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Good Public Transit

Does Dallas Really Have to Choose Between a Subway and a Streetcar?

A Dallas Morning News columnist’s mistakes unwittingly reveal the mechanisms of DART’s political maneuvering
By Peter Simek |
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Robert Wilonsky has one dud of a column in today’s paper about DART, D2, and the whole downtown streetcar business. As Tim mentioned earlier, the column sounds at times like Wilonsky is regurgitating verbatim stuff he was told by Dallas Area Rapid Transit president and executive director Gary Thomas, and at times like he is attempting to revive the corny, clueless, blundering folksiness of Steve Blow. But what I find most interesting about the column is the way that, in its failure to grasp the full extent of the issues it grapples with, it reveals the hand of a transit agency shifting its political narrative to withstand the headwinds of unexpected opposition.

I think the best place to start is some confusing – though telling – double-talk from Thomas that sets the premise of the piece. That premise is, in short, that DART can’t afford to build both a downtown subway (D2) and a downtown streetcar, and so you, dear Dallas citizens, have some tough choices to make. Here’s how Wilonsky portrays it, beginning with a quote from Thomas:

“I’d rather not look at it as either/or but as: This is what I think we need to tackle first and this is what I think we need to tackle second,” DART’s president and executive director Gary Thomas said yesterday, after his second meeting with the City Council in two weeks.

I asked him which he thinks ought to come first, D2 or the streetcar. To which he responded, after a brief pause, “I don’t know right now.”

Maybe D2, he said. Except they haven’t hit the long-ago agreed-to ridership figures that trigger a second downtown line (and won’t till 2040, or close to). So … maybe the streetcar, he said, which is one day expected to tie into the McKinney Avenue trolley and link Knox-Henderson with Bishop Arts.

“I can argue both sides,” Thomas said.

This much Wilonsky gets right, Thomas can argue both sides – because that’s what he is doing right here.

Last year, when bringing D2 to the DART board and Dallas City Council ahead of submitting the project plan to the Federal Transit Administration as part of a federal grant program, Thomas characterized D2 as DART’s most pressing capital project. That’s because of the way the light rail system was designed, bottle-necking all train traffic in DART’s light rail network through downtown Dallas. As a result, DART’s “current operations represent the practical operating capacity without compromising schedule reliability during the peak headway period,” as stated in a brochure that describes the need for the three proposed “interrelated projects” DART planned to submit to the feds. Or in plain English: DART can’t fit any more trains on the tracks during rush hour.

But now we see Thomas changing that pitch a bit. Maybe D2 is not as much of a priority because, Thomas says, current ridership levels are not at the levels that they would trigger the need to build a second downtown line as stipulated in Dallas’ original contract with DART.

You see that? Two things happened there. The first is that Thomas shifted his justification for D2 from capacity to ridership. In transit lingo, capacity refers to the number of trains on the tracks. Ridership refers to the people in those trains. According to Thomas, ridership doesn’t justify the immediate need for D2. But as we know, DART can’t put any more trains on the tracks. If you are at capacity, how do you improve service to attract more riders? How do you accommodate for ridership if your system has hit capacity? It’s a clever rhetorical catch-22.

The second thing Thomas does is invoke the city’s Interlocal Agreement with DART to support his rationale for potentially deprioritizing D2. That is a contract Dallas signed with the public transit agency way back in the 1980s. At the time, Dallas’ representatives were justifiably concerned that at some point running a busy light rail system on downtown’s surface streets was going to mess up downtown. So they included a stipulation in the Interlocal Agreement that said that as soon as DART hits certain thresholds of ridership, that surface-grade DART line has to go underground – DART has to make it a subway.

But as Thomas knows all too well – because he explained it to me only a few months ago – that stipulation in the contract between DART and Dallas refers to burying the existing line downtown once ridership hits a certain threshold. It has nothing to do with the second line. In fact, the only reason the provision in the contract with DART has any bearing on D2 is because subway supporters have cited the interlocal agreement as a justification for burying DART’s ever-so-necessary D2 rather than eventually having to bury the existing line.

(Full disclosure: the subway advocacy movement is being led, to a large extent, by the Coalition for a New Dallas, which is chaired by D Magazine publisher Wick Alison.)

Which all raises a simple question: Why is Thomas backpeddling to now argue that D2 may not be the region’s most pressing public transit need? Just a year ago, he and his agency, arguing that D2 was critical, rammed the project through the public process so quickly that the City Council signed off on a downtown alignment that isn’t even feasible. Has he changed his mind? Should Dallas call his bluff?

Hold on to that question.

There are a lot of other confusing things in Wilonsky’s column. One is his portrayal of the whole subway proposal as a surprise when a subway alignment underneath Commerce Street was one of the handful of proposed alignments submitted to the Dallas City Council last year. And why is this now being characterized as a streetcar vs. subway decision when at the time the Council reviewed that Commerce Street subway alignment, the streetcar was still being advanced as one of DART’s three “interrelated projects” being submitted to the FTA under its core capacity granting program?

And why does Wilonsky report that changing D2 to a subway would force DART’s FTA grant “to the back of the line,” when DART has stated that they are not sure if amending the current application to a subway alignment would either delay the review process or kick-start a new application? And even if DART had to submit a new application, D2 adds the most capacity by double of any other public transit project in the country currently seeking federal funding and it is a strong candidate for full-funding in any budget cycle. In fact, you could argue DART is selling itself short by not asking for enough federal dollars for the project, but that is a story for another day.

Finally, why does Wilonsky bury a detail that could have been the focus of his column? He reports that last year the president of Downtown Dallas Inc. asked DART to study a downtown streetcar route that runs up Elm and Commerce as part of its review of potential alignments. But DART didn’t do it, and so at the City Council transportation committee meeting Monday, there were no cost details or ridership projections available for the Elm/Commerce route. Lo and behold, when the Council committee saw that, they decided they didn’t have enough information to make a decision and sent DART back to the drawing board — just in time to let this year’s federal grant application deadline pass on by.

See how that works? A DDI-endorsed alignment is all but a sure bet to win Council approval. But if DART doesn’t study the alignment, what’s there to approve? Thomas takes a ruler to the knuckles from council member Philip Kingston, the execs scurry back to their offices, a deadlines passes, and the streetcar projects is delayed for another year.

In his column, Wilonsky portrays the entire process as a tough choice between waiting on a streetcar or waiting on D2, but he doesn’t seem to see that the deck is stacked. What we really learned this week is that the downtown streetcar project has already been delayed for another year, while the surface-level alignment for D2 continues to move quietly through its environmental assessment phase. The only thing left to do is scare off the subway activists who could spoil the whole thing, and he’s doing that by stoking fear that any waffling will lead to a forfeiting of the federal dollars. Remarkably, that is exactly what Wilonsky’s column seems to do: play DART’s fear card for them.

Why would DART do this? Doesn’t DART take its cues from its board? Is DART run by a bunch of bumbling buffoons who can’t remember what they have said or promised or when the deadlines are and what they have to do to meet them?

No, of course not. In fact, what I believe we are seeing here is DART’s classic and quite clever and skillful political maneuvering and manipulation.

Wilonsky is right about this much in his column: when it comes to DART and its various proposed capital projects, it is all about the money. But the money, in this case, doesn’t have to do with the subway or the streetcar. The money is all about the elephant in the room: the Cotton Belt light rail extension.

The Cotton Belt is another long-planned addition to DART’s 90-mile light rail system that would run east-west through the northern suburbs, more or less connecting Plano directly to Carrollton and DFW Airport, but also running through Addison. Last month, the Plano City Council earmarked $12 million to help kick-start the Cotton Belt project, which, like a downtown subway, is estimated to cost $1 billion-plus. In the same article about Plano’s contribution to the Cotton Belt, Wilonsky’s DMN colleague Brandon Formby reports that DART’s plan of funding the extension is to take out a $1 billion low interest loan.

That’s a billion dollars in debt, for an extension of rail that is estimated to have a ridership of about 6,000 passengers per day.

So it is all about the money, and DART has a lot of it. In fact, DART has the borrowing capacity of $1 billion of low interest loans, while it simultaneously seeks large federal grants to fund D2 and the streetcar. If DART can keep the cost of D2 down by maintaining its surface-level alignment, it won’t diminish the borrowing capacity it needs to afford the Cotton Belt. Then it can build all three of the projects. But not if the Dallas City Council decides it will only accept a D2 as a subway.

Of course, DART could also scrap the Cotton Belt because it is a pretty useless transit project that has very low projected ridership, wouldn’t qualify for core capacity grants, and is opposed by political officials in Dallas and the suburbs. But the Cotton Belt is also a political hot potato.

There is a political firestorm brewing in the suburbs. DART’s light rail system has not only reached its operational capacity, it has been built out to the edges of its member cities. The agency is now hoping to lure new members to join the agency, cities who will chip in more sales tax revenue and continue DART’s highway-like sprawl northward. Meanwhile, the city of Addison has long threatened to leave DART altogether if it doesn’t follow through on its 30-year-old promise to deliver rail. By building the Cotton Belt, DART would both keep Addison in the system and assure potential new member cities that they actually do follow through on their promises to deliver service.

So from an agency perspective, the Cotton Belt and D2 are both vitally important to sustaining DART’s familiar model of growth. A streetcar, on the other hand, not so much. That’s why, I believe, Thomas is now changing the sales pitch on D2. It’s a bluff, a way of making public officials worry about forfeiting federal dollars or creating costly delays of D2. It’s why DART doesn’t study the alignments they are asked to study. It’s why they claim they can’t build a subway and a streetcar and yet are able to find money for useless billion-dollar light rail projects in the suburbs.

The reason is, put most simply, DART isn’t set up to think like a public transit agency. Regardless of Thomas’ recent invocation of ridership, it doesn’t evaluate its priorities and successes in terms of ridership and mobility or in terms of investing in transit in areas where it has the potential to be most successful, e.g. dense urban environments like downtown. Instead, DART thinks in terms of total light rail miles, numbers of member cities, collected sales tax revenues, and “transit oriented” developments, in which DART’s stations serve as little more than expensive urban ornaments.

And so DART continues to spend billions on mediocre to bad public transit, whether you like it or not.

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