects you to most of the eastern metroplex through the DART system), Arlington (which contains the biggest tourist draws), Downtown Fort Worth. There’s also value in connecting to D/FW airport, which is one of the nation’s largest and brings in a large number of people who are then connecting to other Texas cities. The challenge is, these destinations don’t line up right for a single train to hit them all efficiently. This leaves us options to consider.

If you’re willing to make the airport connection secondary, you could build something like this:

There are a number of advantages to this alignment. First of all you’re hitting Arlington, which contains a lot of the regions major attractions and isn’t on any of the existing transit networks. Second, you’re providing complimentary service that supports the TRE and DART systems without directly competing against them. This does create a possible transfer to reach the airport, but if there was enough traffic to justify it the rail operator could always route trains that went directly to and from.

If you think connecting to the airport is more important than connecting to Arlington or Fort Worth, you could build something like this:

This route goes from Downtown Dallas to D/FW airport, then continues to the north-central suburbs and ends in Denton. There are two problems with this route, however. One is that it overlaps directly with DART service that’s currently under construction. The second is that it misses the bigger destinations that people from other cities in Texas are going to be interested in traveling to – namely Fort Worth and the major tourist activities in Arlington.

I prefer the first option. When considered as a compliment to the existing transit networks in the D/FW region it works much better than the second alignment.

If we take a step back and look at the new regional service beside the existing commuter and light-rail networks, this is what we get:

As with the other corridors, we’ve now encompassed both high-traffic corridors and extensions into currently underdeveloped areas that provide major TOD potential. On the south side of Dallas we’re creating the future connection to the rest of the state while also serving areas where entire new towns could be built around the rail stops. As discussed in previous posts, this potential to develop new towns along the line is the single most important element in making a private-sector rail system potentially viable.

So what about travel times? Regional service from Downtown Dallas to Downtown Fort Worth could take as little as 30 minutes, and express service could be around 15 minutes. As discussed at length in previous posts, the speed is entirely dependent on the configuration of the track, the acceleration, and the number of stops, but a newly-built system needn’t be constrained by the design parameters of older technology. In other words, it’s possible.

As always I look forward to hearing comments, particularly from D/FW area folks who may have better insight into how a regional/high-speed main line should run through their region!