r/dart

Silver line has a train in Addison every 30 minutes. Thousands attended Kaboom town festival. Hundreds (thousands?) took the train. People were pushing/crushing onto the train because they knew missing it would mean waiting another 30 minutes. My family missed the train twice due to overcrowding.

Why not add more trains for Kaboom town?

It would be really nice if we had street cars on lower Greenville. Obviously the city doesn’t have much rail in a lot of places, but I feel it could use some rail in the lower Greenville area especially with how much foot traffic it gets. And it would be really handy to use the street car to easily hop between each part of lower Greenville.

Received a ticket for fare evasion. Utterly ridiculous. I was literally running to the platform. I walked on WITH the Dart officer. She immediately asked me for ticket and I explained the app was messing up. She then asked for my id, which I just happened to have, and complied as an act of good faith.

She then proceeds to give me a ticket without asking any questions. Even though I had a ticket by the time it was even written and I had screen shots of the app messing up and declining payment for no reason. It would only work thru Apple Cash. I tried to provide the contextual info but she didn’t care at all.

It annoys me when you act in good faith and someone is just legalistic. This is NOT A GOOD WAY to increase feels for Dart. Not a good way to increase ridership.

It is a given that the downtown stations — especially West End, Pearl Arts District, and St. Paul — are pretty sketchy. There's a makeshift police watchtower at the West End station. Whether there's actually a cop inside it is a coin flip.

During FIFA, the stations are another world: visible police presence, less loitering, no open drug use. It'll go back to normal once the tournament crowds leave.

I have friends who won't ride DART at night because of these stations. One mentioned a stabbing he'd heard about secondhand — no name, no date, nothing I could verify, and he wasn't there for it either. That's not really the point. The point is he believes it enough to change his behavior, and he's not alone. Whether that specific story is true or not, the effect is the same: people are opting out.

If DART wants higher ridership, you'd think they'd care about that gap between perception and reality — or at least about closing it. Right now the stations do nothing to close it. The watchtower at West End station with maybe-a-cop-in-it doesn't read as safety, it reads as an admission that something's wrong and this is the theater DART settled on instead of a fix.

DART can't easily gate these stations the way a subway system can. West End, Pearl, St. Paul — they're open to the street, platforms flush with the sidewalk, no choke-point to put a turnstile in.

But fare checking doesn't require any of that. It just requires someone walking the platform asking to see a ticket. I never see it happen. If DART wants to signal that this is a place with rules, someone occasionally checking fares would do more than a watchtower nobody's sure is staffed.

None of this requires DART to prove my friends right or wrong about what's actually happened at these stations. Ridership doesn't run on crime statistics (and DART refuses to publish per stations stats) — it runs on whether someone waiting for a train feels like anyone's paying attention. Right now the answer downtown is no. 🙁

Services like the KC Streetcar have been able to share reports of ridership breaking records for the World Cup. I've seen the photos: I have to assume TRE is pulling impressive numbers, possibly exceeding its 2008 peak of 9,000 riders a day. The organizations HAVE to know these numbers. How can we get them to share it, and get some positive pr for the trains?

Do yall think that Arlington will final think about adding public transportation in their city after the World Cup?

Hi I am a 28F who just moved to Carrollton (I’m liking it so far!) I read bout the dart being a good idea for those looking to goto Dallas for fun.

I got an invite to Deep Ellum this weekend (I’ve lived in Dallas before, I already know about this area)

I’m trying to gauge how safe would it be for me to take the dart alone there and back?

I’ve lived in Chicago before so I know that some lines can be safer than others. What’s your opinion? Maybe take the dart there and uber back?

Possibly attending the FIFA Fan Fest Concert Latin Legacy Tour on Sunday June 28. From the Fan Fest website I see the public transportation option is DART Green Line to Fair Park/MLK station and there is a special tram running for the soccer matches. My question, is the tram only for the soccer match that afternoon or does it run later that night? I’ve taken my own car to the pavilion for plenty of concerts my biggest complaint is there needs to be a station on the other side of fair park right in front of the pavilion. If there’s not a tram I’m not walking to those stations alone at night so wanted to be sure.