Alliance may be in the middle of nowhere, but if we believe its inflated claims, there are 31,355 direct and construction jobs there, with another 68,165 indirect jobs. There is not a single T bus to serve that market. I’ve heard the T DOES plan to run event busses to TMS in the near future.

Take a look at the schedules for transit agencies in other major metropolitan areas and you will find similar scheduling schemes. There are more options during rush hours and near the city center, than during off-peak hours, weekends and holidays. It is not cost effective to run buses and trains every ten, fifteen or twenty minutes when the ridership will be near or at zero. Transit agencies have to weight the value of their service against the cost to run it. If one whiny cyclist wants to take the train to a basic skills class, I doubt the transit agency is going to bend over backwards to accommodate.

Making another cycling related analogy: Timid and novice cyclists demand the installation of bike lanes to, in part, provide them with so-called safe zones in which to ride their bikes. They do not care that doing so usually takes a regular traffic lane and fail to realize that increasing the number of cars in the remaining space will increase congestion and, subsequently, pollution, heat and tempers. The relatively few number of cyclists who would use bike lanes in North Texas will never justify the resource expenditure to install and maintain them. Yet the whiners complain and the politicians pander.

Your examples of TMS and Alliance are equally ridiculous. The limited number of events at the former would never justify the establishment of service routes. It would be a money losing venture. It is more cost effective – both personally and through governmental subsidies and support – for you to take a cab, than to maintain bus service. The same goes for the airport. There are a couple of buses which serve DAL, because it is located within the city limits and there are already buses in the area. Alliance has no similar benefit; it is out in the middle of nowhere. As the sprawl you love so much continues to creep that direction, perhaps that will change in the future. Right now, such complaints are folly.

The racks also extend the service captures basin of every DART bus stop from 1/4 mile to a minimum of one mile… a 400% increase in accessibility.

The T is focused on downtown Fort Worth. Period. There is essentially NO useful service to the northern reaches of Fort Worth (like Alliance Airport or TM Speedway), despite the taxes those areas pay.

Luckily, I have my bike, and that’s as much as I need. I can take TRE as a backbone for extension of range on Saturday recreational rides (it doesn’t run at all on Sundays). It might be a little better over in Dallas, but I have not found trains and buses to be well coordinated schedulewise. Checking out potential alternate bikeDFW Traffic 101 courses to the one that pooped out on me, the best I’ve found was one that I rode 10 miles to a TRE station, then took the train, then rode 10 more miles to the start of the class, arriving 10 minutes before class started. Sunday, I’d have ridden the whole distance to the class, at a time penalty of roughly 20 minutes compared to the Saturday trek. That’s not RAPID transit in my book.

Unfortunately, my story is the norm rather than the exception. I LOVE the TRE, but it’s “toy transit” that I’m willing to pay my subsidized $45 per year to ride. I’ve just never found any Metroplex transit the least bit useful OTHER than the TRE to get anywhere I’ve needed to get. Even when I go to the Dallas main library, I find that the bus leaves a couple minutes BEFORE the TRE arriveds at Union Station. The walk from Union Station to the library is pleasant, but I wonder why DART area patrons put up with such nonsense.