DART may tie rates to where riders live’

DART has a plan to get break even.

David Leininger, CFO of Dallas Area Rapid Transit, recently told a panel discussing the future of Dallas, that staff is talking to the DART board about instituting a higher rate for those residents living in cities that are not DART members. My question, obviously, is how are they going to know who is who. Anyway, here’s what the man had to say on the subject:

Our demand has grown beyond our boundaries. One of our biggest challenges is dealing with Frisco and McKinney and all of the areas north of our service area. Ten percent of all trips are generated at our end-of the-line stations; 55 percent of those end-of-line riders are “non-residents,” or people who live outside of DART, and that rate is growing. At the time that the plan was put together, 25 years ago, out-of-area ridership was probably 1 or 2 percent. We are spending, on light rail alone, in terms of subsidies to people who live outside our service area, roughly $20 million on the operating side. If you fold in the capital costs associated with it, it’s about $50 million a year in expense for riders who do not live in the service area and whose cities do not contribute to DART. That’s the big economic challenge that we’ve got to address. There is literally a discussion going on with our board now, to have non-resident and resident price differentiation. And it would be a big differentiation. It wouldn’t be 25 cents, I can tell you that.