F4shionablecha0s

I don't think it's trolling if it's a clearly idiotic decision that directly impacts all of us up here. For us, the vision for the HSR was like this: DART to Union Station, Union Station to downtown Houston. For a lot of people, downtown or the adjacent area (Midtown) would be the final destination. If not, downtown Houston is the hub of your whole road/rail/bus network. Now you've turned it into this: DART to Union Station, Union Station to a dead mall's parking lot out by 610... which is NO ONE's final destination. From there maybe light rail will be built at some point... but let's be honest that won't happen for a while. Maybe you can take a bus, but come on no one's going to do that. So then you'll have to either rent a car, beg a friend for a ride, or call an Uber. It's just removed so much of the utility...

I'm a Dallasite and I can't believe you guys are screwing this up. All this work that we're doing on our end to make the HSR practical and modern and then on your end we're gonna plop the passengers in some parking lot in the middle of nowhere. So incredibly stupid and shortsighted...

One nitpick... Those photos are of the OLD Parkland Campus. The NEW Parkland campus is the current Parkland campus - the one Kennedy was taken to and the one that just got a huge new main building.

Where do you come up with this stuff?

You Houstonians love drawing up your arbitrary distinctions and then using that to validate yourselves. Our Galleria is bigger than yours (ignoring Northpark), our medical district is bigger than yours (Dallas built hospitals more spread out), but then when other cities play the same game you find ways to discount it (OH YEAH WELL NO ONE RIDES DART SO IT DOESN'T MATTER HOW BIG IT IS). Especially with Klyde Warren Park, any logical examination of downtown would include Uptown as well. So our central urban core is bigger than TMC. There. We all win. Virgin Hotel announced for the Dallas Design District: http://candysdirt.com/2015/06/24/crosland-group-plans-two-additional-major-virginal-developments-design-district/

All this hassle, all this expense, Dallas going through all the trouble of building a downtown station linked to their rail system... and on the Houston end it would dump the pax off in some parking lot in the middle of nowhere. *facepalm*

So they appear to have learned nothing from the design mistakes made on the Red Line...

It'll take longer than five minutes. Business travelers are going to be this route's meat and potatoes - particularly those business passengers flying between Hobby and Love right now. For every one passenger you pick up in Huntsville you're going to lose five DAL-HOU passengers. Why are we even bothering to make the thing high speed if we're going to cripple it with stops in podunk towns? Let's say someone DOES want to take the train to one of those towns. How are they going to get around once they get there? There's no transit. Rent a car? Why wouldn't they just drive from Houston or Dallas then? It doesn't make any sense.

The only way the HSR is going to work is if there are zero stops. Stops are a dealbreaker. Downtown Dallas to Downtown Houston, no stops. Anything else is not going to be able to effectively compete with Southwest. If we start pandering to politicians by making the train stop in the middle of nowhere than this whole thing is dead on arrival.

You posted the evidence. See that northernmost "Dallas Potential Station Locations" circle? See the portion of that circle that lies within downtown? That's adjacent to Union Station.

Look at the Dallas Morning News article. Texas Central has named a site adjacent to Union Station, just north of I-30, as one of three possibilities. There's even a map. The second DART LRT alignment and expansion of downtown streetcar services are DART plans, but the downtown HSR station is all Texas Central.