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THE CITY Let the Trains Begin

By JIM HENDERSON |

SURE, LIGHT-RAIL TRANSIT WAS THE VAMPIRE that sunlight couldn’t scald and wooden slakes through the heart couldn’t kill. Lord knows, enough people tried. Important people, political pros, spreadsheet nerds, bean counters, neighborhood activists, right-wing nuts, left-wing wimps, and enough urbanolo-gists to gridlock the Big Bend. Half of them said it didn’t make sense and the other half said that even if it did, Dallas Area Rapid Transit was too incompetent to pull it off.

Rail transit is an anachronism in a time and place of urban sprawl, they said, and will have little positive impact on Dallas. It won’t make a dent in traffic congestion or pollution levels. It won’t encourage the development of new “lite spaces,” but will merely serve existing ones. Methods of transit do not change personal habits (moving to the suburbs, driving long distances to work), they said, and therefore those methods must be tailored to ingrained preferences.

Maybe they were correct. We’re about to find out. On June 14, if all goes well for a change, DART will throw the switch to set a fleet of sleek, electric passenger cars skating back and forth between downtown and South and West Oak Cliff, the prelude to a northward extension to Park Lane at Central Expressway a few months later.

In panting press releases and slick promotional material, DART officials have been touting this 20-mile “starter line” as something of an environmental and economic messiah that will “revolutionize public transportation” and ” usher in a bold, new era of regional mobility. “

If this traffic-choked region needs anything, it is mobility, and it’s conceivable that rail transit could ultimately stitch together the far-flung points of congregation-malls, office centers, hotels, airports, sports arenas, and neighborhoods-more efficiently than the thoroughfares and freeways that tend to be obsolete before the first shovel of dirt is turned. But a lot will have to happen, and many uncertainties wall have to be resolved, for that ambition to be realized.

Will light rail take more cars off the streets or will it mostly siphon off commuters who were already taking the bus? Will population shift toward the rail lines to create the kind of density that makes rail traffic feasible? Will private development near the train stations generate enough economic activity to help offset the enormous cost of the system? Does light rail have the potential to significantly alter not only the contours of the city, but its psychology as well? Will DART be judged a failure if it does neither? Those are S866-billion questions, every one, and a 20-mile starter line, with 40 trains and 21 stations, isn’t a large enough laboratory to spin out the most accurate indicators.

But there’s hope. New transit forms, given the proper economics, bave a remarkable record of changing habits and civilizations. Covered wagons and cattle drives were ushered to extinction by the westward advance of railroads; if anything transformed American culture more than the automobile, it was the interstate highway system; lower fares and expanded routes turned 747s into the Greyhound buses of the airline industry’s post-deregulation era.

Don’t expect anything so dramatic from 20 miles of light-rail starter line, but expect something.

The Pacific Avenue Central Transit Mall already has altered the texture of downtown, and business people are talking of it as a potential new “focal point” of the Central Business District, a place of sidewalk restaurants, vendors, and entertainers (and you thought street musicians, mimes, and jugglers were extinct organisms), DART officials say the South Oak Cliff corridor is already spawning development (four banks, two supermarkets, and a handful of restaurants in the past two years), and plans are being made to rehabilitate the historic Monroe Shops building-once the operations site of the Texas Electric Railway Company-into an office and retail facility adjacent to the Illinois Station. Realtors and developers hawking houses and condos on both sides of Central Expressway include the rail line in their pitches.

Because nearby commercial and residential development is considered essential to rider-ship, DART has lined up a string of testimonials to the rail line’s drawing power.

David Hardin of Minyard Food Stores says the Ledbetter Station was a large factor in the placement of a nearby market; Bridget Smith of Citizens Utilities says that company turned down sites further from the city and leased space in the Nasher Properties tower beside Central Expressway because of the transit line; Judd Pankey of SCI Texas Real Estate says his company bought a million square feet at Elm and Akard streets for the same reason. The list goes on.

“We’ve even had developers call to get information about the lines that won’t be open until after 2000,” says Amy Moore, a DART senior management systems planner.

Is this more DART hype? Remember that back in its early days of issuing cost estimates, construction timetables, service requirements, and revenue potential, this was the gang that couldn’t crunch numbers with iron molars. The facts and figures were so skewed and projections so distorted that computers sometimes crashed trying to process them. By 1986, yearly administrative costs turned out to be four or five times higher than forecast in 1983; federal grants were less than half what was expected. Interest expenses were six times higher than anticipated. Everything was a moving target. Is this more of the same?

In lieu of a crystal ball, it may be instructive to look at other cities where rail transit has been installed in the past decade or so. A 1995 DART study, largely relying on information from local transit authorities and the American Public Transit Association, touched on a few of them:

●In Washington, D.C., 48 percent of all commercial and 36 percent of all new construction has occurred around rail stations (in Toronto, the figure is 90 percent).

●The state of Virginia is realizing a return of more than 12 percent a year on its investment in the D.C. system.

●In Miami, property values near Metrorail stations increased by as much as 160 percent between 1980 and 1993; in the San Francisco Bay area, the value of land within 100 feet of a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station also rose significantly.

●Memphis saw more downtown development in the nine months after opening its Main Street Trolley in 1993 than in all of the previous three years.

And then there’s Portland, which in the study of mass transit is the city most often compared to Dallas, largely because it is western, conservative, low-density, and strongly attached to the automobile.

Portland began implementing its Central City Plan, built first around buses, in 1975. By 1992, the number of downtown jobs increased by more than 50 percent, from 56,000 to 86,000-with no increase in traffic congestion and a reduction in air pollution. Light rail was inaugurated in 1987,andby 1992,according to Tri-Met, the city’s transit agency, more than S30 million worth of new apartments had been built immediately adjacent to the stations. With commercial development and public facilities tossed in, the total is now well over $1 billion.

Of course, some economic manipulation was required to change the habits of the city’s commuters. Restrictions were placed on the amount of parking allowed in the downtown area (maximums were imposed on new office buildings) and parking prices were driven up. The same is almost certain to occur in Dallas. Question: When downtown parking is simply not available or becomes prohibitively expensive, will people stop going downtown-or will they go via the train? Portland’s downtown job growth suggests the latter.

The experience of other cities also promises some disappointments, at least initially. In most places, initial ridership did not meet expectations and fares have paid a smaller than anticipated percentage of operating costs.

But the thing is built and DART now has to make it acceptable enough to survive a grace period sufficient to reveal the wisdom or folly of rail travel in Dallas, Short-falling revenues may send the critics back to the talk shows, but that is the least of the agency’s potential problems.

At a March conference of downtown business leaders, DART officials, and transit hon-chos from other cities, generous time was spent addressing the issues that could immediately sour public opinion and discourage rider-ship)-namely safety and cleanliness, DART’s own 75-member security force will work the downtown transit mall on bicycles and Harleys, there will be a strong police presence on the trains and at the 21 stations, loiterers will be rousted, graffiti will be removed within an hour of being reported, trash receptacles will not overflow.

A lot is at stake here. If this thing doesn’t click, the trains could be sold and the tracks paved over. But what would become of those tunnels under Central Expressway? Don’t even think supercollider.

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