If there’s no compelling, big traffic-generating workplace, school, or civic building to call for an adjoining station, then the helter skelter placement of stations on the competing route based on simpler engineering and lower cost makes good sense.

I still sort of like that blue loop to go past the Convention Center itself as well as its proposed hotel. Looks like ‘it’ could use a second station, especially as the overall system expands to connect to Southwest Airlines’ hub at Love Field and eventually to DFW. And couldn’t that loop work off your favorite purple line with a tweak or two? But then, maybe two stations could confuse out-of-town riders.

Of course, this sort of discussion could be moot. The cynic in me recalls that Joseph Stalin observed that he who counts the votes determines who wins elections (see Bush v Gore further to that point, ha). Or consider the American observation that “Politics ain’t beanbag.”

In this case, one short two-station option competes with three longer options. If the powerful person or body counting the votes wants a longer route farther away from the heart of Downtown, they can add together the votes for those three options and declare that to be the public’s preference. If they want the short route, it will probably win a plurality while the longer route votes are split, thus it can be declared the most popular way to go.

The other issue is that these lines are currently planned to have sections both at-grade and underground, so engineering complications arise between the various options. Also, the purple line is currently estimated to be the least expensive to build.

Yes, that big “it” is the convention center. There already is a convention center station underneath it on the yellow line (which actually serves both the RED and BLUE trains, but is yellow on this map). The primary rationale for the blue line is to swing by the to-be-built convention center hotel, but as you can see it’s just a giant parking lot right now.

I guess I’d vote for the orange line, or the purple one. (And I sort of like the blue loop added to what I gather is a proposed convention center hotel on a vacant lot.) I’d want to bring more territory within a walkable distance of DART, and maybe infill the green line in the future to make for more of a mass-transit type system in the Downtown.

But when I look at the station dots, hunh? The purple variant would have a station near I-45, but none of the others. I’d figure, either the area needs a station, or it doesn’t. So why not put that station on the orange line too? Then move the next orange line station closer to the next station marked on the purple line. Really, why are these stations on the purple and orange lines so helter skelter? The lines are one block apart, but the stations have no obvious relationship to the surrounding streets and buildings, and certainly none to each other.

What is that huge rooftop between I-30 and the blue loop (with the yellow line going under it)? Could that be the Convention Center? Nobody there will be looking for a DART station? Just from looking at the size of the whatever ‘it’ is, I’d put the blue loop station closer to the huge ‘it’. Then I’d want a station on Lamar between ‘it’ and the yellow line.

That gives me potentially five stations using the orange or purple lines with the blue loop. I think they’d work out to be about the same distance apart as those on the yellow line through the heart of Downtown. I could live with four. But only two or three stations doesn’t make sense to me.

Hope this makes sense to you.

On the 3-station routes it appears that the proposed stations would be 1500-2000 feet apart. That seems quite close together already.

But yes, overall it is a system for suburban commuters.

Apparently no consideration was given to a four- or five-station option. More and closer stations would let DART work here like mass transit, moving people within the inner city. But no, it’s a system for suburban commuters and looks like it intends to remain just that.

Few areas like that exist in Dallas. Most of the Metroplex is astonishingly unfriendly to pedestrians, and up until recently even Dallas was not very interested in mass transit. Biking is unpleasant to say the least, and despite the redevelopment of places like Uptown in Dallas or West 7th in Fort Worth there is very few (if any) places in the whole Metroplex that are conducive to living without a car. And the Metroplex is….really big. So that’s like 10 million cars there.

Not disagreeing with the post. I love that Dallas is investing in transit and someday that may convince me to return to the Metroplex. I just wanted to add in a little perspective.