DART greenlights blue, orange lines

But service will be cut

Jon Boyd, Aug 16, 10.

Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) re-evaluated its financial plan last week, as reported by Michael A. Lindenberger of the Dallas Morning News:

Just six weeks after telling board members that it couldn’t be done, DART executives on Tuesday presented their bosses with a 20-year financial plan that keeps the Orange Line rail service on track to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.

They also presented a $1.25 billion budget for 2011 that cuts 87 jobs next year but will delay, for a year at least, layoffs.

The 20-year plan would allow room for a second major rail project, an extension of the Blue Line to southern Oak Cliff by the end of this decade. That’s a possibility that promised to draw a fight, or at least a debate, from some board members who think the agency should save its money to build a long-promised second downtown Dallas rail line that is now on hold.

The draft budget for 2011 calls for trimming 87 full-time jobs at DART, few enough to be handled by attrition. It also anticipates some reduced bus and rail services, including having light-rail trains run through downtown every 15 minutes instead of every 10.

While all of the light rail extensions already under construction will be completed, DART needed to cut $8.8 billion over twenty years, and found $5.6 millionof savings per year by increasing peak light rail headways from 10 to 15 minutes, according to Yonah Freemark of The Transport Politic. Cutting the D2 light rail, a trunk line for Downtown Dallas, from the capital expansion was another compromise.

Freemark opines about the politics:

In moving forward with the airport link [the Orange line], DART will be pursuing a politically popular project that, if not completed, could have resulted in the decision by some cities to abandon their membership in the agency, depriving it of vital sales tax revenues. Yet it is poor policy to endorse a major construction program even as services are being cut; in other words, what’s the point of building track that will be used by only a few trains a day?

But one can imagine the political pressure in which DART decision-makers find themselves: The agency must fulfill the interests of its most suburban constituents, many of whom are frustrated that they have yet to receive their personalized light rail line. Meanwhile, because the airport connection appeals most strongly to the political leaders of the region because it is the only transit line most of them will ever use, it is essential for DART to pursue its construction if it wants to remain in the funding game.

Yet operations cutbacks do have their negative consequences. The decision to cut headways on light rail operations has justified DART’s decision to permanently postpone the D2 downtown light rail link, which would have relieved the existing center-city trunk route used by all lines. That project, it seems, is not necessary if all lines are running only every fifteen minutes; in addition, the creation of a new streetcar [urban circulator] system already partially funded through the federal TIGER program will add capacity for downtown riders. So the agency has determined that it is preferable to divert spending on an extension of the Blue Line south to the University of North Texas instead.

That project, though, will only further enforce the already very suburban orientation of DART’s expansion program rather than improve the circulation of people within the densest parts of Dallas. In addition, it seems to imply that fifteen-minute frequencies are acceptable in the long-term; they certainly are not if Dallas ever intends to encourage significantly increased public use of its light rail system, which has cost more than $2.5 billion to build so far. Why not, some will likely argue, save up and spend on the new downtown alignment as soon as possible, which would allow an eventual ramp-up in services to meet growing demand?

In 2008, the most recent ridership available from the National Transit Database (pdf), DART‘s 44 miles of light rail handled fully 19 and a half million unlinked trips, while its 14 miles of commuter rail handled just over one and a half million (p.40). By contrast, Houston’s seven-mile Main Street line facilitated 11.8 million trips in 2008 (p. 37). The Main Street line runs six minute headways during peak hours.