EDITOR’S PAGE

The white paper table covers at 311 Lombar-di’s were covered with crayon-colored squiggly lines by the time I finished my lunch with Charles Anderson. He was catching me up on DART’s new service plan, the one that resulted from the transit agency’s sound defeat at the polls last June-a defeat this magazine advocated and was probably partially responsible for. Anderson ate sparingly and spoke rapidly with an optimism that seemed so genuine that several times I stopped eating or asking questions and stared at him with my fork in midair. The man’s very name has come to call for an automatic modifier: “embattled.” And here he is enthusiastically sketching new routes and technologies and transportation solutions for what DART has defined as the area’s twelve major transportation corridors. Either this guy ought to be playing with the Shakespeare Festival, 1 thought, or we may be close to a transportation plan that will actually fly.

Hope lives! This new DART proposal for a comprehensive transportation plan ought to make a lot of people sit up and applaud. A funny thing happened, though, in the twisted process of getting to it. Most of the people who would enjoy it and benefit from it got fed up and went home.

I can’t discern much enthusiasm for DART these days, to put it mildly. And that’s a shame, really, because giving up on DART now is tantamount to giving up on the idea of public transportation. Do we really want to start from scratch with a new agency and a new management search and new engineering studies and new board members-in a new boardroom? Id be the first to admit that DART has made its share of political blunders and budget-busting expenditures, but the heaviest raps against it-that million-dollar boardroom, and the trip to Europe-belong to a generation of leaders who aren’t even there anymore. From what I can see, DART, under the guidance of Anderson and what is reputed to be one of the most talented planning staff’s assembled any where, has done exactly what the voters charged them to do.

In other words, they’ve gone back to the drawing board and come up with a plan that makes sense for a sprawling region. Basically, the new system being proposed has a range of transportation options, some of which are the meat and potatoes of the system now. In the future, we’ll have everything from garden-variety bus service, to express highway lanes, to little “DART-About” vans that will pick you up at home, to a commuter rail line from Union Station to D/FW Airport (on existing tracks), to rapid transit-probably light rail-in southwest Dallas, along Central Expressway, and from Garland to downtown.

That’s basically the steak. But there’s sizzle, too-in the form of a people-mover circling downtown, linking the West End with the Convention Center, with the Farmer’s Market, with the Arts District, el al. DART’s proposal for this part of the system lays the transit mode options wide open. It can be as sexy as monorail, as technologically snazzy as magnetic levitation. or as nostalgic as an extended route for the McKinney Avenue Trolley.

It’s the perfect compromise plan. There are jitney-type DAKTAbouls for those who don’t believe fixed-route transit will ever pull people out of their cars, and gleaming new trains for those who view rail as the key to an equally shiny future.

Is it affordable? Anderson says the system can be built on a pay-as-you-go basis with a minimal assist from the federal government . As voters, we said a resounding no last June to the idea of DART floating bonds to pay for transit. So this time DART is playing it safe. Tunnels are out, Anderson says, because of their prohibitive cost. If somebody else wants to come up with the money (and Dallas businessman Walt Humann. who spearheaded the monumental task of moving the redesign of North Central off dead center, is trying to do just that)- then that’s fine. Otherwise, we’ll have surface transit like the systems in San Diego and Portland. Why? Because. Anderson says, that’s what we can afford.

All good compromises seek that flat middle ground between divergent extremes. But often, consensus plans end up being hated by both sides. Despite the good sense in this proposal, I’m afraid there’s a real likelihood of that happening here. The so-called “inner-city liberals” will attack the plan for not being “visionary.” The up-north conservatives will hate it because it still has trains and they don’t believe anyone in Dallas, Texas, will ride a train. Free-market fanatics will insist that private jitney services could do twice the job at none of the taxpayer cost. Downtown boosters will say it’s second-rate because it doesn’t have a subway.

And the rest of you folks out there are probably just sick and tired of the whole mess.

In my view, we need to fight the temptation to hale that signature yellow logo and get on with solving the very real traffic problems that loom ahead in the next century. We need to admit that the people who built the boardroom and trotted around Europe don’t run the railroad anymore. We need to look beyond the narrow view from our own back yard and see that low-income people in South and West Dallas need an affordable, efficient means of getting to their jobs. And that downtown will choke on its own congestion and exhaust fumes if we can’t move people in and out in something other than cars and buses.

Can DART move past its mind-boggling perception problems? Can the image of those sleek and shiny yellow cars get a new grip on our imagination? Is there any way that DART can jolt us out of our apathy?

I asked that question of new board member Peter Baldwin, a longtime civic leader and real estate developer. His answer came quickly: “There’s only one way, and that’s to build something.”

That seems to be the battle cry of all the folks in the bunkers over at DART. Let’s get the dirt flyin-it’s the Dallas way. I, for one, am beginning to like the sound of that tune.