SICK TRANSIT STILL ILL?

The continuing campaign to create a regional transportation authority for Dallas already is showing signs of being in trouble again. Voters turned down the creation of the Lone Star Transportation Authority last year after critics charged that its powers were too broad and its plans too vague.

For the record, pro-authority forces are saying that by the time the next referendum rolls around in January 1983 they will have solved the problems that scared voters last time around.

Waller Humann, president of Hunt Oil Co., is leading protransit-authority forces and has formed a group called the Transportation Task Force. He’s happy to talk about all the changes that he says will make the proposal more appetizing and feasible.

Humann thinks the vagueness problem can be solved by involving some 700 business, civic and neighborhood groups in the planning process, right down to the nitty-gritty technical points. After an interim authority board has been selected and has waded through all those recommendations, the final transit proposal is bound to be more specific than its unloved predecessor, Humann says.

Not necessarily, says Richard Smith, former Dallas City Council member and chairman of the ill-fated Lone Star Transportation Authority.

“There are difficult decisions to make that take a lot of technical analysis,” Smith says. “What kind of rail, what will it cost and what alignments are technically feasible are real questions. How you decide those in a few months with the kind of budget they would likely have . . . I just don’t see how you can do that.”

The chief of the planners who will help write the final proposal also thinks the planning process will be difficult, due to the extra “community involvement.” Normally there would be enough time, says Gordon Shunk, director of transportation and energy at the North Central Texas Council of Governments, “But … by the time you meet with a lot of neighborhood groups, it takes a lot of time. It’s going to be tense reaching the decisions by January 1983.”

But Humann says the election doesn’t have to be in 1983.