As North Texas cities contemplate leaving the Dallas Area Rapid Transit system, Dallas leaders are imploring the public transportation agency: “Can you please help us help you?”
Council member Lorie Blair’s gentle query to Dallas Area Rapid Transit officials Tuesday marked the role Dallas — which constitutes 75% of the ridership — is going to play in the embattled transit agency’s future.
In the past month, Highland Park, Farmers Branch, Irving and Plano approved elections in May for voters to decide whether to stay or leave the system. Addison was set to vote on holding a similar election Tuesday night. Each city has argued its 1-cent sales tax contributions far exceed the services it receives in return. The cities also question the 13-member transit agency’s governance model based on population, which gives Dallas more representation.
If they prevail in the elections, cities would still be obligated to pay off their debt for several years, depending on their contributions.
Political Points
At Dallas City Hall on Tuesday, council members offered transit officials some respite, urging DART officials to find ways to expand services in areas such as southern Dallas.
“How can we partner better?” council member Paula Blackmon asked.
City officials have been collaborating with DART to convert parking lots around stations into homes. In Pleasant Grove, Palladium USA, with help from the city and the transit agency, built mixed-income housing next to the Buckner station. Blackmon, whose district includes the Mockingbird station, asked what the city could do to accelerate similar projects, as more housing near transit hubs could spur ridership.
DART board member Patrick Kennedy said the agency has an inventory of all its properties and the needs attached to them. Does this lot need underground utility improvements? Does it need to be rezoned?
In Dallas, several parking lots around DART, for instance, are restricted by city code that does not allow for the type of mixed-use developments many had envisioned seeing there. Kennedy said the goal is to see these projects take two to four years and not the seven to 10 years they tend to take.
“A lot of developers are turned off by these long processes and don’t want to work with us because they can’t predict what the development cycle is going to be like by the time it’s ready to break ground,” he said.
During Tuesday’s meeting, council members parsed quarterly ridership numbers that have improved after a steep decline in the latter half of 2020 but have more or less leveled off in the past couple of years.
Crimes against persons are down 16% from last year. Property crimes such as theft are down 26%; however, arrests from drug-related offenses have increased. DART officials said they had increased security measures by deploying more boots on the ground, pairing police officers with mental health workers to serve vulnerable riders and have contracts out to upgrade its surveillance camera system.
Council member Cara Mendelsohn, whose district includes the new Silver Line, urged DART officials to bolster their efforts to increase ridership. “We need people to use the system,” she said. “We need public transit in Dallas, absolutely can’t live without it. We’re a large urban city. We must have this. There’s nobody here talking about, ‘we need to pull out of DART.’ That’s not going to happen.”
Mendelsohn touched upon an existential crisis facing the agency. The system has not grown. Other North Texas cities have chosen to use their penny sales tax to attract businesses and professional sports teams.
Texas cities have a choice between using their penny for economic development or investing in public transit. “And we have to make this value proposition worth it,” she said.
Dee Leggett, executive vice president and chief development officer at DART, said Dallas was the driver of the transit system. She cited a 2023 North Central Texas Council of Governments survey that showed Dallas was still a significant regional trip generator.
Eight percent of Carrollton trips stay in the city; the rest go into Dallas. For Irving, 29% of the trips are internal, and 63% go to Dallas.
“As we can also see from this data, inner city connections are critical, and local connectivity is just important to get people to their final destination,” Leggett said, adding that since many riders make two to three transfers in their trip, DART had focused its resources on first and last mile connections, and maintaining coverage.