On paper, it looks like a tremendous opportunity. After 30 years, Dallas Area Rapid Transit is poised to move forward on two major, once-in-a-generation transportation projects, and it has the opportunity to plan them both together and simultaneously.
The first project is one we have been talking a lot about lately. Since DART reached capacity on its 90-mile network of light rail, the agency has been planning a second downtown light rail line – called D2 – to increase overall system capacity.
DART initially tried to move forward on building a street-level light rail, but stakeholders and elected representatives are now pushing for a subway, at a greater potential cost of more than $1 billion, because, they argue, a subway is the only way to bring light rail transit to new parts of downtown without disrupting ongoing investment and revitalization in the central core. At a Dallas City Council meeting last week, DART president Gary Thomas learned that council members are leaning more and more towards throwing the city’s support – which DART needs to build its second alignment – behind the subway.
That’s a big deal. Running a subway line through downtown Dallas will change the way we move through, in, and around downtown, and it will shape the way downtown grows for the next 100 years.
Which brings us to the second, once-in-a-generation transportation project that is also on the table. Today, at 1 p.m. Thomas will be back at city hall to brief the city council’s transportation committee on the downtown circulator streetcar project. Like D2, the downtown streetcar, which will connect the McKinney Ave. and Oak Cliff streetcar lines, has long been in the works, but is now being advanced thanks to new funding available through the Federal Transit Administration’s new core capacity grant program. According to the briefing documents prepared for today’s meeting, Thomas will ask the council to consider four potential alignments for streetcar.
Which, if you stop and think about it for a few seconds, is bonkers. Here’s why.
Less than a week ago we learned that the alignment of D2 is very much in the air. The surface light rail alignment the Dallas City Council approved last year has been thrown out because the route can’t accommodate light rail, and now the city is seriously considering forcing DART to pursue a subway option. The alignment of D2, the location of its stations, the places where it intersects with the existing light rail network will all dictate the behavior of transit riders downtown. And yet, DART wants the council to settle on an alignment of another major transit investment – the streetcar – without knowing what will happen with D2.
You might think that DART’s planners would look at adding a new light rail line and a new streetcar and wonder who these two pieces of infrastructure might affect each other. How does adjusting D2’s alignment affect ridership on the streetcar’s alignment? Which streetcar alignments work best with which D2 alignment? How do these two new projects fit into the overall system? DART, however, doesn’t see it this way.
When asked about the connection between D2 and the streetcar by the Dallas Morning News, a DART spokesperson characterized the whole thing as a chicken-and-egg situation:
DART spokesman Morgan Lyons said it’s not important to the transit agency whether the City Council chooses a path for the light-rail project before the route for a streetcar extension or vice versa.
“We just need to make sure the projects complement each other,” Lyons said.
Think about that for a second. How can the two projects complement each other if we don’t know what they will actually look like? Aren’t pieces of a transit system inter-dependent? Won’t the location of a D2 light rail station suggest where to run a streetcar? For example, wouldn’t it be ridiculous and redundant to run a streetcar over the same stretch of street that D2 may run under?
And if DART is serious about the need for the two projects to complement each other, does settling on a streetcar alignment today mean that, moving forward, DART will push for the D2 alignment to take into account the streetcar? Why would we allow an $80 million public investment, the streetcar, wag the tail of what is, potentially, a $1 billion investment in the subway?
Here’s what’s most troubling to me about this whole thing. Dallas has been handed the opportunity to plan two huge major public investments in downtown transit together, and yet DART seems content to roll along on each project, considering them independently of each other, seemingly with little concern for context and mobility, while hoping the whole thing snaps together nicely in the end. How come DART’s planners aren’t running ridership scenarios for the streetcar and D2 together? Wouldn’t it be useful for policy makers to know that if D2 is built in one way it will affect streetcar ridership differently depending on the various alignments? Even a six-year-old playing with an erector set has a better appreciation for the way systems operate than to ignore the fact that D2 and the streetcar will affect the success of one another.
When you drill down into the actual streetcar alignments DART has prepared for the council, what you get is even more evidence of a mentality at DART that doesn’t sufficiently consider context or mobility.
You can look at the four alignments here. There’s the Ross/San Jacinto route, the cheap-o option, that runs up Griffin and does the yeoman’s labor of connecting the Oak Cliff and McKinney lines but does very little to offer new multimodal transit to downtown. There’s the Young St. route, which shows the streetcar inexplicably sharing road space with one of the very light rail surface alignments DART has submitted to the FTA for a grant. And there’s Main Street option, which looks the best of the lot (DART’s project ridership number show it will have the most impact), until you consider what it would mean to run a streetcar on skinny, bustling Main Street.
In fact, that’s what Downtown Dallas Inc. told DART when they saw the three options. In letters from DDI to DART attached in the briefing, the downtown business association says running a streetcar up Main St. is a dumb idea because it will disrupt the progress in motion – downtown’s biggest success story – while a block away on Elm and Commerce you have streets that could not only better accommodate the streetcar but could actually benefit from the way the streetcar could draw activity on Main St. to the streets immediately north and south of the successful corridor.
However, we don’t have ridership or cost numbers for the Elm/Commerce alignment in the briefing because it wasn’t part of DART’s original proposal. Just as DART slapped a makeshift Jackson St. alignment to its D2 planning last fall – an alignment that eventually had to be thrown out because the tiniest bit of engineering revealed it was unfeasible – DART has slapped a fourth alignment to its proposed menu of streetcar routes thanks to DDI.
And that’s my concern. If DDI’s transit committee identified it as clearly the best option, why wasn’t the Elm/Commerce alignment generated by DART in the first place? It suggests that not only is DART not planning a streetcar in tandem with D2, it is planning a streetcar designed with insufficient consideration of the way the streetcar will work within the context of the public transit system or the built environment for which it is being planned.
Instead, once again, DART trots a few options to the Dallas City Council and asks them to choose between doors number one, two, three, or four, when we know that behind all of these doors lies the same old less-than-mediocre public transit system DART has been building out for 30-plus years.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Organization around the subway line has shown that Dallas can dictate its future, it can demand better options and better thinking about public transit planning. The city council can hold DART’s feet to the fire, tell them 10 years is too long to wait for better bus service, a subway is the only way to go through a booming downtown, and a streetcar needs to work as part of the greater whole, and not as another capital project DART can add to its bullet-pointed list of false successes.
This moment really is unprecedented. Two major public transit infrastructure projects that will greatly affect the future of downtown, Dallas, and the region for a 100 years are on the table at the same time. We have to get them both right.
