DART's money woes

I'm not shedding any tears over the news that less-than-anticipated sales tax revenues likely will force DART to scrap plans for a second downtown rail line. It was a waste of money to begin with, a possible convenience but not a necessity. I never thought it would increase rail traffic enough to justify its construction. I worked at City Hall, where today city leaders have been lobbying for a rail station to be located on this second downtown line, and took DART rail to work almost daily. I never found it inconvenient to walk to the nearest station and, in fact, found a way to get from City Hall to the Convention Center station without ever leaving the shelter of a building. That came in handy during inclement weather.

DART sacrificed its opportunity to be a realistic viable transportation alternative when it opted more than a quarter of a century ago for light instead of heavy rail. For that reason DART will never have the appeal of the New York subway system, the Paris Metro or the London Underground, to name just three municipal rail services I have used frequently. Besides, Dallas is not really a city in the way New York, London, Paris, Boston, San Francisco, Moscoe etc are. Dallas is a comparatively small downtown business center surrounded by predominatly individualistic residential neighborhoods. Rail really doesn't work that well in a Dallas-type environment.

About the only troubling news in DART's financial revelations is the scrapping of the Blue Line extension that would have taken it to the Dallas campus of the University of North Texas. That line, to me, should have the highest priority of all the ones except the Orange line to DFW airport. I also find concern in that plans for additional HOV lanes will be scaled back almost 80 percent, even though most people in Dallas think HOV lanes are more of a transportation issue than an environmental one.