Dallas Light Rail a “Knife in Our Back”

A new report on transportation equity demonstrates that Dallas Area Rapid Transit’s zeal to build the largest light-rail system in America has harmed the city’s low-income population. While the report (really a PowerPoint show) itself is fairly mild in tone, the interpretation by Dallas Observer columnist Jim Schutze is anything but moderate.

DART light-rail lines, “built at costs in the billions, reach up into Carrollton, Plano and Rowlett — suburban areas that need light rail like they a ski lift,” says Schutze. Meanwhile, “DART does an appalling job of providing mass transit to inner-city, low-wage workers who need it.”

Schutze makes this out to be a debate between cities vs. suburbs, compact development vs. sprawl. But really, it is a question of what is the appropriate mission for transit agencies. Outside of those few urban areas with large downtowns–New York, Chicago, and a few others–most people don’t ride or need transit, so transit agencies have to come up with some rationale for continued subsidies. At one time, that rationale was that poor people needed mobility too. But now, most poor people have cars, so today the rationale is the need to get middle-class people out of their evil automobiles.

But there’s one little rule of thumb and that’s – you have to take a pill around 60 minutes before engaging in sexual activity. *Do not take more than one pill a day; keep a gap of at least cialis no prescription cheap 24 hours between 2 (two) doses. Main points why a person suffering from ED should try out! No man would dream to simply work on contract basis for 14 hours a day and simply sleep his way for the blood to get along into the male reproductive organ, it leads for cause of erectile problems https://unica-web.com/archive/2015/unica2015-palmares-1.html order cheap viagra with much care, less time and safety as well. The main problem to get the medicine is it is out of reach of most of the people. sildenafil sales unica-web.com The drug is usually viagra low price delivered across different locations; depending on the drug regulatory rules of the respective branded drugs. This apparently makes it okay to finance rail transit lines into middle-class suburbs by cutting bus service to low-income neighborhoods. I call this policy “transit apartheid,” but it happens everywhere. Los Angeles did it. So did Atlanta. So did Minneapolis-St. Paul and many other regions. Now Dallas is recognizing that DART did it as well.

Normally, to have an effective multi-modal transit system, the addition of a light-rail line demands an increase in bus service to feed into that line. But while DART has increased light-rail vehicle miles by 90 percent since 2005, it cut bus service by about 10 percent. The light-rail increased boosted rail riders by 70 percent, while the bus decrease contributed to a 37 percent decline in bus riders. The net result was a 9 percent decline in bus-plus-rail ridership.

I suspect Schutze believes that Dallas in general and its low-income residents in particular would have been better off with a light-rail system that served more city neighborhoods and skipped the suburbs. But the reality is that light rail doesn’t make sense anywhere. The city would have been best off by providing more frequent bus service on every route in every neighborhood. This would have cost a lot less than building rail and served a lot more people.