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[quote user="HarveyK400"] I've only visited Texas once, but what I heard and read before and after was a lot of push for better rail service.    [/quote]Texas is as large as France and has about 22 million residents.  So unless you read a lot or met a lot of people while you were here once, you probably did not get a very good understanding of Texas, or its geography, people, politics, social structure, housing patterns, economy, transport systems, etc.The people in the Lone Star state made it clear after WW II that they wanted highways and airways.  They abandoned the trains in droves and never looked back.  They were not dragged into it.  Texans have a habit of thinking for themselves.  With the exception of several remote spots in southwest Texas, every community in the state is within a 1.5 to 2 hour drive of an airport with frequent daily air service.  For those people who cannot or will not drive, most locations are served by reasonable intercity bus service.  Pitching train service to the small communities that are not served by an intercity bus line or for the few people who cannot drive or fly would not work.  The market is insufficient to justify the cost.  And the Texas Legislature is not about to turn loose of the money necessary to build a passenger rail system that would serve at best a very small percentage of the population.  Expanding the highway and airway system in Texas could very well cost more than upgrading a rail line for passenger train service.  But as long as the state can afford to build the additional highway and airway capacity, that is what the people will tell their elected representatives to do.  Noting that few transport planners, as well as public transit officials, do not use transit is a fact.  There is nothing scurrilous about it.  I worked extensively on the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) referendum, which opened the way to build the light rail line in Dallas.  And I rode DART to work for more than 32 years.  I have stayed in close touch with the goings on at DART, including attending many of the Board meetings.  Most of the DART Board members and DART executives do not use public transit on a regular basis.   This is also true of the Capital Metro system in Austin, which is where I live now.  And it is probably true of the transit officials in the other cities in the state with public transit.  People who earn more than $100,000 per year, at least in this state, drive to and from work.  They do not use public transit.  And for a variety of social reasons and operating constraints they never will. The DART light rail line has been successful if you don't consider the steep subsidy received by each passenger or that the ridership was inflated in part by feeding passengers to it by redirecting buses to the train stations as opposed to going downtown.  In fact, until the latest run-up in gas prices, DART as a whole was losing passengers, although the number of riders on the light rail line increased significantly.  Part of the DART initiative was to build HOV lanes in the Metroplex.  Interestingly, the number of people carried by the HOV lanes is more than two times the number of people carried on the light rail lines.
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