It was last fall. After nearly 10 years out of
I haven’t ridden the Denton-Dallas A Train, but I have seen it, and it’s quite impressive. It’s no wonder it’s gaining in popularity.
I HAVE driven on I-35. Groannnnnnnnn…
What makes it worse is there isn’t just an I-35 East. There’s an I-35 North, South, East, and West, four directions at once, or so it seems. I suspect you have to be a North Texas native to figure it out.
Denton’s a helluva nice town, I should add. A great walkable downtown section with lots to do and see, and the old courthouse is wonderful. Tour the inside and you’ll feel like you’re in a John Wayne western!
ANOTHER POINT OF VIEW:
Friday, June 10, 2016 at 11:21 a.m.
By
After reading the storys’, I feel he has dammed DART with faint praise. It reads to me that he does’t think the light rail is cost effective. But he doesn’t give an alternative. Nor does he state the cost of adding more lanes to alleviate traffic congestion. So I ask what point is he tring to make? Also who is the author?
I agree. He only states percentasges. But ridership has increased greatly as has all commuting. Light rail, certainly in Dallas, has benefited the car drivers as well as the passengers and removed the necessity of taking lots more land for more lanes and roads.
There are other issues he doesn’t cover either. Several companies downtown, purchase and give out DART passes to employees as a perk. Also, I would almost never go to downtown Dallas and spend money if it wasn’t for DART. Same with the State Fair and visits to the ZOO. DART makes each outing more convienient and cheaper.
He fails to mention intermodalism, how you can purchase a Regional Pass and use it to traverse…1. DART light rail and city buses, 2 Trinity Railway Express, 3. The Fort Worth T City Buses. In effect for $5 I can travel from Plano all the way to the Fort Worth Stockyards (what is that 50-60 miles?). There is no way I could get there cheaper using any other mode. DART is not just limited to Dallas there is a Partnership with Fort Worth that extends the system to Fort Worth using the Trinity Railway Express and a regional pass. The author implied the rider is just stuck with Dallas and they are not.
Dammed with faint praise because tried as he might, he couldn’t find a legitmate complaint to bury it, which he wanted to do from the word go.
Published: June 13, 2016 4:00 pm
A DART light rail train pulled into the Pearl Street Station in downtown Da
Yes this is more balanced and accurate. Let me explain in more detail so it makes more sense. Texas does not have a State Income tax. It instead gets it’s taxes from Property Taxes and collection of the state sales tax. What this means of course is North Texas suburbs especially tend to favor Shopping Centers, Entertainment Venues, Restaurants…anything that generates a sales tax. There are pros and cons to this which can be discussed in another thread. One pro is that most Texas cities are heavily PRO BUSINESS in their approach. One con is there is too damn many shopping centers. Anyways, each city has the election to spend a full penny of sales tax collection on DART or they can spend two half penny’s split between Economic Development (thats blowing taxpayer money to incent business to locate to a particular city) AND the other half penny goes to performing arts, public art displays etc. The reason the DART Red Line stops at Plano is because the City of Allen the next suburb North does not want to pay to join DART. Allen being a suburb of only 85,000 compared to Plano’s 250,000+ believes it can free ride the DART system as it is small enough to sponge off the suburbs that are paying for it to the South. Furthermore, though they are eager to hide it, the Allen City Council believes that if DART is extended North it will allow the undesirables in. Now some will interpret that as racist but I would not go that far since Allen is a starter home community for the most part and is very racially diverse (most subdivisions are pretty well racially mixed). So I have no idea what is driving that second fear among the City Council, it’s not a race thing obviously…is it a socio-economic thing? Not sure on the latter because Allen still builds low income and Senior housing willingly and it doesn’t ghetto-ize the location of either.
BTW interesting and off topic side note here. Denton allows residents the option of raising chickens on their land so more than a few Denton residents have small Chicken Coups on their residential lots that allow them to eat fresh eggs each morning for breakfest as well as the occasional Fresh Chicken. How many other large cities would allow that in the United States?. It is pretty noisy though when the Sun rises and all those Roosters start to shriek.
Seems the folks who ran the Texas Interurban from from Dallas to Denton between 1923 and 1932 were just ahead of their time. TI cars ran on the same MKT line used by the A train.
I’ll say this much and no more. If you’re a Dallas resident it’s worth taking the train to Denton for a meal at Cartwrights Restaurant, center of town of Denton across from the courthouse. WOW, is that place good!
Texas does not have a personal income tax. However, it has a franchise or margins tax on business income or revenues, which are part of the income stream. The tax has the characteristics of a business income tax.
As per the Texas Comptroller of Accounts, "the tax is based on the taxable entity’s margin. Margin equals the lowest of four calculations:
The calculations are a function of revenues less cost of goods sold or a qualifying expense.
Most tax specialists agree that it is an income tax, although people in Texas don’t want to call it that because the term income tax in an anathema. </
[quote user=“JPS1”]
Texas does not have a personal income tax. However, it has a franchise or margins tax on business income or revenues, which are part of the income stream. The tax has the characteristics of a business income tax.
As per the Texas Comptroller of Accounts, "the tax is based on the taxable entity’s margin. Margin equals the lowest of four calculations:
The calculations are a function of revenues less cost of goods sold or a qualifying expense.
Most tax specialists agree that it is an income tax, although people in Texas don’t want to call it that because the term inc
Most small businesses don’t pay the franchise or margin tax.
“Texas does not have a personal income tax. However, it has a franchise or margins tax on business income or revenues, which are part of the income stream. The tax has the characteristics of a business income tax.”
The last sentence contains the operative phrase: “characteristics of a busines income tax.” There is no confusion of terms. The phrase is pretty clear.
Most of the CPA’s in the Texas Society of Certified Public Accountants that I know believe the margin tax behaves like an income tax irrespective of what it is called.
The margin tax hits the income stream before the bottom line, which makes it different from the federal income tax and/or most state income taxes. However, without any revenue or the items defined in the code, there would be no tax.
As per the Comptroller of Public Accounts, in 2015 the Texas Franchise (Margin) tax generated $4.7 billion for the state’s coffers. It was just 4.3 per cent of total revenues.
My comments should not be construed to mean that I favor the tax. I would eliminate all business taxes, since they are, for the most part, not paid by the business. Most business taxes - those paid by the business on its operations as opposed to those collected by the business for the state - are passed through to the customer in the price of the good
I am a little confused. Is this thread about the Denton ‘A’ Train or DART or both?
I TRIED to make it a thread about Route 35 North, South, East, and West but nobody bit!
I though I might have heard SOMETHING from some North Texas residents!
SINCE THE A TRAIN CONNECTS WITH DART, I DID NOT WISH TO START A NEW THREAD FOR THE ADDED INFORMATION.
Well the Denton line has only 2500 riders a day acrording to this Months Trains Mag Commuter Artical
The Denton County Transportation Authority (DCTA) ‘A’ train runs from Denton to Carrollton, a distance of approximately 21 miles, with a transfer point at Trinity Mills for the DART Green Line trains to Dallas. It serves five stations. During the week it operates approximately 60 schedules - 30 southbound and 30 northbound.
The ‘A’ train consists of low-floor Stadler GTW 2/6 passenger rail vehicles that can seat 104 passengers and allow for 96 standees. The cars can accommodate wheelchairs and bikes.
In 2015 the ‘A’ train carried approximately 555,000 passengers or roughly 18 per cent of DCTA’s estimated 3,000,000 passengers.
System wide – includes buses and trains - the number of passengers carried by DCTA increased approximately 7 per cent in 2015 compared to 2014. The number of passengers on the “A” train in 2015 was down 2.3 per cent from 2014. Most of the decrease, according to the DCTA, was due to flooding on the southern portion of the line.
The fare box recovery for the ‘A’ train in 2015 was 6.15 per cent, while the recovery for the bus system was 42.73 per cent. The operating subsidy for the rail passengers was approximately $1.50 per passenger mile or $22.17 per passenger. Depreciation and interest, as well as miscellaneous charges, would increase these numbers.
This information can be found in DCTA’s 2015 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report.