Its incredible how you could read all of that and yet not have any takeaways to adjust your preconceived notions of the reality of life in this area.
> infrastructure has been under-invested in for 100+ years.
This isn't some subway built in 1920 that has barely even had a new train in the past 50 years. The Orange Line opened in 2010. The Red Line in 1996. Some of the stations opened in like 2014. The rolling stock is mostly stuff purchased post-2008. And with the Silver Line, those are all totally new stations on a totally new path with totally new rolling stock. Clearly, you don't know what you're talking about if you're thinking this is stuff that hasn't been invested in for nearly 100 years. But hey, you watched some YouTube videos, so you know exactly what the realities are like living in DFW and know precisely what would solve it.
> more modern and electric
The train in my example is pretty new and electric. Once again, you clearly don't know what you're talking about here.
> an electric train that leaves every 15min is apparently impossible.
The Orange Line and Red Line at its peak is like 7.5ish min intervals. Once again, you clearly don't know what you're talking about here.
> If the buses had their own lanes (not like Texas doesn't have enough lanes) the avg speed of the bus could likely be improved quite a lot.
What, we're going to have 100mph busses going on surface streets or something? Dedicated bus lanes make sense in areas where there's lots of traffic and gridlock, they can do a lot of good there. The bus in the example isn't in one of those places. That road isn't normally very crowded. Forcing the light cycles for the bus would probably save a minute or two, but once again the overall trip is losing by well over a half hour. The overall trip time is worse because you're going to stop that train several times along its path, that bus is going to stop and pick up people. Whereas the car, even if it goes a bit slower because of traffic, is still keeping its average speed at like 50ish mph.
> The whole area seems like its pretty dense with a lot of people
That's the thing. It really isn't. Some people have a several minute drive jus to leave their neighborhood, just to get to the first place where a bus stop would even remotely make any sense to be. Some parts are decently dense, and those are the places where people can and do reasonably take transit as their primary way of travel. But it is definitely not the norm. But hey, once again, you're someone that's watched a few YouTube videos and poked around on Google maps, you definitely know more than the person who's actually lived in it for over a decade.
> It should NEVER take 30 min to swap from one train to another.
Sure. But those trains are going to be largely empty even with the 30 minute service interval. Running them every 5 minutes is burning billions of dollars and lots of energy rolling empty trains. And in the end, look at the math. Shave 15 minutes off the trip. Shave 30 minutes off the trip. The highway path still beats out on time.
> This is just about infrastructure choices
Its far more about city design overall than just "infrastructure". You could replace all the highways overnight in DFW with trains that run every 30 seconds. It'll just increase the overall transit times for all these commuters. Do the math. Look at actual average speeds for whatever design you might propose. It is a fundamental issue with how the cities are laid out and designed from the very foundations. Those average commuters would end up changing trains several times on their commutes. That train is going to have to roll through a bunch of stations and stops in order to actually be useful to the riders. Because its not "mostly people in this area going mostly to that area", its people from an absolutely massive area going to an absolutely massive area.
> Even just with buses on existing roads. As long as you make some room for them and give them the appropriate priority and so on. A lot could be done for not that much money, if people actually wanted.
The thing is, once again, the density and overall design of where I'd want to go. There's a bus stop right outside my house. The routes from there make a decent bit of sense, they go along through a few shopping areas and to the nice downtown Plano area and that bus station there. But I don't often shop at those shopping areas. I go to slightly different ones. So now there would need to either be yet another bus line that goes to each of those different shopping areas, or so much bus service the next bus is just a couple of minutes behind. Otherwise, each of those changes really adds up in time, and suddenly I'm spending 2-3x as much time taking the bus than just driving.
And I'm lucky, I live literally on the edge of my neighborhood. Someone deeper in the neighborhood, it is a 15 minute walk to the main road where the bus is. With the weather right now having a heat index of like 110F. That walk alone is longer than what their drive would be to that store. So then what, we have busses snaking through all the small curvy neighborhood roads? Gee, that'll really make the overall travel time higher. This is why I just completely ignored the travel time for that person to Parker Road Station, you include that and for a lot of people it really blows the travel time up.
And to think, I'm in kind of a small and compact neighborhood for DFW. There's a lot out there with much bigger lots and more separated from the main roads.
So you see how its not just a matter of "well, if only we had more modern electrc trains, and more busses, maybe dedicated bus lanes." It is the fact that person is weighing a 15 minute walk in 110F heat versus leaving their house in an air-conditioned car and getting to their destination in the same amount of time as before they even got on the bus. That bus wait could be 0 minutes, that bus could go practically right where they wanted to go, the bus isn't really stuck in traffic for their route, but because of the layout of their neighborhood and the sprawling nature of all the places they might want to go taking the bus just didn't make sense.
Its far more than just "invest in the infrastructure!" It is changing the mindset. Its building new forms of housing, shopping, and working. And yes, actually building the trains and buying the busses. But we could quadruple the bus fleet of DART and change the train service interval to 10 seconds tomorrow and we'd still have roughly the same ridership. In the end though, I do vote for that more modern city design. I do vote to expand DART. I do vote for bike lanes and better traffic calming. And I do ride transit when it makes sense. I just wish it made more sense more often.