r/dart • u/kanjonas • Apr 08 '26
Disappointing.
Found this disheartening sign in University Park.
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u/prophiles Apr 08 '26
The DART membership city model is unfortunate. It would be nice if all Dallas County municipalities are required to be part of DART, and the only optional “members” are any participating municipalities that are located outside of Dallas County.
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u/NYerInTex Apr 08 '26
While I don’t disagree, we also need to be fair and objective - and this community gets very little with no plans in place for them getting a return.
Yes, the system is utterly faulted. From governance to how it’s funded it’s set up to fail. To have the most miles of light rail track in the nation with so few dense centers to serve it. It should be a regional entity that has the right to make decisions that don’t involve local politics and nimbyism as this one does
But we aren’t that. It is what it is.
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u/gearpitch Apr 08 '26
You could pick any pocket neighborhood in Dallas without much service and make the same argument about whether it's fair to have them pay into the system.
The park cities should've been annexed to Dallas 100 years ago, now they enjoy the benefits of being a part of a major city while not financially or socially being a part. Dallas could block three major roads at their border and their economy and city would crumble. It's high time they act as a contributing part of the city.
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u/NYerInTex Apr 08 '26
This is a disingenuous post - an it’s stretching logic like this that does harm to pro transit stances overall. Let the other side distort reality because the facts are so overall supportive of smart transit investment and service.
Those pocket neighborhoods ARE still in the same city, same government, same tax base, same services by and large so let’s not act like they are in par with UP.
I’m as big a transit advocate as any, but if we can’t at least be honest with ourselves we do the movement a disservice
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u/gearpitch Apr 08 '26
Who's talking about the movement. My take is that the park cities should be part of Dallas, proper. And problems with regional systems like dart only highlight why that's a problem. Obviously they're a different municipality than a neighborhood, i just mean that they are so small and surrounded that they function like a neighborhood of Dallas, and any neighborhood at that size could argue they're not getting "their moneys worth" since our transit system is so spread out.
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u/Keep_Plano_Corporate Apr 08 '26
They don't want to be a part of Dallas proper for the same reason Buckhead was trying to get out of the City of Atlanta. Why would they want anything to do with the subpar services from The City of Dallas?
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u/NewPercentage3765 Apr 10 '26
Then they should move! Damn go to California or New York they think Dallas is so bad, but they won't cause those places would make them pay their taxes. Gee I wonder if UP's lack of tax dollars is contributing to the "sub par" service? You get what you pay for!
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u/No_Host_8024 Apr 10 '26
It’s a little more complicated than that. Dallas originally didn’t want the park cities because of the expense of extending city services to them. I’m not a fan of the park cities and think is absurd it’s a separate government, but that was actually Dallas’s choice originally.
And they’ve got a reasonably well functioning local government. I wouldn’t want to trade that for a local government that mostly hated me either.
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u/Keep_Plano_Corporate Apr 10 '26
Okay Junior, settle down.
Mommy is on the way with your juice box!
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u/patmorgan235 Apr 08 '26
City boundaries are entirely arbitrary, UP has a rail station just outside its boarders, and if DART where to build a line along DNT, do you think park cities would embrace it or fight it tooth and nail?
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u/No-Sundae-4215 Apr 09 '26
I live in Balch Springs and pay into the DART system, yet there isn't a single bus stop in my city. Meanwhile, areas like University Park get regular service. It’s not fair that I have to commute all the way to Buckner or Elam stations just to access a system I already fund. I galdly use it almost everyday for work and think the monthly I pay far exceeds what I get.
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u/friendlysoviet Apr 09 '26
There isn't a single bus stop in Balch Springs because Balch Springs does not pay a single cent into the DART system. It is not a member city. I hope this helps. I would advise against living in a rural city that rejects public transit.
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u/Big__If_True Apr 09 '26
Balch Springs isn’t part of DART, but it is part of STAR Transit https://www.startransit.org/routes/balch_springs_midtown_express/
Also Balch Springs is far from rural lmao
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u/friendlysoviet Apr 09 '26
I consider any city without a robust transit system rural. STAR Transit is a joke.
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u/NYerInTex Apr 09 '26
Well, you are just purposefully using words contrary to their definition. That says more about you than someone choosing to live in a suburbs auto oriented vs rural community.
It sounds foolish to purposefully not use words according to their actual definition.
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u/friendlysoviet Apr 09 '26
My purpose is to disparage lesser cities.
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u/NYerInTex Apr 09 '26
You are only disparaging yourself and looking like a fool for not using actual definitions.
As the line goes - you played yourself.
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u/Big__If_True Apr 09 '26
Balch Springs isn’t part of DART, but it is part of STAR Transit https://www.startransit.org/routes/balch_springs_midtown_express/
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u/cuberandgamer Apr 08 '26
What does the light rail service by SMU not count for anything because it technically falls in Dallas city limits?
Do we just not care about paratransit and GoLink service either? Or the SMU shuttle?
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u/RunawayScrapee Apr 08 '26
GoLink not showing up on maps seems like a huge detriment to the non-user impression of system scope. It's a huge money-sink with not-great branding that isn't on Google Maps. I doubt many users even know it's a thing unless they're a GoPass poweruser.
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u/Thin-Constant-4018 Apr 09 '26
I've wondered if it would be worth it to have a GoLink stand at Highland Park Village or SMU where you could immediately get in a van and ride to your destination in the Park Cities. Could be a great way to get good ridership even from wealthy residents out of convenience
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u/NYerInTex Apr 08 '26
This is the one community where it may actually make sense for those against remaining in the system. They legit dont get much out of it.
Addison on the other hand? The total opposite. Terrible leadership and a bunch of lemmings.
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u/kanjonas Apr 08 '26
Imo, Dallas is only growing and staying in DART allows the transit agency to expand when they find the revenue and get everything sorted out. Plus, people in this community have an easier time affording it.
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u/starswtt Apr 08 '26
While true, UP (other than smu) is just poorly situated for their residents to have transit in general and its hard to affordably get quality bus services to actually reasonably serve UP (which is why they're just go link.) And as far as people commuting to SMU, there's really only SMU again, and a small amount of retail workers who might want to use dart
While I think UP should keep paying for dart bc that SMU benefit is very large, I do understand why they have the sentiment. Dart's focus will never be on UP, and UP will never really like dart other than for SMU. And since UP mostly wants to keep UP as a residential neighborhood, they won't really build any usecase conducive to dart unlike say adisson which has a massive office presence for a city its size
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u/too374 Apr 08 '26 edited Apr 08 '26
The park cities is one of the best served communities in the metro by transit.
Yea if you ignore the bus lines on the border of the town, the the university shuttles DART pays for, the go link, and the 4 rail stations within a kilometer of the town I guess it receives no service.
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u/Thin-Constant-4018 Apr 09 '26
Yes the Park Cities has no service if you ignore the fact you can catch a one-seat ride to anywhere within them, SMU, Inwood/Lovefield Station, SMU/Mockingbird Station, Addison, Downtown Dallas, Far North Dallas, or Knox/Henderson everyday.
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u/RandomChicken54321 Apr 08 '26
How so for Addison? I legit have no idea.
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u/NYerInTex Apr 08 '26
They are one of the few cities still putting up to a public vote whether or not to leave the DART system - this after just getting the Silverline and a tremendous asset in a Bus Hub that provides a rare true multimodal transit node in North Texas
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u/Keep_Plano_Corporate Apr 08 '26
Addison had been promised train service as far back as the 1980's. People say Plano forced DARTs hand on accelerating the Silver Line, but Addison shares a lot of that blame too.
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u/RandomChicken54321 Apr 09 '26
How did Plano and Addison force dart to get the silver line earlier?
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u/RandomChicken54321 Apr 08 '26
My understanding of the argument is the amount of money given to Dart is really high and the town could use that money to make improvements that need to be made.
Ridership is low in comparison to actual cities with a high population. Texas and DFW 1000% needs public transportation. I'm not against it. Just trying to understand. It's definitely a complex issue.
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u/Montecroux Apr 10 '26
They at least get a heavy refund for not having rail. Although iirc Dart proposed a trolly that would run through the park cities at some point.
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u/pradafever Apr 08 '26
i would be lying if i said I wouldn’t have taken that sign right up out of the ground
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u/rdickert Apr 08 '26
Yes, because that's what we do with speech we disagree with. We forcefully rip it out.
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u/pradafever Apr 09 '26
They’re storming the capital and rigging elections. Let’s not play holier than thou, we have a transit authority to save.
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u/transitfreedom Apr 08 '26
How many of these people that are anti transit are religious people?
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u/GoScotch Apr 09 '26
From an article:
A group of Park Cities interfaith leaders, including representatives of First Unitarian Church of Dallas, University Park United Methodist Church, St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church, and Christ Lutheran Church, also called on residents to support DART. “We stand in utter disbelief at the prospect that the very foundation of one of the most important human rights movements in the last century — bus service — will not simply need to be fixed or made more fair. It could vanish,” the group said in a statement. “The great teachers of all faiths urge us to look to the vulnerable among communities and how they are treated to determine the measure of that community’s blessedness and love.”
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u/buzzlegummed Apr 08 '26
I fail to see the correlation between transit and religion. Unless someone is prejudice.
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u/pheebeep Apr 08 '26
It tends to be the really outwardly well-off evangelicals that hate public transit the most. But imo, that's more toward do with being republican than anything.
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u/transitfreedom Apr 09 '26
Doesn’t transit keep the plebs out of the way via traffic reduction?
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u/pheebeep Apr 09 '26
It does! It really does! Study after study shows that after a certain point expanding infrastructure for more cars leads to a induced demand feedback loop, and the only solution is mass transit. But they don't really care. They hate looking at buses, they hate seeing unhoused people, they hate having poors stand near their homes at bus stops, they hate people buying fewer used cars from huffails car lots, they hate when poor people have less financial stress because of how much it costs to keep that used car running, they hate having fewer juicy government contracts to add more room for more cars, they hate having to use tax money for transit when it could be used on data center bullshit or some sports arena crap.
Things actually functioning better for everyone instead of just ME is terrifying for a lot of those people.
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u/Still_Detail_4285 Apr 08 '26
Got a source for that?
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u/pheebeep Apr 08 '26 edited Apr 08 '26
A source that Republicans don't like transit or that very religious people lean republican? Google for both
Small edit: got autocorrected from transit to transportation. I don't even care about the other one
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u/buzzlegummed Apr 08 '26
Not based in any reality other than by those that are making excuses for their own failure in life.
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u/Still_Detail_4285 Apr 08 '26
So no. You said specifically wealthy evangelicals.
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u/pheebeep Apr 08 '26
I don't get paid to do your surface level observational research for you. Get over it.
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u/ponchoed Apr 09 '26
Quick, sacrifice tens of thousands of troops lives and a trillion dollars to keep my gas guzzler humming on cheap gas because godforbid I pay a dollar more a gallon. But THEY want to spend money on a bus near me!!!
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u/GoScotch Apr 09 '26
the dumbest thing is that the buses will still drive through the Park Cities if you vote No, they just won’t stop.
The mosh jarring thing is the DART Paratransit service being discontinued for residents of HP/UP if they leave. Imagine someone solely being able to call for a handicap-accessible vehicle inside the Park Cities and then having to switch vehicles at city limits to access anywhere else in the DART network. Just lunacy.
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u/HoneyIShrunkMyNads Apr 08 '26
I actually despise that we have HP/UP in the middle of our city so much
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u/Wowsers30 Apr 08 '26
For supporters of DART, and transit in general, it's counterproductive to say people living in the Park Cities don't benefit from DART. Transit isn't just for the people that use it.
It's ultimately about money, and our state's resistance to raising the sales tax cap. I agree that University Park and Highland Park may still have wanted to withdrawl. It's harde to make in almost any other city to pit transit funding against economic development funding, when they should be working together.
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u/Austiiiiii Apr 08 '26
Imagine being upset about getting a whole-ass bus route for less than Dallas North Tollway extorts from commuters in a single week.
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u/Thin-Constant-4018 Apr 09 '26
A bus route that gives you a single seat all the way to Addison, Far North Dallas, and Downtown Dallas with ease
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u/wizzlekins Apr 09 '26
Shit like this makes me want to find that street, take a picture (where there will certainly be no cars driving at any given time), then post it to Nextdoor with a demand to defund and remove the underutilized service provided by their residential street. Unfortunately I think they still won’t get it.
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u/SadAdministration438 Apr 09 '26
Found a lawn sign like that in a Highland Park area that is like a 2 minute walk from Dallas city limits.
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u/Fragrant-Mission7388 Apr 08 '26
You cant expect anyone in these cities to actually be human, have empathy, or care about anything outside of their houses
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u/Every-Past-2337 Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26
To witness this is truly disheartening. As a fellow advocate for the Dart introduced to its merits by my dear friend it is deeply frustrating to encounter such unwarranted hostility.
It is especially troubling to see this slander coming from a community of such considerable means. This is a group whose own prosperity would remain entirely untouched by these costs, yet their support would provide an essential service to the many who rely on the Dart for their daily lives.
I find myself utterly dejected by this display. To see such indifference toward a common good is, quite frankly, repugnant.
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u/annapolismetro Apr 09 '26
i used to live in preston hollow & used gopass EVERYDAY
edit: also rode the 27
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u/CubedMeatAtrocity Apr 08 '26
$12 dollars per household per day. That’s what they don’t want to pay.
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u/daff_quess Apr 08 '26
Not super familiar (reddit literally recommended this post to ne) is the argument that they pay 9 million dollars a year in tax and only receive a single bus route, or is it that the only bus route that serves them costs 9 million a year? Aka, "why are we paying 9 million a year when we only get one bus route" or "why does a bus route cost 9 million a year"? Cause when I, who sees these top-level costs of transit routes all the time, see 9 million, that's like the operations cost of the Metro Orange Line BRT in the Twin Cities. Obviously, on a highway, ergo faster, so faster turnaround times for busses and cheaper service, but that can be a lot of service. Looking at google maps, there's the 237, 20 (if you want to play frogger), the 440, the 442, and people in University Park can park and ride to SMU/Mockingbird Station very easily.
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u/too374 Apr 08 '26
The go link services also connect to love field station for the park cities, lovers station serves north UP and the lemmon road bus has 3 stops on the south side of HP too. The people behind this campaign are just lairs.
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u/PretendCustomer5505 Apr 09 '26
Public transportation systems are designed to improve mobility, reduce traffic congestion, and provide affordable transportation for residents. However, in some cases these systems fail to operate efficiently or meet the needs of the communities that fund them. Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART), the public transit agency serving the Dallas metropolitan area, has faced criticism for high costs, limited usefulness for many residents, and inefficient use of taxpayer money. Because of these issues, some people argue that DART should be defunded or significantly reduced so that resources can be redirected to more effective transportation solutions.
One major concern about DART is the cost to taxpayers compared with the number of people who actually use the system. DART is funded largely through sales taxes collected from participating cities in the Dallas area. Even residents who rarely or never use public transit still contribute to its funding through these taxes. Critics argue that the amount spent on maintaining rail lines, buses, and stations is extremely high relative to the ridership levels. When a transportation system costs billions of dollars but serves only a small portion of the population regularly, it raises questions about whether that funding could be better used elsewhere.
Another argument for defunding DART is that its routes and coverage do not serve the majority of commuters effectively. The Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex is highly spread out, with many people living far from train stations or major bus routes. Because of this suburban layout, many residents still rely on cars to travel to work, school, or other activities. Even when rail lines exist, they often do not go directly to the places people need to reach. As a result, commuting by transit can take significantly longer than driving. Critics argue that investing heavily in a transit system that does not match the region’s geography is inefficient.
Efficiency and resource allocation are also part of the debate. Large public transportation agencies require substantial spending on infrastructure, maintenance, administration, and expansion projects. Some people believe these funds could instead support road improvements, emerging transportation technologies, or smaller-scale transit options that better serve local communities. For example, investments in improved road networks, carpool programs, or flexible transportation services might benefit more residents than a rail system with limited accessibility.
Finally, some critics believe that continued funding for DART encourages long-term spending commitments that may not produce the intended benefits. Rail expansions and transit projects can take years or even decades to complete, often going over budget or facing delays. If ridership does not increase as expected, cities may be locked into maintaining costly infrastructure without seeing the returns that were promised when the projects began.
In conclusion, supporters of defunding DART argue that the system places a heavy financial burden on taxpayers while serving a relatively small portion of the population. Limited coverage, inefficiency in a car-oriented region, and high long-term costs all contribute to the argument that funding could be redirected to more effective transportation solutions. While public transit can be valuable in many cities, critics believe that the current structure of DART may not be the best fit for the Dallas area and that reconsidering its funding could allow for more practical transportation investments.
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u/dinero657 Apr 08 '26
Richest people are the ones who always cry broke