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Southwest does not fly from DFW if by that you mean DFW International Airport.  It flies from Love Field, which is approximately 11 miles east of DFW.Southwest flies 60 flights a weekday between Dallas and Houston, 26 flights between Dallas and Austin, and 30 flights between Dallas and San Antonio.  Southwest's 737s can carry an average of 149 passengers.  Its load factor in 2007 on its Texas flights was approximately 80 per cent.  This means that it carried approximately 3,595,072 passengers between these three cities during the week.  The number of flights on the weekend and over certain holiday periods varies from the weekday operations.  Add in the passengers carried on the weekends or special holiday flights, plus the passengers carried to its other Texas cities (Amarillo, Corpus Christi, El Paso, Harlingen, and Lubbock), and Southwest carried more passengers in Texas in 2007 than all of Amtrak's long distance trains (3,819,267).  Southwest is only one of the many airlines serving Texas.  When you throw in the passengers carried by the other carriers (American, Continental, etc.) within Texas, as well as into and out of Texas, the airlines serving Texas probably enplaned and deplaned more passengers than Amtrak carried over its system with the possible exception of the Northeast Corridor. Approximately 15 years ago, if I remember correctly, a consortium of investors proposed building a high speed rail line to connect first two and then all the Texas Triangle cities.  I believe the first candidates for the rail line were Dallas and Houston.  Their proposal did not fly - no pun intended - because the state legislature would not guarantee the bonds needed to raise the funds for the project.  They promoters could not raise enough money in the capital markets to float the project.  It died.  Southwest Airlines, amongst others, opposed public funding for the project.  It argued that a potential competitor should not receive government money to complete against a private enterprise.  Supporters of the rail project argued that Southwest was hypocritical.  It gets, so they argued, a hefty subsidy from the federal government because the airports that if flies from were built with municipal bonds, which attract a lower interest rate because they are tax free.  This in turn supports lower landing fees, etc.  The supporters also pointed to the argument that the commercial airlines, including Southwest, don't pay their fair share of the costs associated with the air traffic control system.  These two points are debatable.  The airline trade group, for example, has some reasonable numbers that show airline passengers pay a disproportinately high percentage of the control system costs.The subsidies received by the airlines, even in a worse case scenario, don't match the subsidies received by Amtrak's passengers, especially those traveling on long distance trains.  In 2007 airline ticket buyers received an average subsidy of approximately $5.75 per passenger.  Amtrak's passengers, by comparison, received an average system wide subsidy of approximately $40 per ticket.  The long distance train riders received an average subsidy of approximately $138 per passenger.  In addition to the federal subsidies pay to Amtrak, it gets other subsidies.  For example, the Dallas and Fort Worth stations are owned by the cities.  Amtrak shares space in them with other carriers and pays a nominal fee for its space.  The Dallas Union Station complex is being refurbished.  Yep!  The city will use taxpayer bonds to do the job.  One could argue, I think, that this is a subsidy akin to the airport subsidy referred to above.The airline subsidy numbers were taken from NARP's website and are subject to revision.  Other than adding them up, I have not yet had time to dig into them.  NARP makes a big deal about the subsidies received by airline passengers and highway users.  By comparision, however, the subsidies received by Amtrak's patrons appear to be higher.  I have suggested to them that they should focus on rail passenger issues.
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