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This article is part of a series of pieces celebrating Glasstire’s 25th anniversary. To see other stories from this series, go here. To see pieces from the month of March, around the theme Texas Topographies: Examining Place & Practice, go here.

by William Sarradet

The question of using anything other than a car sounds almost rhetorical in a state famous for its highways. But as a writer who covers Texas culture and travels constantly across the state to see exhibitions, artist talks, and gallery openings, I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit thinking about what it actually means to get somewhere without a car here. I have mentioned in previous writings why taking a train or a bus can fit my preferences instead of driving, and that extends to the trips I take viewing art. In recent years, I’ve put this to the test in Dallas, Houston, Austin, El Paso, and a handful of smaller Texas towns. The answer is layered: many venues are accessible by some public transit system, although accessibility does not always correlate to the size of the city.

Consider the most common reference point for metropolitanism: New York City. Manhattan’s density has a throughline to urban planning. The subway system of the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) carries roughly 3.4 million daily riders in the borough of Manhattan. That infrastructure makes the entire cultural ecosystem of the city accessible at relatively low cost, rendering car ownership largely unnecessary. When we talk about promoting the arts, we are often, at least partially, reaching for that model. Texas, orders of magnitude larger, operates under entirely different assumptions. The United States has the world’s largest freight rail network, but individual mobility here is overwhelmingly tied to private vehicle ownership. These factors shape the experience of navigating culture within our cities.

The two most developed passenger rail systems in Texas belong to Dallas and Houston. Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) is the larger of the two by a considerable margin, with 73 stations spread across five lines, serving 13 member cities. Houston’s Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County (METRO) operates 39 stations across three lines. But raw station counts obscure an important difference. DART was designed primarily as a commuter system, and it shows. Mixed-use development has lagged significantly behind where the lines were built, which means there is often very little to do per stop.

Getting from one part of Dallas to another by train tends to funnel riders through downtown, which is colloquially known as a hub-and-spoke model. Although the recent addition of the Silver Line in 2025 acts as a cross-town connection at the Green and Red/Orange lines, the route is much further north than urban Dallas and mainly acts as a conduit for the Plano area to reach Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. For an arts visitor, this layout has some effects. Getting to the Dallas Museum of Art on DART is doable; bus routes service many areas directly to the city block of North St. Paul street upon which the museum sits. Getting to the many galleries in the Design District, not to mention intermediate stops to accommodate food or rest, is much less straightforward.

Houston’s system is shorter and denser, and that turns out to be an asset. METRO’s Red Line runs north-south through downtown and into the Museum District, putting riders within steps of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH). The lines thread through the actual fabric of the city rather than bypassing it. On trips to Houston, I’ve been able to leave my car behind entirely and navigate the city by train and bus without serious inconvenience, including late night travel. Although inner Houston sidewalks leave something to be desired, I have easily visited the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (HCCC) and other spaces in the city’s inner loop using a mix of light rail and walking. That kind of point-to-point connectivity is rare in Texas transit.

Austin sits further down this spectrum. The city’s commuter rail, operated by Capital Metro, runs a single line from the suburb of Leander into downtown. During extended stays in Austin, often in East Austin neighborhoods, I’ve yet to find a single gallery or arts institution that the rail line makes meaningfully accessible. Buses can be useful to reach institutions in the downtown area, in part because their service to and from the University of Texas promotes frequency. However, many other destinations disproportionately require a car or a rideshare. This has less to do with institutional planning than it does with the values of the city as a whole. It reflects what happens when a rail investment is primarily justified as a vehicle-reduction strategy for commuters rather than a connective tissue for urban life.

Outside the major metros, buses do more work than most visitors expect. In El Paso, Sun Metro has taken me to the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) and to Galeria Cinco Puntos in the Five Points neighborhood. El Paso rewards transit use in a way that surprises first-timers, though the city’s dramatic topographic variation, with steep elevation changes across its neighborhoods, adds a physical dimension to every trip. On one visit, I logged more steps in a single day than I ever have anywhere else.

McAllen and Wichita Falls each maintain bus systems that are more substantial than their population sizes might suggest. Metro McAllen runs 12 routes extending from near Edinburg down past the southern edge of the McAllen Miller International Airport. With some walking, those routes can take you to the International Museum of Art & Science (IMAS). The Wichita Falls Transit System, known as Falls Ride, runs seven routes connecting downtown to Parker Square, the commercial center at the intersection of Kemp Boulevard and Kell Boulevard. None of those routes deliver riders conveniently to the Wichita Falls Museum of Art (WFMA). Both cities sit within 20 minutes of their state borders, Oklahoma to the north and Mexico to the south, respectively. For visitors, time can be a constraint. That said, the more fundamental limitation in both cities is frequency. When buses only come once an hour, a weeklong visit may afford the time to catch a ride. It becomes a real obstacle when you’re passing through. During busy days of museum viewing and studio visits, I have been unable to find the time in my schedule to experiment using bus routes while visiting either city.

The relationship between transit and the arts in Texas isn’t just logistical. Institutions are immovable in a way that transit systems are theoretically not. A museum commits to a piece of land and a building for generations. The meaningful question is whether transit grows toward or away from the institutions in its vicinity. Houston has managed a version of this alignment, though the sheer scale of the city prevents robust service across the entire region. Dallas has attempted transit infrastructure to meet the needs of its citizens, but hasn’t yet unlocked the necessary density that would make it work for everyone. Smaller cities have systems that could serve arts visitors reliably if frequencies were dramatically increased, and the downstream benefits would extend well beyond any single trip to a gallery: lower emissions and more equitable access to the cultural institutions that these cities fund with public dollars and civic pride.