Wednesday, June 14, 2006
By Tony Hartzel/ The Dallas Morning News
Ten years ago Wednesday, DART light-rail trains glided into downtown Dallas and carried with them a new identity for North Texas.
Dallas' modern mass transit era began June 14, 1996, when 11.2 miles of rail opened from downtown to Oak Cliff. With every trip since, the yellow-and-white trains have woven themselves tightly into a culture that once centered almost exclusively on the car.
Commutes. Shopping trips. Concerts. NBA and NHL championship games. All now served by rail, and more than 125 million rail trips taken so far.
Even when riders filled the trains on the first day of service, success remained uncertain.
The trains are meeting original ridership forecasts by carrying almost 70,000 passengers each weekday along a 45-mile-long network. Dallas Area Rapid Transit has become the fifth-largest light-rail system in the United States behind Los Angeles, New Jersey, San Diego and Portland, Ore.
"It's part of an emerging new fabric of Dallas," said civic leader and longtime DART supporter Walt Humann, who helped lead the charge for mass transit almost 30 years ago. "DART already has – and will have – a very, very significant impact on how we grow in the future."
Light rail had its doubters until the day it opened. Many argued that North Texans would never give up their cars to ride together on trains. Since then, Dallas Area Rapid Transit has gone from carrying 1.4 million light-rail passengers in 1996 to 17.5 million passengers in 2005.
The trains also produced some unanticipated benefits.
Developers have built or announced more than $3 billion in real estate projects near current or future rail lines, according to a study by the transit agency and the University of North Texas. Mockingbird Station, The Cedars, Cityplace, downtown Garland, downtown Plano and Galatyn Park in Richardson have blossomed with business.
"Rail does the same things highways have done," said DART board chairman Mark Enoch. "Before, businesses actually turned their facades around to face the highway. What we're doing now is turning that back around again to face our rail lines."
But some experts caution that DART has not helped much with traffic congestion. Dr. Siim Sööt, a transportation researcher in Chicago,
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said North Texas added hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the 1990s – and much more traffic. Simultaneously, bus and light-rail usage remained relatively flat.
"Clearly, transit may be sold as a means of alleviating congestion. But in reality it is a poor means, except in selected corridors, of addressing growth in traffic," said Dr. Sööt, director emeritus of the Urban Transportation Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Regional leaders are quick to note that light rail does not reach Fort Worth, Arlington and many other Dallas-Fort Worth area cities. But trains can provide commuters a valuable option in areas where they run.
Light rail does give more commuters an option for traveling in the heart of rush hour, Dr. Sööt said. Without that option, more commuters probably would choose to travel earlier or later on the highways, creating traffic problems for longer periods of the day, he said.
Difficult start
Getting the trains rolling was not easy.
The Legislature created DART as an interim authority in 1981. Voters in 14 cities then approved the transit agency's creation in 1983 and provided a 1 percent sales tax rate as funding. But DART still had to fight for its vision to build the first light-rail system in the Southwest.
Not all cities embraced the plan. Voters in Duncanville, Grand Prairie, Lancaster, Mesquite, The Colony and Wilmer rejected the transit agency's plan for immediate bus service and eventual rail connections.
"Our citizens on two separate votes turned it down," said Duncanville Mayor David Green. "It was going to be 25 years out before we would get rail service out our way. At the time, we felt it was not worth it."
Since DART's creation, voters in most cities that did not join DART have passed sales tax increases dedicated to other purposes. Those hikes have pushed many cities' sales tax rates up against a state-mandated tax cap – effectively prohibiting them from joining DART. Regional leaders and DART officials now are considering new ways to allow cities to join the transit agency.
Voters in many DART suburbs held pulloutelections in the agency's early years. Coppell and Flower Mound voters approved leaving the agency in 1989."We never thought it would not happen," she said."Too many of us were too determined."
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Others who came later also doubted that DART's light-rail plans would survive.
"The first year I was there, I wasn't sure this thing would work or not," said Roger Snoble, the agency's president and executive director from 1994 to 2001.
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Even when riders filled the trains on the first day of service, its success remained uncertain.
"A lot of people in Dallas were in favor of it, and it was the right thing to do. But they were silent about it," said Mr. Snoble, who now leads the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority.
Still, Mr. Snoble said he got an inkling of the public's support a year before the rail line opened. Crowds flocked to see one of DART's new rail cars at the State Fair of Texas.
"It really has changed the way people live, work and play," he said. "It's done a lot to shape communities."
Other effects
Between 5 and 6 p.m. on a typical weekday, 26 red line and blue line trains head north and south from the West End Transit Center in downtown Dallas. With 76 seats per rail car and two or three cars per train, light rail has the ability to carry thousands of passengers an hour to their destinations.
Regional planners say light rail can carry the equivalent of one to two lanes of traffic on Central Expressway during peak times. Others say it's more.
Gary Thomas, DART's chief executive, said the trains will create more relief from traffic jams as the system expands to places such as Fair Park, the Parkland Hospital area and Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.
"The single biggest reason people do not ride the system is that it does not go where they want to go," he said. "It's not going to be just to ride downtown."
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