Why are Texas interchanges so tall?

My neighborhood was an example: A defunct theater behind our multi-unit house was sold to a developer, who built a massive residental building there. Our alderman had promised that new residential developments would be required to include parking with the sale of a unit. That was a lie.

As a result, many of the new residents decided that instead of buying a parking space in their building (where they WERE available), they'd just park on our streets... where we HAD to park because we had no other option. So now our standard of living took a huge hit, because we could no longer come home from work or the grocery store or other trips, and park and go into our homes. We had to circle the neighborhood in ever-larger radii for hours per week looking for parking. Real fun at 1 a.m... in the winter.

I don't know why you think there are fewer amenities here than in the US. What specific amenities do you think are lacking?

a 15 minute walk from me there are public baths(free, including the amazing Limmat river with crystal clear water), hiking(free), amazing bars, night clubs and restaurants.

Take a look at the route for the Red/Orange lines on DART. Tell me which stations get the axe to make that spacing. Do we kill Downtown Plano or Cityline? Do we kill the stop with the easy bus transfer to the Richardson library and city hall? Do we kill the station next to the massive apartment complexes and the concert hall and office park at Galatyn? Or all the mixed use at Spring Valley? Do people lose access to the hospital and medical facilities near Forest Ln? No more shopping at all the stuff at the Shops at Park Lane and NorthPark mall? Do SMU students lose access to the network by taking away Lovers Ln? Forget all the mixed use at Mockingbird? Tell me, who gets the axe? And you really think we're going to keep ridership up if we eliminate the stop at the hospital or eliminate half the apartment complexes on the path?

The only easy stops I see to eliminate are the ones downtown where it's acting like a streetcar. There were plans for a "D2" project to move these lines underground and change the number of stops.

And all of this is also still assuming there is the bus connections to take you East/West, because there's still so much you miss at each stop on just the train alignment a few miles either direction.

Where does the bus go? If you have dense city cores with business, commercial, and shopping it makes sense.

Living near Austin, I could take a bus to a place like the domain and have shaded walkways where I could walk to most shops without dying of heat stroke.

If I'm not going to the domain, I'm looking at businesses with huge parking lots strung along stroads. Walking from the bus drop off to a store might just kill you on a day like yesterday where it was 108F, and parking lot temps are closer to 130F.

Also getting to where you want to go over the huge spread out cities may involve waiting for 5 or 6 different busses.

And then hopefully your park and ride is being watched and you're windows aren't broken out.

My in-laws live in Irving, near the Ritz (ex-Four Seasons). The only thing they would ever consider using DART for would be the Texas State Fair (including the UT/OU game), and only because the parking is so expensive and so far away if you drive down there that the time penalty is much smaller.

Then you have the facts on the ground that probably are older than DART: the North Lake College station is a perfect example of bad transit design, as the station is at the edge of the property while the buildings are centered. You could just as easily (with perfect foreknowledge) have put the buildings right next to the station and used the back of the property for parking lots, which adds almost no time to driving but makes transit much more appealing (as it is, those who disembark there have to walk across the entire parking lot to get to the school).

Even worse, the University of Dallas station that has almost no pedestrian access at all. It would take ten minutes walking just to get to the other side of the highway because of the convoluted route you would have to take.

Traffic has to be really bad before public transit with a lot of stops is faster than door-to-door in a car, assuming there's parking at the other end.

You can do many things to make cities more transit-friendly, pedestrian-friendly, bike-friendly. But drivers aren't epsilon-minus semi-morons, and while a car in central Paris or Amsterdam is a liability, in most of Dallas it's at best a minor inconvenience to find parking. And there's absolutely nothing that can ever beat the convenience of a private conveyance. There's a reason really rich people fly private. It goes where you want, when you want.

I took my wife to the airport the other day. There is no public transit that goes to our local airport; you have no choice but to get in a private car or taxi unless you've got serious stamina for walking on fully-exposed public roads (no shade, no rain shield) with no sidewalks and 60+ mph (100 km/h) traffic for tens of miles. On the plus side (for the passenger), I dropped her off more or less right outside the check-in counter and security. She didn't spend more than a minute or two, tops, for all her indoor walking around to the gate.