I was as surprised as some of you apparently were to hear the room full of praise for DART’s handling of the Green Line service to Fair Park during the Texas-OU game.
I happen to agree with the board that DART did a heck of a lot of things right in opening the Green Line on time, and providing smooth trips to the fair for tens of thousands during the 24-day event. But when DART president Gary Thomas began his description of what went wrong on game day, with understatement, I knew I was witnessing a serious disconnect.
“Oct. 17 was a little bit more challenging,” he said. “Obviously there were a lot more people than we expected.”
And when the board of directors chose to praise DART’s efforts, with only the mildest of suggestions for ideas to try next year, I knew it wasn’t just Thomas who had underestimated the sense of frustration, and outright anger, the riders I’ve been hearing from are feeling.
Oct. 17 wasn’t just challenging. It was a debacle, and one that took what might have been DART’s finest moment in years and made it a cause for many riders to refuse to consider trusting an important day to the rail line. Some board members acknowledged as much in that they suspected that this year’s experience was likely going to persuade some riders to stay away next year.
I think the inability on the part of the DART staff, and now the DART board, to adequately acknowledge the let-down many riders felt has made that a certainty, rather than merely likely. The Dallas City Council’s equally nonchalant response is part of the same pattern.
What really went wrong?
Thomas is absolutely right that the heart of the problem was that too many folks wanted to ride the train to the fair in too small a window of time. DART says it provided 80,000 trips to Fair Park that day, which would roughly equate to 40,000 round-trip passengers.
It isn’t saying how many of those were headed to the game and how many to the fair, but either way you slice it, it’s a lot of people trying to ride the train between 8 am and the 11 a.m. kickoff. (Another way of measuring: Thomas said the ticket machines took in $100,000 Saturday, a total that would equal 25,000 round-trip fares, plus all those who had monthly passes or other tickets.)
DART had looked at numbers from last year, when it operated a Red Line rail and shuttle service, and determined that about a 50 percent increase from last year’s 30,000 trips was reasonable. It expected to be able to handle up to 53,000 trips that day, and only anticipated 45,000. As a result, it considered, but then dropped, the idea of adding back-up shuttles to the rail service.
Of course, the capacity of the system for the three hours immediately before the game could never have handled half of 45,000 trips — or some 22,500 riders. Even if they were perfectly spaced out at 7,500 or so riders per hour, the system simply can’t handle that many people without delays, no matter how crowded the trains get.
So even if the crowds had been more like what DART expected — and even if one train hadn’t broken down, and even if the TRE commuter lines had dumped too many people at once at Victory Station — DART would have had big problems moving that many folks, and ought to have had back-up shuttles just in case.
As it turns out, their estimates for the crowds were low. One train did break down, causing in Thomas’ words a spiral effect on delays throughout the system. And of course, TRE trains did dump as many as 1,400 passenger at Victory just before 10 a.m., filling up the trains for nearly an hour, making folks waiting at Pearl wait and wait before a train came along with any open seats.
None of those things would have been easily handled, even with buses. Dart board member Randall Chrisman was right to say that sometimes it rains so much that even the best sewer system can handle all the run off without flooding. But DART’s own projections, matched against mathematical capacity, shows that its system was going to be flooded that day, even if there hadn’t been the kind of cloudburst we saw.
What about next year? Next year might be better, and then again it might not be. Thomas mentioned some promising ideas — beginning with running those missing buses — but unless the crowds are smaller, it’s not likely to make for a smooth ride.
Here’s an example: DART now says it might work with the city to run three of its larger rail cars on each train during game day, a move that would require the city to agree to let DART block its intersections near the stations, because that many rail cars will stretch out beyond the rail platforms.
DART may get the city’s ok — though the impact on the vehicle traffic will have to be considered. But Thomas said again and again that one of the major problems on Oct. 17 was that so many folks crowded into the trains that it took too long for them to get on and off the trains, especially give than the platforms were already so crowded. Three train full of folks, instead of two, won’t make that problem go away.
Bottom line: DART has its work cut out for it, both in restoring the trust of the taxpayers who have being paying into its coffers for more than a quarter-century, and in preparing a plan for next year that will allow the agency, and the city, to put its best foot forward.
One way not to do that is to continue to minimize the frustration its would-be fans felt at the game. DART simply did not prepare for the kind of crowds it attracted. That’s a mistake, though it doesn’t have to be a fatal one.
In this case, DART needs more of Bill Clinton’s feel-your-pain sensibility, than Barack Obama’s cool intellectual assessment. That’s not easy for a group of brainy, dedicated engineers, but it’s a role one would think its board members would help the executives there learn to embrace.