Remembering the ice-out of 2011: Will DART do better this time?

updated 3:01 p.m.

WASHINGTON — The bad news for DART and its customers in today’s disabling storm does provide the agency and its public an opportunity. It will be clear after today just how much DART and its management, from president Gary Thomas to its board of directors, learned from the last time ice knocked the system out cold.

DART has made a lot of changes, but the real test will be in how it responds to setbacks.

Today’s total blackout brings back unpleasant memories from February, 2011 — when a terrific cold snap, with plenty of ice, put the whole system on shutdown.

At the time, DART was entirely unprepared for such an event – in fact it had gambled the night before that the cold and ice would leave it mostly unscathed, even skipping a Super Bowl transportation committee aimed at readying everyone in the region for the storm.

I don’t follow transportation any more — that merry job belongs to Brandon Formby as readers of this blog will know well. So it will be up to him to chronicle how well the agency handles today’s trauma.

But it’s worth recalling that the 2011 debacle was made worse by a string of communication failures that left passengers stranded on frigid platforms waiting for hours for trains that didn’t come. Police officers were sent to some stations — and remained in their cars, rather than communicate with the stranded passengers.

The biggest letdown came after the fact, when management’s first response was to shoo-away recommendations for improvement. Gary Thomas’s message: We got it covered. Bad weather happens. As for those police officers in their cars: Thomas said at the time, of course they didn’t get out of the cars — It was 10 degrees outside, he noted.

Officials were clear: Steps to keep the critical parts on the rail lines from freezing weren’t needed here, and a plan to run the trains all night long in advance of the ice, as happens in some places where cold is more frequent, was too expensive and not prudent.

I was reminded of all this yesterday, long before the weather turned nasty in Dallas, while waiting on a meeting near the Capitol yesterday, hunkered over a cup of coffee on a remarkably balmy morning. In walked Randall Crissman, the longtime DART board member from Carrollton and former chairman. He’s now a board member of the American Public Transportation Association, too, and was in for a meeting.

We got to talking about old times — about the string of let-downs, from the ice storm to the self-inflicted Texas-OU game disaster to the incident where the Red Line broken down in northbound tunnel and passengers sat so long without adequate information from DART they ended up breaking the law to wander along the tracks in the dark.

The common factor in all those episodes was a communication response from DART that made things much worse. At the OU game, DART spokesman Morgan Lyons told the fans, many of whom had been stuck so long in traffic that they missed the first half of the game, that the problem was that they hadn’t learned how to ride transit. Never mind that our reported later showed that even under the best of circumstances, DART’s capacity was so far short of the demand they had helped hype up in the weeks leading to the game enormous delays were guaranteed.

It was so bad that board chairman William Velasco wanted to take out a full page ad in hometown newspapers for the team’s fans and apologize. That idea was nixed by management as sending the wrong message.

After the tunnel incident, the first response from DART was to remind folks who left the cars that they had behaved like criminals.

But nothing compared to the misery DART passengers experienced in February 2011, when a freak storm shut the system down. I spent some time on the rails that day and later in the week when things got bad all over again. Misery is not an overstatement.

Again and again, people wanted to know why can’t DART tell us what’s happening. And, why can’t they get the dang trains running again?

Not expecting a repeat of the shutdown, Crissman and I talked yesterday about how things had improved. Reluctantly, to be sure, and after initially resisting the idea, DART did move forward with major changes. It spent millions of dollars to put large screens on every single platform — designed to tell people when the next trains are coming. Not just what their schedule was, but what their real-time progress was.

More recently, they added smart-phone apps that help passengers stay abreast of real-time train schedules.

That’s real progress. Another example: When crime began to spike back in 2012/2013 the agency moved quickly to put officers on every single train — finally, it seems, understanding that if it wan’t to grow ridership it had to begin responding to its customers’ needs.

But we also talked about the tendency of DART’s management to resist all criticism, to dig in its heels, and delay needed improvements.

Thomas had been helped in that behavior by board members who rallied to shut down dissent. Chairman Velasco, finally so frustrated by the tone-deaf response to crises, had the courage, or wisdom, to allow himself to be quoted saying the agency had fumbled badly during the ice storm and would do what it needed to restore faith from its customers.

But rather than embrace that truth-telling, the board members at the next meeting, shouted him down and scolded him for talking out of turn. Velasco later told me he had felt his authority as chairman had been all but gutted as a result.

Yesterday, Chrisman and I agreed to disagree. He feels, still, that it’s better for board members to keep criticism internal, and avoid “throwing the agency under the bus” with out-of-school comments. “The impact of bad publicity is so much stronger even the same amount of good publicity,” he explained.

I think Velasco offered the agency the only way out of a tremendous public relations setback, and instead the agency made things worse for itself.

Now, unexpectedly, the agency has another opportunity to respond to a disaster. With new apps, new video boards, and a new social media strategy — it may be doing a better job. It’s hard to tell from Washington.

But the real test will come from how it handles the inevitable criticism. Will it dig in its heels? Or show that it understands the frustrations its passengers are surely feeling.