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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Dallas - Transit Tour
This episode highlights our challenge of exploring Dallas exclusively via public transit. Our journey reveals the good and bad of navigating a major city without a car while incorporating the unique sights of the Dallas landscape.
- Testing DART's capabilities in real-time
- Encountering Dallas's landmarks, including the zoo and Bishop Arts District
- Our experiences with transit frequency and efficiency
- Observations on the lack of direct transit routes and bus connections
- Insights into the history and transformation of Dallas neighborhoods
- Recommendations for future transit adventures and improvements
If you'd like to support the show and help us continue our transit explorations, please consider joining us on Patreon!
Doors are closing. Public transit that's my way to roll On the metro. I'm taking control. Bus stops, train tracks it's my daily grind. Public transit, it's the rhythm of my life. On this episode, we explore Dallas in a day using only public transit. We put the trains and buses of the DART system to the test to see how challenging it is to get around Dallas without a day using only public transit. We put the trains and buses of the Dart system to the test to see how challenging it is to get around Dallas without a car. All of this and more coming up on Transit Tangents. We are in downtown Dallas, Union Station. We're doing Dallas in a day using only public transit.
Speaker 2:We're very curious to see how this is gonna go. We've done Austin, which was pretty good. We've done Houston, which surprised us. Yep, a lot of good train service, a lot of good bus service.
Speaker 1:We just got back from a very chilly Washington DC.
Speaker 2:We did that as well. We've done Salt Lake.
Speaker 1:City, which was also very cold, new Orleans, new Orleans, that was on the hotter side. We're really adding to the list here. So thank you all so much for the support for being able to help get us to all these places. But yeah, kansas City coming up next. But yeah, we're really interested to see what a day in Dallas is like, using only public transit to get around. We'll ride the dark light rail, we'll take buses, maybe some bike share. We'll see throughout the day If we can find the bike share If we can find the bike share.
Speaker 1:We're going to start off here. Here, though, by popping on the red line headed towards the zoo.
Speaker 2:Yep, so we're gonna head towards the zoo, where we'll also see one of the brand new CAP programs, over the highway, and then explore a little bit of South Dallas from there.
Speaker 1:While we get on the train. If you could like this video, we would appreciate it. You can also support the show by subscribing, checking out our merch store or supporting us on Patreon. So we made it to the zoo. We took a quick walk from the train station itself or the light rail station itself.
Speaker 2:To this lovely parking lot, yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And before we get into this lovely sculpture behind us, a couple things I want to point out. I noticed at the light rail stop there were a couple spots for buses to pull in for easy connections there. We're going to get on some buses later in the day, but not yet. But the main reason we came here is Chris really wanted to see this giraffe.
Speaker 2:I have driven past this giraffe so many times, leaving Dallas. I've never actually seen it up close. So now we're seeing this giant like 40 foot tall giraffe sculpture.
Speaker 1:And then another, more legitimate reason even why we walked over here. But, if you look past the giraffe sculpture.
Speaker 2:You see the new park the new highway cap.
Speaker 1:Yep, and we talked a little bit about this in our highway caps episode. We did actually in Dallas at Clyde Warren Park. But yeah, there's a new highway cap being built. You can see some of the like I'm assuming our installation or building that's going on top right over the kind of wall here. We can't really get any closer to get a better view. But interesting to see Dallas investing more in some highway caps.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Austin. Pay attention. My nervous laugh here is in part because, since our cap and stitch episode came out, the vote for the plans was pushed back due to tech stop being behind schedule, which gave the city some extra leeway. Now, though, with federal grant programs up in the air, I personally get nervous about the city taking on the expense with the potential lack of federal help.
Speaker 2:It is 1140 and we have hit snag number one. From the Dallas Zoo area, we're going to check out the Bishop Arts District Very cool kind of trendy place in South Dallas.
Speaker 1:You would think this being a major transportation stop the zoo there'd be a direct bus from here to there, right, or like a bus that gets you in the right direction, but all of the stuff is saying basically like go up a stop and then take another bus or walk, and all of the options. It's actually ends up being like the same amount of time to walk About 30 minutes total, yeah. So now it is a long walk. So I think we are gonna try doing train to bus.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we'll see how it goes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll keep you posted. So back to the red line.
Speaker 2:So this is not a microphone. So the trains, as we just discovered, are running at about a 20 minute frequency. The next one's in four minutes, the one after that is in 23 minutes and we're not that far from downtown, so you would expect maybe a little bit faster frequency for being a Friday in Dallas, right, hopefully we don't miss any trains.
Speaker 1:All right, so we made it to Tyler Vernon Station, just one further stop down the Red Line. As far as what's around the station, there are a couple things here. We've got a brewery Oak Cliff Brewing A couple food trucks and whatnot.
Speaker 2:Pegasus Reuse, which is like a creative reuse store Gotcha.
Speaker 1:Otherwise not much. It's a lot of single-family homes and things are pretty spread out. There is a bike lane. It is on a road that people are driving a little quick on, but it has got a little bit of separation with their version of like a what do you call them Armillo or something?
Speaker 1:yeah, the zebra dillos, yep, um, yeah, uh. Also of note, we've seen a couple buses kind of pop through and pick people up, so it's definitely like a hub for buses as well. We're waiting for one, but uh, it's about 15 minutes before yep, we have a bus.
Speaker 2:Uh, we have a bus coming in, yeah, about 15 minutes. Uh, we'll grab that one head over to the Bishop Arts District.
Speaker 1:We had a few options for buses, but the 226 would be next to arrive. We got on without issue and we were on our way to Bishop Arts. Despite waiting a little bit for the bus connection there, it did take us kind of right to the section of town we wanted to go here and the bus was efficient and we weren't sitting around waiting or anything like that.
Speaker 2:So total trip time from the train station to Bishop Arts is about eight minutes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so can't really complain too much about that either and I think even with the weight we probably did beat our walk time and we would be much tired or Tireder More tired.
Speaker 2:How tired are you now?
Speaker 1:Yes, but we have made it to the Bishop Arts District. Yes.
Speaker 2:This is an area that in the 1920s was developed as a commercial corridor in south dallas. By the 60s 70s this area had declined economically pretty significantly and then there were a lot of efforts in the 80s and 90s to start revitalizing this area and brought us to the district arts that we know today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and as we were on the bus, I could start to see some like new development happening as well, uh, kind of bigger apartment buildings and whatnot.
Speaker 2:so, yeah, Time is 12 49. We stopped in the Bishop's Arts District and grabbed a quick lunch at Veracruz Cafe very delicious, highly recommend if you are in the neighborhood. And what are we doing next?
Speaker 1:Uh, we're gonna pop on another bus headed towards downtown Dallas. I believe it was the 49. I will correct that. If I'm wrong about the bus, it runs about every 20 minutes from here to downtown, so we'll go try to catch that and see you all in downtown Dallas.
Speaker 2:We are making a slight correction. As we walk around the Bishop Arts District we realized the Dallas Street Cars Southern Terminus is right here in the district and we can take it straight back to downtown, basically back to our hotel right at the Union Station.
Speaker 1:The Dallas Street Car is a two and a half mile line that runs from Union Station to Oak Cliff, right near the Bishop's Arts District. It opened for service in 2015 and was funded in part by a Tiger Grant, if you're interested in learning more about the grants.
Speaker 2:We talked about them a little bit in a very early episode. We learned something new. I didn't know what the term was for the little thing that goes up and touches the power lines above a streetcar. Turns out it is called a pantograph.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and while we were on this Dallas streetcar here, uh, halfway through the ride the driver actually had to get out to go like verify that it went up. Um, it seems like half of this doesn't have the electric connection up top and it must run on battery for part of it, and then the other half it's running with the pantograph up. Uh, getting a current. Um, we also just ran into someone who lives here in dallas and said he'd never seen this before, so I think we just found a pretty niche, uh, transit item that maybe isn't super heavily used.
Speaker 2:Maybe it is, I don't know, it could be we, so we're using this halfway like midday um, after lunch, you know, a lot of people are still at work and so maybe it is more popular for commuters going between Dallas, downtown Dallas and, like, south Dallas.
Speaker 1:But there were maybe four people who jumped on while we were on, which isn't abnormal for the middle of the day, I mean, like it's kind of a random time, um, but yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, and although good experience you got like a nice view through south Dallas, there's a lot of development, uh that has sprung up along this uh line.
Speaker 1:So it has all of the right elements to be well used. Totally one issue with it and kind of everything we've seen so far today. We haven't been hampered too much by it but like the frequencies on everything, it's been every 20 minutes on everything that we've ridden all day, 30 minutes on one of the buses I think we just like lucked out on it. So so far as far as frequencies goes, this is kind of in the lowest frequencies of any city we've been to so far.
Speaker 2:I think trains in central downtown are going to be a little faster, but we're going to take a walk through downtown and find out Walking through downtown and a notable thing that happened here, JFK was actually assassinated.
Speaker 1:Someone shot him from outside of this building, so avoid this area in a convertible. Chris is shaking his head Too soon.
Speaker 2:Too soon.
Speaker 1:Lewis. Too soon, too soon.
Speaker 2:Also near the JFK site. You can take the train or the bus a couple blocks over and you'll be at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum Also a good thing to come check out in downtown.
Speaker 1:We are currently walking down Pacific Street. This is kind of the main trunk line where all of the light rails that cut through downtown all run down.
Speaker 2:What's really great about the street is that they've dedicated it to the light rail, so you can ride a bike down, you can sort of walk down the street, but for the most part there's no cars, no buses, it is just the light rail using Pacific.
Speaker 1:Avenue and it seems like that actually has decent signal priority doing all, going over all the cross streets and that sort of Thing which we love to see absolutely On this main trunk line along Pacific Street that we've noticed the frequency of the trains Feels much higher. Yeah, a lot of that is because this is where multiple of the train lines are kind of converging in blue, the orange, the red, think the yellow.
Speaker 2:He meant green, all of them sort of converge here.
Speaker 1:Right, it feels like more like every five minutes or something a train is going by in either direction. So love to see that in the area. Cool, all righty, we are here in Thanksgiving Square, great little public space right in downtown. You've got some nice areas to sit, some fountains and things like that. It's shady, which in the summer is kind of cool.
Speaker 2:It's like a myriad of religious themes it's not one set religion here and there's kind of this spiral cathedral-esque building behind us. It's very pretty, very tranquil space that was built around 1964 in downtown Dallas, nice.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to hypnotize everyone into more transit, more transit. Hopefully, sean Duffy, bring positive words about trains, build more of them. From here we are going to pop back on the train, we're going to get on the green line and take that towards deep ellum. Yes, one thing that I think is a little interesting is, like the, the rolling stock is pretty aged, I will say. Not great for accessibility either. You have to walk up a flight of stairs getting on any of these. Um, but in this trip and in another trip where we've been here, they do go very fast, much faster than most light rails, I will say yeah.
Speaker 2:So we took the train from downtown. We're just kind of to the east of downtown in a section called Deep Ellum Yep, really popular neighborhood. It is kind of the definition of a gentrified neighborhood in Dallas. Yep, you can actually find out a lot about the history of this neighborhood through the Megan Kimball book City Limits where she talks about the highway expansion that kind of ripped through this neighborhood. But we did take the green line over here and what we have noticed now that we're here is that the green line is running at a 20 minute frequency, and again it is 220 on a Friday, you know. So we would think there'd be a little higher frequency here, a lot of people kind of going home, maybe a little early on a friday, but the 20 minutes was a bit surprising, right?
Speaker 1:and I mean, is it peak hours yet? No, but like I don't know. That's dallas is a what is this? The help major city in the us? Like it's like the seventh largest city in the us it's in the top 10 largest cities in the country.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's like around number seven.
Speaker 1:I Every 20 minutes in this proximity to downtown is not great.
Speaker 2:No, but we are close to downtown. It's an easy train ride. We just wish they were maybe like 10 minutes, yeah. So one thing I love about Deep Ellum is that you have this sort of robot sculpture theme very like silver, guitar-esque looking robot and all these little silver birds around him while he's playing his guitar. It's actually art that was commissioned by DART, which is the Dallas Area Rapid Transit, and it's great. It's a great thing to come and stopped in Deep Ellum, had a nice little coffee at Merritt Coffee, which if you're from Austin, you'll also be very familiar with Merritt. Walked around Deep Ellum for a little bit and then we jumped back on the Green Line and took that over to Fair Park.
Speaker 1:Yes, fair Park is another stop on the Green Line and this is also where this was the second park in the city of Dallas, second public park. It's looking a little sad right now. They're doing some draining of ponds and whatnot, but I can imagine it in all of its glory. It's probably beautiful.
Speaker 2:Fair Park is home to the famous Texas State Fair, where you have many different expositions, from technology and transportation, farming, all kinds of things, not to mention the famous Midway and the place where I think deep-fried Oreos might have been invented Basically, anything deep-fried you can find here. There's also museums and all kinds of other things to see. This became the sort of epicenter of this became the sort of epicenter of Texas and Texas things and expositions because in 1936, we had the Texas Centennial celebration right here, where all of these Art Deco buildings that we're surrounded by were built, and since then they've been maintained and restored and continue to be used for Texans. Today, maybe we'll see a Bicentennial coming up here.
Speaker 1:That would be pretty cool to see. Another fun fact about this stop is that Chris had like a brief one month stint. Maybe we'll see a bicentennial coming up here. That would be pretty cool to see. Another fun fact about this stop is that Chris had like a brief one month stint, living in Dallas and commuted through here quite a bit I did.
Speaker 2:I lived in Dallas for one month, out of Carrollton, and I would commute from Carrollton to Fair Park to practice for the Dallas Opera.
Speaker 1:I just learned this moments ago also, so I'm as shocked as you are.
Speaker 2:Do you want to belt out a couple lines for us? Oddly enough, I was a rock climber in the Dallas Opera of Everest. We'll throw up some photos if you're watching, so you can actually like see what the stage and everything look like. It's kind of ridiculous but fun little fact, totally.
Speaker 1:Yes, it is giving very abandoned, vibes.
Speaker 2:This is like a section of Disney that people just stop going to.
Speaker 1:All. The eeriest part is the flagpoles with no flags on them, and you're just hearing the thing ringing against it. Anyway, we are headed back to the Green Line Station at Fair Park. We were going to be taking a bus up towards SMU. It seems like, though, the fastest route is going to be to take two trains.
Speaker 2:Two trains and do a transfer. You either had to transfer a bus or a train. The bus is about 41 minutes, the train is about 25 minutes or so. Right, so it is 3.30 now. We're kind of fighting the setting sun, so we're going to hop on the train and move a little quicker.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the setting sun, so we're gonna hop on the train and move a little quicker, yeah, and in general, there's just been a lot less buses, yeah, that are frequent, like we had seen in houston, um, and in other texas cities, honestly, but obviously, like san antonio and austin don't really have real rail options for the most part, so, um, it makes sense, but, uh, the good news, though, is that you know the rail does move fast and everything but, for the lack of frequency on the rails here.
Speaker 1:It feels like there probably should be more bus options that run fairly parallel. I don't know, yeah also.
Speaker 2:uh, if you are watching, if you're listening, you haven't seen this, but if you're watching, if you're listening, you haven't seen this, but if you're watching, you may have noticed I have a hoodie on that says Transit Tangents with our logo on it. It is super comfortable, it is very nice in this chilly weather and it can be yours not this one, but you can buy this on our new store, which you can get on the link to the YouTube video. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And there's more than just sweatshirts. There too, there's t-shirts, all sorts of stuff like that, hats and socks, yep, and in addition to Patreon, that is another way you can help support the show if you want to help do so. Absolutely Slight change of plans. Yeah, so the train was gonna be 19 minutes before the next one. Obviously not great, but we found a series of two buses that will hypothetically get us there faster.
Speaker 2:We'll jump on the 23, which picks up right here in front of Fair Park, and then we will transfer to the 3, which will take us straight to Mockingbird Station, which is next door to SMU.
Speaker 1:So fingers crossed that the transfer goes well.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Hello, hello, thank you, thanks. You're a transit agent. I'm sorry. What do you serve me? Oh, transit tangent. So we do a podcast. It's all about public transit. So we go to cities and we ride around and then talk about how good or bad or like what the experience is, like that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Hopefully people are getting off of it. This is the bus we need, but will you get across the street first, watching it potentially creep by? Oh boy, oh boy, yeah, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, yeah, that ain't going to go long. Well, maybe this is where we're running. Oh, the light is changing. Is anyone getting off? They're just right by it. It's getting stuck with the light up there. We can try. Do you want to try or no? I think we're cooked. So the bus we were on got stuck at an intersection right here at the light. For a second we had to take the bus over the intersection, get off and then on foot cross back over, and while we were sitting at the light, the bus we going the opposite direction uh went by and we missed it by like seconds.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, but we're gonna try to catch another bus in about four minutes, which means we need to get back on the other side. Okay, so we should go.
Speaker 1:That would be yeah, because otherwise it's going to be like almost 20 minutes for the next bus yeah, uh, the one oh. Although I see a bus coming, could it just be on. No, it's a school bus.
Speaker 2:The 1-05 should pick up right here, okay.
Speaker 1:So we're going right back to the bus stop. We were just at First little snafu of the day.
Speaker 2:That was a journey. Yes, we tried to get to the three bus. We got caught by the traffic signal. Didn't make it had to go back across the street to wait for the 105. And then we waited longer than expected for the 105 because there's just no signal priority. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was a very poorly timed light. Yeah, we watched our bus sit through at least four cycles of the traffic light with three other. There are three buses sitting at the light basically the whole time waiting to go, and that's like a downfall of not having any dedicated lanes for a bus and a downfall of buses in general, versus like rail or something like that where you're not having to deal with the traffic and everything.
Speaker 2:But we did finally make it to mockingbird finally made it to mockingbird station at about 4.18 is when we uh, when the bus landed here, landed, rolled in, stopped. Yes, uh, mockingbird Station is really cool. It's very nice like urban development, very transit oriented development. You have the red and the orange lines that come through here. I think the blue as well, maybe.
Speaker 1:I'm not sure. We'll look at it, yeah.
Speaker 2:We have multiple train lines that come in through here. You have multiple bus lines that converge here. You have the hike and bike path as well through here. So just a lot of connectivity, and it's also next door to SMU Right.
Speaker 1:And we're going to, I believe, walk over towards SMU. This is also where George W Bush's Presidential Library is, at SMU, so we're going to go take a little bit of a walk from over here and check some of that out.
Speaker 2:So if you do a recall back to our cap and stitch program episode, we talked about caps versus stitches. What we're standing on right now is really a stitch and what that means is that it is a cap over the bridge that doesn't extend like you have parks on it, but it does have a wide boulevard, really wide sidewalks, and makes the crossing of the highway a little better yeah a little better in this case, it's still pretty.
Speaker 1:You do get some plantings here, uh, but you got the texas turnaround in the middle of it here too, which makes it a little less appealing.
Speaker 2:I feel like it doesn't feel like the most welcoming way to cross the highway, but it is still better than what we currently have in Austin and it's still better than what most communities have crossing an interstate.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and not everyone will necessarily agree with this, but personally, depending on how much money something like this costs, I'm not sure that I'd almost rather see the improvements be on either side of it. And just like I don't know, the having the extra width here, what is it actually doing? I don't, I don't know. I think you disagree with me. Probably I do disagree with you.
Speaker 2:I think I think in places like this it's a good use case SMU, the campus that we're sort of walking into. It crosses both sides of this highway and it does provide a wider, safer Avenue for students to pass. It also provides a higher capacity pedestrian way for people to cross, so there are benefits to it there are.
Speaker 1:My counter would be it's about 4 pm, right? Yeah, there are parts of the college campus on both sides of the highway here and capacity is not an issue doesn't seem to be an issue. Okay and fair point but I, you know that makes sense. Um, I think a uh. The other interesting element here, too is, just like a pedestrian only bridge over this. Actually connecting directly to the train station as well as having the added benefit of going to the other side of campus feels like a more appropriate step, but I agree.
Speaker 2:I don't know Absolutely. I think there'd be an easier way to connect students to the metro than what's currently presented here the Mockingbird Station. We made our way across the stitch and we're now on SMU's campus at the George H I'm sorry the George W Bush Presidential Library.
Speaker 1:Chris went in to grab some water and has the George W Bush water.
Speaker 2:I have official commemorative George W Bush water. Some, if you go back and listen to some of his speeches, would say he may be a liberal president, given the current political climate.
Speaker 1:You know Radical far left George W Bush Beep. From here we're gonna walk around the SMU campus a bit and then-.
Speaker 2:Try to get back to one of the stations to catch the McKinney streetcar.
Speaker 1:Yes, all right, so we were going to try to catch a bus from SMU. From the other side of SMU from the highway. From the highway, it basically seems like any of the buses to SMU just leave SMU and go back to the Mockingbird Station, which we were at, which for a college campus with 12,000 students on it and faculty and everything feels like not a campus that is very well served by transit.
Speaker 2:It really doesn't. So we're sort of being forced to go back to the train line, which is fine for our purposes. But if you were trying to go, you know, maybe a little bit southwest of here, you're really struggling to be able to get there efficiently.
Speaker 1:Yeah, to get a lot of places from here, you basically just have to go to. You have to cross the highway, either on a bus or walking to that station and then go where you're going. Yeah, not ideal, not ideal. So we're going to do that and we're going to hopefully head down to City Place and try to catch the McKinney Streetcar, which is like one of the more historical streetcar lines here More historic restored streetcar.
Speaker 1:Yep, we boarded a train at Mockingbird Station without issue and headed into the tunnel towards City Place. City Place is the only underground train station currently operating anywhere in the state of Texas. It is on a three and a half mile section of track that is tunneled between Mockingbird and downtown Dallas. The station is about 120 feet below ground At the surface. There are bus connections as well as the terminus for the McKinney streetcar.
Speaker 2:Here's more info on the streetcar and what's really amazing is that at this station, right outside the doors, is a turntable like an old school turntable that actually spins the streetcar around and lets it face the other direction and literally we like walked out.
Speaker 1:we went up all the escalators and everything and it happened to be turning around right as we were getting out.
Speaker 2:So we got to Pretty amazing to see.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and it was, like you know, very old school train. Yeah, and it was, like you know, very old school train. We actually got to like read a little bit about the history of the specific train car we were on and kind of rattled our way through the neighborhood into downtown.
Speaker 2:I almost said downtown Austin Downtown.
Speaker 1:Dallas I forgot where we were for a second, downtown Dallas, where we are currently now at Clyde Warren Park.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and my impressions of the McKinney Street car. So what you should understand is it is not part of the DART system. Yeah, so this is something that is independent and it's actually this streetcar's been back in service since the 80s. It was out of service for about 33 years, where the streetcar specifically the one we were on used to store hay bales. What's really cool about this is it can provide a sense of transit if you're just trying to get, maybe, from uptown back into downtown. Right, but it seems a little more novelty and touristy than it is real transit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, most of the people on board seemed like they were just riding it for fun, which is kind of what we were doing. But there was a woman who came off the same train we did who asked the driver hey, does this go by Walgreens? And he was like, yeah, it does go by Walgreens. So she came on and she wrote it to run to Walgreens the rest of the way. So that's really helpful for her, Totally.
Speaker 2:And what's also really cool about this is that the train line's been running for about 35 years and it's not publicly funded. It is funded by donation, which is really, really amazing that they're able to keep this really cool amenity for the community up and running just by those donations.
Speaker 1:So, like I briefly said at the start of this section, here we're now in Clyde Warren Park. If you're an avid listener slash viewer of the show, you know we've been here before. We did an entire episode on highway caps and stitches, covering the one here in Dallas, one in Seattle, one in DC, as well as talking about the future of potential caps in Austin, texas.
Speaker 2:And now we've visited two of the caps, three of the caps that we talked about. We also talked about the other one in South Dallas.
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely so yeah, and we were right. Recently we're in DC. I was like what other one are we going to do? So, yeah, good to be back here at Cloud Worm Park again. I think this is like one of the better examples of highway caps around. But if you're interested in it we talked at length about it then so we'll just put a link there for folks and won't put you through it again now my key takeaways.
Speaker 2:while, yes, the system here is quite extensive and you can get many, many places, the frequencies aren't convenient.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was kind of the issue all day, like I compared to Houston, compared to San Antonio, compared to Austin, compared to the only one where this is, you know, new Orleans. I feel like we ran into some frequency issues as well, but I thought the frequencies were going to be better, about 20 minutes on average. There was nothing faster than 20 minutes.
Speaker 2:I'm sure there's express buses somewhere or rapid buses that we haven't.
Speaker 1:We didn't find them on our route. We didn't encounter them today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but the general routes we were taking, which maybe aren't the most common routes people would take, Totally Definitely were at 20-minute intervals. So if it's a really you know, not popular line, unused line, then 20 minutes may be fine.
Speaker 1:To me, the biggest shock was the fact that the light rail stayed at 20 minutes per line all day. We were even on it around rush hour when we got off in City Place. At what time is it? Right now? We are here 6.06. 6.06. So we were at City Place about an hour ago, around 5 pm, which is the time frame you would have more service running, and it wasn't so.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think if you're on a trunk line or like one of the lines that have multiple transit lines running through it, the frequency is not as big of a deal, because if they're each running at 20 minutes you're gonna catch one about every five to 10 minutes. That's fine. But if you are outside of that zone, that's when it becomes a little bit more of a headache to try to catch.
Speaker 1:Totally the only other thing I would say, just in the routes that we encountered, a lot of the ways to get around on a bus without doing a transfer. It was very much like right into downtown and then right out of downtown, yep uh. You had to get creative. You wanted to do kind of point to point on the outskirts, which in houston, for example, and even in san antonio we were finding those more cross-town routes houston.
Speaker 2:We had no issue trying to connect those points right um in dc. We don't have those issues, austin, you know it's a little tricky, but you don't have as many issues, but it did seem like a lot of the transit was centralized to Dallas and centralized to the dark lines. Right, yeah, yeah so, but with all that, there's definitely more to Dallas that we didn't get to. So please, if you have suggestions for others who would like to see Dallas in a day using transit, please put those in the comments.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, let us know what we missed, and we've talked about Dallas in the past too, so we'll link some past episodes where we've met with folks from Data. We're also, when we're recording this now, doing an event tomorrow with Data, which will be another sort of episode at a certain point here. So check that out. If you want to support the show, to get us to more cities, like all the ones we've been to so far, the best way to do so is to support us directly on Patreon. If you're on Patreon, you also get access to episodes early. You get access to our members-only Discord, all sorts of stuff like that. In addition to that, we've also got the new merch store, where you can get sweatshirts, regular shirts, socks, hats, all sorts of stuff in there and more things to come.
Speaker 1:Yeah, those are all great ways to help support the show, to make sure that we can continue to keep doing this. But yeah, with all that being said, this was Dallas in a Day using only public transit. Thank you all so much for watching and enjoy the rest of your.
Speaker 2:Transit Tangents Tuesday. I'm saving that dough. Public transit's where it's at Watch me go.