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Trip from Carrollton to Denton slated to get easier for commuters
DCTA investing in 21-mile rail line between cities
Hailey Persinger
Issue date: 3/5/08 Section: NEWS
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The Regional Transportation Council granted the Denton County Transit Authority $57 million Jan. 24 to develop a rail line running 21 miles from Carrollton to Denton. The 21-mile stretch comes as an addition to the Dallas Area Rapid Transit Green Line that runs from Pleasant Grove through downtown Dallas and up to Carrollton.
The $57 million, which will later be matched by the DCTA with another $14 million, will be used to purchase 12 Light Rail New Technology vehicles that, according to a DCTA news release, will "be capable of operating on non-electrified tracks with clean diesel engines."
The total $61 million is only a fraction of the money required to construct the rail, however. Dee Leggett, vice president of communications and marketing for the DCTA, said another $254 million is required to complete the entire project.
"The total project cost is estimated at about $315 million," Leggett said. "The remainder of the $315 million - that'll be used to actually construct the rail line and the adjacent bicycle/pedestrian trail."
Leggett said construction on the project is slated to begin early next year and will be available to commuters starting in December of 2010.
Though Leggett said it was not really possible to "pin down" the exact number of commuters that travel between Carrollton and Denton each day, more than half of Denton residents make the trip on a regular basis.
"They're about 66 percent of Denton county's population that commutes or are project to be commuted into Dallas county," Leggett said.
She also said the line would be especially useful to all Denton-area college students and not just NT's.
"If you look at just the universities alone - you have NT, TWU and the community college in Corinth - there is a large commuting population that are students coming north into Denton that we project would also use that line," he said.
Using the line to get to either Texas Woman's University or NT will be made easier with the addition of buses to the lines. Leggett said the DCTA has plans to run buses from the Denton stops to both universities.
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