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Good Public Transit

Here’s a Typical DART Solution for Fixing Dallas Public Transit: Pay a Little More for Lyft

A new partnership between DART and Lyft intends for riders to start using the ride-share service to make up for the public transit agency's shortcomings.
By Peter Simek |
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CORRECTION: The link to the partnership with Lyft for last-mile access to transit stations is from a couple of years ago. The newly announced partnership with Lyft relates paratransit services. Those services are part of a pilot program that will supplement and expand existing paratransit service. It will not cost more for riders using Lyft through DART’s paratransit service.  For more on that, go here

This is how DART plans to fix its public transit: ask riders to pay extra for a ride share service that will take them from DART’s inconvenient bus and light rail stations to their homes. At least, that’s the idea behind a new partnership with Lyft that the transit agency has announced, which also includes use of the ride-share service to supplement DART paratransit.

But if paying for a ride-share service just to get to your bus station sounds like a bad deal, don’t worry, DART is going to make paying more for transportation convenient. In DART’s new app, you will be able to click through and connect to Lyft’s app. Also, if you use the code “DART,” Lyft will get you a five bucks off your first ten rides.

How is this a fix?

Well, it’s not. It’s grasping for straws. Here’s the real issue: In a landmark study that was released last week, researchers from the University of Texas at Arlington said that one of the big obstacles facing those riding DART is getting from their home to a bus or light rail station. The study found that a third of residents in Dallas do not have walking access to a transit station.

Those “first and last” miles need to be addressed, but a solution like adding Lyft to the DART phone app doesn’t really help because it doesn’t address the underlying problems at issue in the way DART operates its system and it presents an increased cost burden for transit riders in a city that already pays too much for transportation. After all, UTA’s study also showed that Dallas residents spend more of their income on transit that the average American. People who rely on transit need public transit to be a more affordable – not an increasingly expensive – solution.

And who is this supposed to help? First off, it assumes DART riders have a smart phone and a credit card. Riders who are likely to use a ride-share service already have the app onto their phones, and they don’t need to be told by DART they need to use it. Those who aren’t already using it either don’t use ride-sharing services or can’t afford to. And will paying more to carve minutes off the front or back of a trip change the lost time in the frequent transfers and nonsensical routing that makes getting around the city on DART a nightmare?

The problem with DART is in the way the system functions, in the layout and placement of bus and light rail stations, and in the fundamental transit approach guiding those decisions. That’s where the problem needs to be addressed – in the system.

Could ride-share play a part in a more convenient Dallas public transit system? Sure, but only as one of a suite of options that makes transit more accessible, reliable, and affordable. That will require rethinking routes and schedules, investing in frequency, and addressing larger, more long-term issues, like land use, economic development, and density.

Given its track record, should we believe that DART is even capable of addressing the fundamental problems facing its failures to provide reliable transportation?

Well, maybe. But first it needs to address the institutional issues Jim Schutze laid out in a post yesterday, in which he showed how historically the tail that wags the DART dog is the construction and consulting industries that line up for a piece of the agency’s huge operating and capital budgets. Until an informed and willful board stands up to that inertia, nothing will change at DART.

Luckily, with Dallas’ new board appointees, there is reason to hope that this will begin to happen.

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