It was last fall. After nearly 10 years out of college, I decided to return to school to pursue a graduate certificate in narrative journalism from the Frank W. Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism at the University of North Texas.
My first day of classes, I left work at the Denton Record-Chronicle with more than two hours to drive to my 6:30 p.m. class in downtown Dallas.
Then traffic stalled in Carrollton. An accident had shut down the freeway.
With minutes to spare, I arrived to class frustrated, frazzled and never wanting to make the trip down I-35E to Dallas on a school day again.
That first week of school, I decided I would ride the A-train between Denton and Dallas. Every week, I walked the few blocks from the newspaper office to the downtown rail station, hopped aboard and headed to class.
No longer did I arrive frustrated and frazzled just minutes before class. I had half an hour available to finish a snack and do some more reading before class. I was more relaxed.
My story was similar to that of John Schwindt, a Lewisville resident. On Thursday he rode the A-train for the first time. It was a dry run to see if the schedule gave him ample time to get to Denton and make his classes at UNT. Schwindt is studying emergency administration and disaster training.
“It’s good,” Schwindt said of the rail line. “Not too crowded. It went quick. Better than sitting in traffic.”
It was his first trip, but he said it won’t be his last.
“It’s a lot easier for me to drive to the station and ride to school,” he said. “During the fall, there’ll be a lot more people on 35.”
The A-train has been in operation for five years. To celebrate the milestone, the Denton County Transportation Authority is offering free passes for use on June 18.
The passes, valid only on the A-train, are available for download on Facebook — visithttp://woobox.com/8haw4z.
“The hardest trip to get people to take on transit is the first time,” said Jim Cline, DCTA president. “It’s a great milestone for [the] agency. Once people ride the A-train service, the bus service, they find they like it.
“This is an opportunity to bring some folks in … and help us celebrate.”
Since the A-train’s inception, it’s provided nearly 2.6 million rides to passengers, according to the DCTA. The commuter rail line travels 21 miles making stops between Denton to Carrollton, where passengers can transfer to the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) system and have access to Dallas, neighboring suburbs and the Trinity Railway Express, the rail line between Dallas and Fort Worth.
Looking to the next five years and beyond, Cline said he’d like to see A-train ridership increase. There are plans to add more trains during the midday, extend service in the evenings and opportunities for additional trains on Saturdays, Cline said. In long-term planning is the possibility of a commuter rail line between Denton and Fort Worth, but that would be determined by the DCTA budget, he said.
For two years, Charles Peevey of Justin has commuted from Denton to Carrollton via the A-train. Peevey, a truck driver, said he began using the train to avoid traffic and save money. He boards a 5:30 a.m. train and usually returns back in Denton by evening.
The ride aboard is “excellent,” he said. The environment is “good,” and the workers are friendly, he added. Aboard the train, he has opportunities to do paperwork and simply just relax.
“It definitely saves on money as far as transportation-wise,” Peevey said. “If definitely saves as far as [driving through] construction.”
Most people who commute on the A-train would probably signal those same sentiments. Riding the train, I had opportunities to nap on early mornings and complete readings, homework or a story for the next day’s paper in the afternoons.
“We provide alternatives,” Cline said. “That’s what we do.”
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:
Twenty years ago on Tuesday, Dallas Area Rapid Transit officially got into the light-rail business, opening an 11-mile “starter system” that carried passengers between downtown’s Pearl Station on the north and Oak Cliff in the south (Westmoreland Station on the Red Line, Illinois Station on the Blue Line). Since then, the system has grown to truly prodigious proportions, adding lines and snaking deep into the suburbs.
With 90 miles of track, DART boasts the longest light-rail system in the country, as the transit agency will happily point out. New York’s MTA operates 660 miles of track, the Chicago Transit Authority has 224 miles and Washington D.C.’s Metro has 117 miles, but those are all “heavy rail” in transit parlance and so don’t count when tallying up superlatives.
DART is also happy to cite impressive-sounding statistics that highlight the light-rail system’s transformative effect. According to DART, it has carried 360 million passenger trips, had $8 billion in economic impact and generated $5 billion in transit-oriented development around its 62 stations. More than that, “changing the way the region grows and how North Texans live,” according to DART CEO Gary Thomas.
What DART is less eager to boast about is how much the system cost. You won’t find the information on DART’s website, at least not in a place that a normal human being can find it, which leaves the inexact but good-enough method of tallying up figures from old news reports.
The first 20 miles cost $860 million. Extending the Red Line to Plano and Blue Line to Garland a few years later came to $1 billion. The green line, connecting Carrollton and Farmers Branch with Pleasant Grove, debuted in 2010 with a total price tag of $1.8 billion. The Orange Line opened in 2012 and pushed to the airport in 2014 and seems to have cost somewhere around $1.8 billion.
The grand total, then, is in the ballpark of $5.5 billion — not adjusting for inflation — or .
That figure doesn’t mean much on its own. Assessing transit systems purely based on dollars is misguided and misses the whole point of transit systems. They are a public good that enables the non-trivial (even in Dallas) segment of the population who can’t or don’t want to drive to navigate an urban area. Light rail specifically is an investment in the future, a piece of infrastructure around which a city can partially be reshaped and a modest corrective to the untold billions in public dollars spent to accommodate cars.
Still, it’s worth evaluating how effectively DART and the cities that run it have leveraged the investment, both in terms of how well and how efficiently the light-rail system serves the needs of travelers and whether it’s really created the type of development the agency claims.
UsabilityDART is a hub-and-spoke system. Trains radiate outward from downtown Dallas, and bus lines radiate outward from the train stations.
This setup is pretty damn good for 9-5 commuters who live within walking distance of a rail station or can easily drive to the park-and-ride lots up in Plano, Richardson or the other suburbs. It’s OK for 9-5 commuters who live near a bus line. It sucks for anyone who doesn’t or is trying to get places during off-peak hours, when buses and trains run less frequently, or who commute to somewhere other than downtown.
DART would probably be more useful for more purposes if its service was organized as a grid, with frequent coverage over a less expansive area, but the sprawling hub-and-spoke system was its destiny. DART is funded and governed by a coalition of Dallas and a dozen suburbs, each of which coveted light rail. DART would have faced revolt had it not plastered the map with light-rail, as is currently happening in rail-less Addison.
Accepting that the existing light-rail alignment, or something close to it, was inevitable, the question then becomes how well DART uses the infrastructure it has. The answer is, pretty well.
A 2014 paper out of Florida State University compared DART’s light-rail system with seven peer transit systems: Denver, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Diego and St. Louis. All eight cities came of age in the automobile era (Portland is the outlier thanks to aggressive anti-sprawl policies) and have light rail as the backbones of their transit systems. The data is from 2011, so it doesn’t capture some later additions, but the character of the system is the same then as now.
When the authors look at operational measures, which seek to capture some of the actual experience of using the system, DART does fairly well. It ranks in the middle of the pack for hours and frequency of service. Its fares, however, are relatively low, the two-hour transfer window is relatively generous, and the trains go pretty fast.
Of course, the main reason the trains go fast is that DART stations are 1.3 miles apart on average, 30 percent more than its closest peer agencies and 30 percent more than the one-mile spacing generally considered to strike an optimal balance between speed and accessibility, a symptom of the system’s sprawl.
Cost EffectivenessOf the transit systems reviewed by the Florida State researchers, DART gets the least bang for its buck by a considerable margin. In 2011, it spent $140 million operating light rail, or 77 cents per passenger mile. Sacramento, the second least cost-effective of the group, spent 60 cents per passenger mile. DART has become more efficient since; it’s operating cost had dropped to 68 cents per passenger mile in 2014 despite the advent of the Orange Line and a short Blue Line extension, presumably because of efficiencies gained by having the Orange Line and Red Line double up north of downtown.
The number will improve if DART can start packing more people onto its trains, but …
RidershipTo get some perspective on the 360 million-passenger number DART threw out to tout its success, consider that DART spent two decades to tally the number of passengers that New York City’s MTA sees in six months.
DART ridership has never quite lived up to early expectations. More telling is the fact that, when one controls for the additional stops and routes, ridership hasn’t appreciably grown. In 2004, when the Red and Blue Lines were near maturity, DART counted slightly more than three unlinked passenger trips per vehicle revenue mile, which is a jargony measure for determining how heavily trains are used. (It's the number of times passengers board a train per how many miles the trains travel while in service.) In 2014, the number was 3.2.
That matches with less formal analyses The Dallas Morning News . Total ridership would spike with the debut of a new line, but station-by-station ridership remained basically flat.
More telling, light-rail hasn’t moved the needle on commuting behavior. Packed rush-hour trains notwithstanding, there’s no evidence to show that more people are using transit now than 20 years ago. In fact, census data show the opposite. In 1990, about 40,000 working adults in Dallas County relied on public transit — all buses — to commute to work. By 2000, with 20 miles of track in operation, the number had dipped to 36,925. The most recent data, from 2014, showed a further decline to 32,368. That number leaves out commuters who may only take the train a couple of days per week, and there are obviously other places the train takes riders to, but if light rail had taken off, it would presumably have show up in commuting statistics.
A 2011 paper from researchers at the University of North Texas, the University of Texas at Arlington and elsewhere captures some of the stubbornness of automobile culture in an examination of the impact of transit-oriented development in Dallas. The authors surveyed and interviewed residents of three such developments — Mockingbird Station, downtown Plano and Southside on Lamar – on their travel behavior. Though the residents were more likely than other Dallasites to use transit, the likelihood was still low even though they lived in places supposedly built for transit use. “Cars are much faster than trains,” said one member of a focus group. Another: “I don’t want to take the time to learn how to use the system; too complicated.” A third: “At places you may get jumped or scared if you go to the wrong area.”And these are people who have chosen to live within walking distance of a train stop.
Transit-Oriented DevelopmentWhen the Mockingbird Station development, with its mix of apartments, retail, office and entertainment, opened in the early 2000s just north of where the Red and Blue Lines emerge from the CityPlace tunnel, it was like nothing else in Dallas. At the time, it seemed like a harbinger of a boom in transit-oriented development.
Mockingbird Station is still put forward locally as an example of the transformative development light rail can bring, which is less a testament to the project’s inherent excellence (it’s a good project) than to the fact that much of the hoped-for development never happened, never mind DART’s boast about spurring $5 billion in transit-oriented development.
The $5 billion is probably an accurate enough measure of the things that have been built in the general vicinity of DART stations, but it’s not all that much when spread across 62 DART stations, most of which have spurred no noticeable construction. With some notable exceptions (downtown Plano being the most prominent), many of the stops that have been graced by development either resemble ghost towns (Galatyn Park in Richardson) or are so thoroughly disconnected from the transit stop that they seem to have been placed there by coincidence (the Park Lane development).
GB Arrington, a rail consultant in Portland who has worked with DART on several projects, says that most of what’s been built next to DART stations isn’t transit-oriented development but transit-adjacent development. “That’s a development like Park Lane that’s in the presence of transit but isn’t shaped by the presence of transit.”
Even developments that do a good job of integrating with the train stations aren’t transit-oriented in the traditional sense. With Mockingbird Station, “it’s there as much because of its proximity to the freeway as it is because of its proximity to a DART station.” CityLine, the massive State Farm-anchored development at the George Bush Turnpike rail station in Richardson, makes solid nods to walkability but is also building more parking than required by the city. “The development community wants to have it both ways … They’re selling proximity to transit and they’re selling the ease to park,” Arrington says.
Arrington doesn’t think that will change until Dallas transportation decision-makers become less obsessed with highways.
The Next 20 YearsDART is still pushing to expand the rail network. A $100 million extension of the Blue Line to UNT Dallas is slated to open later this year. Beyond that, the $2 billion Cotton Belt line, which would connect Plano with DFW Airport, is still in the agency's official plan. So are a handful of spurs that would poke into West Dallas and parts of southern Dallas.
Whether DART rail's performance to date justifies a further build-out remains a matter of debate. Carrollton Mayor Matthew Marchant recently , particularly along the Cotton Belt Corridor. Bus Rapid Transit mimics rail in that it has a fixed route, a dedicated right-of-way, and widely spaced stops, but it uses buses rather than trains and it is far cheaper than rail.
The primary drawbacks to Bus Rapid Transit are that buses aren't as cool as trains and that a bus route, which can be moved, doesn't draw in developers in the same way that fixed infrastructure like rail does. But again, light-rail hasn't exactly been a magnet for riders and its economic development potential, Marchant says, has been oversold.
"The idea that if you get a train station you're going to get Mockingbird Station is just not born out by the facts," he says.
The persistence of DART's belief in rail is that the people who make high-level transportation decisions are people like him, who use the train for occasional outings to the State Fair of Texas or a Mavericks game but otherwise get around by car. If they were regular transit users, Marchant thinks they might be more attuned to the needs of everyday DART users.
That said, Marchant thinks the Green Line's arrival in Carrollton has benefited the city and acted as a nice spur to the redevelopment of Downtown Carrollton. So he sees both sides.
It's still possible that DART's rail network hasn't yet had time to fully mature. In a generation or two, commuters exiting dense, transit-oriented neighborhoods and cramming themselves onto packed trains that come every five minutes will marvel at the foresight of DART planners circa 1996. So far, that's hard to see.
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.
Electroliner 1935 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?
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.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
Money was tight, politicians squabbled and suburbs threatened to back out. But in the end, Dallas Area Rapid Transit pulled it off.
On June 14, 1996, hundreds of people huddled along Pacific Avenue and Bryan Street to watch Dallas become the first Texas city with light rail. Families ate cake, listened to live gospel music, laughed at clowns on stilts and crammed into DART’s yellow-and-white train cars.
A series of celebrations beginning Tuesday will mark the 20th anniversary of the inaugural 11 miles of light rail.
When it launched, the system stretched from Oak Cliff to downtown Dallas. DART envisioned that its network would eventually expand to 53 miles.
Today, it’s nearly double that: 90 miles, with 62 stations in eight cities. That spread makes it the longest light rail system in the country.
The regional rail map as pictured in a 1996 DART brochure.
The DART system map today, as displayed on the agency’s website.
Northbound rides stop in Plano and Carrollton, where commuters can connect to Denton on a train operated by the Denton County Transportation Authority.
To the south, DART is building toward the University of North Texas at Dallas. Two stations in southeast Oak Cliff will open in October.
The light rail system reached the eastern suburb of Rowlett in 2012. Two years later, it extended its westernmost terminus to DFW International Airport, which many considered a watershed moment in the region’s transportation history.
How much has all of this cost? More than $5 billion.
Dallas Mayor-elect Ron Kirk reacted as an air horn went off aboard a DART light rail car during a tour in May 1995. (File Photo/Staff)
The long-promised Cotton Belt line that would serve as a west-east link between the airport and Plano keeps getting pushed back for lack of funding. That $2 billion path would include Addison, which is still patiently waiting for a light rail station after paying into DART for 33 years.
Enticing the suburbs to pay into the system continues to be a challenge for the agency. Some of Dallas’ neighbors are reluctant to give up a penny of sales tax revenue for economic development to fund DART, even as they see an increase in the share of commuters who use public transit.
Another problem that lingers: People in North Texas seem just as in love with their cars as they were 20 years ago. A 2014 Dallas Morning News analysis of census data found that the area added more than 358,000 people who worked outside the home from 2000 to 2012. The number of transit commuters went up by only 435.
Nevertheless, overall passenger trips for three transit agencies — including DART — jumped 22 percent between 2000 and 2010, according to The News analysis.
DART says it has made more than 360 million light rail trips since it began the service in Dallas. The agency also points to $5 billion in private transit-oriented developments at or near rail stations.
That kind of development was a foreign concept here in the late 1990s, when a businessman was told he was crazy for starting a mixed-use project next to DART’s Mockingbird Station. At the time, Ken Hughes chose to emphasize his development’s proximity to Central Expressway rather than the light rail.
Today, the eponymous Mockingbird Station is a Dallas landmark and an award-winning piece of real estate combining retail, apartments and entertainment.
But transit-oriented development is not automatic or immediate. At the VA Medical Center Station in east Oak Cliff, empty land and a worn commercial strip flank one side of the tracks. And in downtown Garland, where rail arrived in 2002, apartments took half a decade to develop next to the station.
Meanwhile, projects in Collin County have become models of success.
A DART stop in historic downtown Plano. (2015 File Photo/Louis DeLuca)
Historic downtown Plano — a hip mix of red-brick pavers, antique fixtures, shops, restaurants and apartments — was recently named one of America’s four Great Neighborhoods by the American Planning Association. The group credited DART light rail with spurring the reinvention of “the sleepy, nearly forgotten heart of a farming community.”
In northern Richardson, a DART station has ushered in the $1.5 billion CityLine complex anchored by State Farm insurance offices. CityLine developer Walt Mountford told PBS NewsHour that light rail makes employers more attractive to young workers.
With a population comparable to San Francisco, fast-growing Collin County remains the promised land for DART. Yet cities like McKinney and Frisco haven’t shown much interest, preferring to spend their sales tax revenue on other economic development activities.
The unraveling last year of the paratransit agency serving Collin County gave DART another chance to court the suburbs. It’s providing temporary curb-to-curb bus trips for elderly and disabled riders in Allen, Wylie and Fairview. But McKinney rejected a deal with DART, and Frisco opted for a one-year agreement with Denton’s transit agency.
For now, DART is again focusing its light rail dollars on downtown Dallas. Officials are studying the alignment of a second rail line through the city’s core that would open in 2021.
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. So beats me what is really driving the undesirables fear.
Anyways, construction has stopped in Plano because Allen is too cheap to contribute and it gets away with it because there is no regional mandate to pay for transit it's a voluntary opt-in or opt-out system. Originally Irving via the manificient Dallas Cowboy Owner, Jerry Jones opted out........then it opted in. Allen is feeling a lot of pressure from residents to opt in. The current political line they are using is they are trying to get the state legislature to allow an increase in the state sales tax to allow both the half penny option and the full penny option which of course means increasing the sales tax by a penny or more. So far the State Legislature has firmly stated "no, you pick one or the other, not both". The other suburbs further North have adopted Allen's line on the issue and so you can't bridge over or route the track around Allen either. So thats the rest of the story and the original article is correct the opposition to Light Rail was very stiff until the core system opened and folks saw the development that sprung up around the stations........then it changed to highly positive to where it is now that DART has a blank check pretty much on further expansion and the hold out cities are under heavy pressure by the electorate to join the collective.
Last but not least. My view on the holdout cities is that the delay they have created with DART has forced DART into some deeper thinking on the expansion lines. For example, do they really want to extend DART out to McKinney then points North? Does it make sense to extend Light Rail all the way North to the Red River Valley? Would it not make more sense to use Heavy Rail Commutter to cover points North of Plano due to faster running times and then express the trains into Dallas after they reach Allen? So this is potentially a silver lining of the delay, Dallas gets to do a little more planning with DART.
On the Cotton Belt Line. As discussed in a another thread that line is split into two systems TEXRail which owns it from the DFW Airport West has already started on it's system and acquiring rail cars. From DFW Airport East the line is still called the Cotton Belt Line project and of course Collin County has once again attempt to find a cheaper alternative to just getting all cities on board to pay for it. So they first tried to lure a private developer and operator to the line with the promise of value capture with surrounding land. So far that has not worked and the time is approaching when they too will be forced into making a decision to either find a way to get everyone on board financially to develop the line or just drop it from their development plans. Currently on the Cotton Belt Line they are taking the same BS stance as the City of Allen, they turn around and tell constituents they are trying to get the sales tax raised so that they can get all cities to participate..........which the legislature has said NO to more than once.
So thats the current impasse on DART expansion as well as the Cotton Belt Line.
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.
Rio Grande Valley, CFI,CFII
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: total revenue minus cost of goods sold; total revenue minus compensation; total revenue times 70 percent; or total revenue minus $1 million (effective Jan. 1, 2014)."" 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.
OK your getting Accounting terms and their definitions mixed up here and it is not as simple as you outline in regards to the Franchise Tax because as a small business owner I am in control of what I define as an expense or a revenue in a lot of cases.
I never paid a franchise tax the entire time I ran my restaurant and my returns were always audited and signed off on by a CPA. I produced Revenue but no Margin. I produced Gross Income but no Net Income.
What your also missing in your explanation is how the Commercial Property Tax system works and how most Shopping center Commercial Leases work. Commerical Property Tax, taxes Capital investment into physical assets as well as the value of physical assets straight lined over time as they depreciate. Commerical Shopping Center leases (a good portion of them) take a cut of the margin above a specific earning point.........converting it to an expense. If I hire and pay for myself and or family members I can convert Income or Margin to Expense. Income for me personally but an expense to the business.
So thats why it is called a Margin tax not a Income tax. I can still have Income if I own and run a business but the business can continue to lose money and I can do that very honestly. The owner of the business before me was dishonest and contrary to popular belief it is really difficult for the IRS to catch dishonest small to medium sized businessman because the rules are so entertwined when it comes to Accounting. At any rate the past business guy was charging his car off as a business expense (it was a restaurant remember), his apartment rent (extended reaonsing there) and the salaries he was paying himself and his wife (only if they are at generally accepted market levels is that acceptable). I was more honest than that and so was my CPA who also said it was not correct. However his CPA signed off on that crap and so did the IRS........because he was a small fish and it wasn't worth their time to persue.
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 goods and services sold by the business.
Politically, of course, eliminatng business taxes, especially those labelled as a corporate income tax, would never fly.
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
Possibly that low percentage fairbox recovery statistic is in part due to expenses in flooding recovery?
daveklepper Possibly that low percentage fairbox recovery statistic is in part due to expenses in flooding recovery?
My suspicion, part of it is because you board a DART bus and the farebox is right there and registers with an affirmative beep when you pay the fare. So it's obvious to the Driver if you paid or not. If you have a pass or ticket it still scans the code and beeps.
None of the light rail vehciles have that and your supposed to pay prior to boarding a train in Dallas, plus on the light rail the operator is in a enclosed cabin locked off from the rest of the passengers......they have no clue if you paid or not.
The other part is patronage, I totally believe the A-Train is lightly patronized based on it's starting point is NOT a major station (origination station in a semi-industrial area as well.....low population density). It's starts in the middle of nowhere and ends in downtown Denton, so most of the A-Train trips are originated on the line, very few transfers from DART light rail or other DART lines I would suspect. If they connected the A-Train to a TRE station as an origination point and then allowed inter-line tickets........might score better on ridership. Best idea would be to connect to Cotton Belt Line or TexRail and originate at DFW Airport instead of Carrolton..........which is doable because all three lines will use Stadler rail cars AND I have a suspicion either the Denton line intersects with the Airport line or is reachable via it because I have seen the rail junction near the current terminus.....looks like it does. So maybe in the future they will fix this.
Also important to point out. TRE does not operate on Sunday, it's Saturday schedule is much reduced. Mon-Fri frequencies during the day are also very lopsided towards the morning and evening rush hours. It does not operate like an average METRA line would.........depressing ridership somewhat but also holding costs down.
DART light rail, up to 50% of the system was constructed before the passenger need and years ahead of schedule because they obtained Federal grants over local funding, which also depresses ridership somewhat.
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