Schutze's High on City Hall as Council's Transportation Committee Chair Puts Positive Spin on DART's Texas-OU Mishap

• Pretty soon the breaking down of charges to make your base rate look low will reach ridiculous proportions. Toilet flush recovery fee to help recoup water costs when our sheeple use our restrooms.

• Now watch this whole package unravel. The BTP has been forced through by the consultants; the local politicians were too weak to stop them - and now it is pay-back time. The consultants move on to sell their wares to a new set of gullible local councillors, whilst the poor old Bath ratepayer picks up the bill. What a mess!

• I think what the public would accept is a truthful and objective attitude toward the system. Acknowledging its failures, regardless of the consequences, and not just promoting only the positives. Nothing less should be expected from elected officials or government employees. A flat transparency of facts instead of some corporate PR and spin control mindset is what should, at the very least, set government apart from big business these days. If somebody with even a modicum of authority at DART could just say, "We're sorry we screwed up that day," then the whining masses would quietly go back to eating funnel cake and JS's job would be more difficult.

• EH, it's coming up Christmas, so I'm all Grinchy. Or Scroogy. Whatever. The point is Jim, it was a few hours of an inconvenience one day out of 365 days. TO GET TO A FRIGGIN CROWDED SPORTS GAME (what's that about letting them eat cake? How bout this one: bread and circuses?) No people starved. Nobody passed out and died of heat exhaustion or dehydration from having to walk 16 blocks from Deep Ellum. It wasn't declared a disaster area. I didn't see FEMA setting up tents. And you know what else? DART hasn't had a problem transporting people since then. No complaints about sorry service on the Green Line, etc. Wonder why that is? And yet here you are along with everyone else who hates DART for the sake of being a taxing authority, declaring DART a total failure over one single day of overwhelming traffic, the likes of which we will not see again for another year. So yeah, a bunch of damn whining masses.

• You tell 'em, cp. And, hey, if they say they're starving, let them eat cake, eh? Damn whining masses.

• No Dallasite, the London Underground cannot take 60,000 passengers from two or three stations to one destination in one hour. No system in the world is built for that capacity. We do not build transit systems to accommodate single, large events (particularly sporting games), we build them to accommodate peak-hour passenger traffic. Again, no system in the world carries 60,000 passengers on a single line from a few stations to one single destination in a hour. Traffic lights or no, passenger rail cars are built to accommodate 300 - 500 passengers a time, depending on the manufacturer. Even if the London Underground decided to run say, 120 cars at 500 passengers each, all from one or two locations to another, single location you have a traffic jam on the line, due to basic math (length of the cars) and physics (how to fit 120 cars on four sets of track). You know nothing about transit and your ignorance is reason enough for people like Linda Koop (who incidentally, knows a thing or two about transit planning) to laud the job that DART did on Texas/OU weekend. I swear, you people can't complain enough. If it's not the car traffic, it's the lack of fast enough shuttle buses. Or uncomfortable buses. Or loud buses. Or stinky buses. Or inconvenient buses. Or you can't walk a half a mile because of the homeless or the cold or the heat. No one complains about TxDOT not building magic carpet jet-pack car lanes across the top of I-30 for the Texas/OU weekend. No one complains that TxDOT actually ENCOURAGES people to drive their cars. No one complains that the State Fair of Texas ENCOURAGES driving and congestion by offering parking. Why don't they have enough parking for 100,000 cars at a time? Let's fire some people at the State Fair for not planning for enough parked vehicles! And now the 60,000 people who chose to take DART that day are now transit planning experts and can do a better job than DART. Well guess what? We hire the transportation planners at DART to plan transit, something I'm guessing that you're not. Why don't you keep your day job, Einstein? I am so sick of listening to you all complain that you got inconvenienced for a few hours out of ONE DAY in your whole life. We really are a bunch of spoiled brats here in this country.

• But, Dallasite, the thing is: you're right.

• Dallasite: What the hell do you expect? The Tube has been operating for OVER A HUNDRED YEARS. And you've obviously never been to London if you think they never have delays on the scale of what happened on UT-OU weekend. Lines close, the system floods, strikes happen, power gets lost. DART is a dream compared to the Tube. A subway would have cost five times as much for little benefit. The TRE is designed to take you to Fort Worth. DFW is an afterthought. They are building you the orange line to get your whiny ass to DFW faster. And the random ticket check system is very common and practical. You need to get out more.

• Michael: "I seriously doubt there is a mass transit system in world that could take 60,000 people to one station on one line in one hour." The London tubes could probably do it in half an hour. Of course, their trains are underground so they don't have to stop at traffic lights, and they don't run into cars, buses, and pedestrians that are just trying to cross the street. Because their trains can run so much faster, they are able to run them through the stations every few minutes. Now compare that to our crappy train system. It take longer to ride the train through downtown than it does to drive. They don't even pretend to check tickets; our trains run on the honor system apparently. The TRE is so pathetic, that taking to the airport takes two to three times as long as taking a cab, plus the hassle of having to switch buses twice. Face it, there a right way, a wrong way, and the Dallas way. The Dallas way always ends up being somewhere pretty close to wrong.

• DART is a good system. This was just a case of poor planning for the event. As the system is builtout, DART removes bus service to drive people to rail. That is not always the best solution for people who are depending on public transportation to get from point a to point b. In other cities when special events take place,the people do not expect the kind of a delay that we saw. True the normal schedule will not function but not a total breakdown. DART was advertising the new Green Line was ready and for people to get on board for the game without calculating the large number that would take them up on their offer. The people came and DART was not prepared. While the DART system is an open system, they will have to control boarding, have suttles, and be prepared to put all available trains on that line. I think DART will do a much better job of planning the next time.

• Here's the ironic part of this whole mess: for the previous few years before '09, my wife and I took the DART shuttle buses from Pearl Station to Fair Park and back on UT/OU day - and it worked BEAUTIFULLY! Then DART eliminates the shuttles and implement light-rail "improvements" which make the system work like crap. If it ain't broke, don't fix it! (Reminds me of new software "upgrades," but that's another rant.) Seriously - I don't know how many years the shuttle service bussed people to the Fair, and maybe that system had problems initially as well. I'm just pissed that DART, instead of saying, "Our bad. Here's how we're gonna fix it.", are laying the blame on passengers and everywhere else but them. Guess that's par for the course, though.

• Easy solution. On Big Event Days Dart should just load up the lines with every train they have and have them continually moving in a circle at about 5-10mph. As if, to create a giant 'people mover' like they have at long stretches of the airport. Or,... just have all the trains on both sides go in one direction in the morning and the other direction in the afternoon. I feel confident in these theories after having achieved a "Diplomate of Lionel Planning and Development-HO scale" from my Uncle Cletus, God rest his soul.

• People in other cities expect massive delays to public transit systems on huge event days. You poor little pampered Dallasites, next time get a suburban to hall your fat tub of lard self to the game. If I were there I woulda chilled across the street from the train station and gotten a beer at one of several bars and waited for the crowd to calm down. Not bitch and whine because a herculean transit feet that even the best systems in the world would struggle with, did not conform to my every whim and desire. I hate DART. They left me standing in the snow the day after Thanksgiving a couple years ago when they just "decided" not the run the last 3 trains of the night (on a Saturday schedule no less, let's take off early.) But this incident? It's not proof of their incompetence, especially when you consider the damn line opened only a few weeks before this...get over it folks.

• If the trains are physically incapable of moving 60,000 in a short time period from points A, B, and C to X, then what are the alternatives? 1. Cabs? Not enough. 2. Private cars? Been there, done that, got ticketed, booted, or burglarized if you missed the Early Bird Special at the Official Fair Park lots. Not to mention the conga line on 75/I-30 to the 2nd Avenue exit. 3. Busses? Hm. Where would DART find a bunch of empty busses that it could use to supplement its overloaded trains? Where indeed? HOW ABOUT ITS OWN BUS BARNS? On Saturdays they might have a few hundred extra busses just sitting there.

• I seriously doubt there is a mass transit system in world that could take 60,000 people to one station on one line in one hour.

• Dallasm: "This proves, beyond any and all doubt, that North Texans are willing to take the train and mass transit." Since the parking lots at Fair Park fill up in the morning, the only parking alternative is to pay $20 to someone appearing less than trustworthy to park in an empty lot or field and then hope your vehicle is still there and undamaged at the end of the day. It's a huge stretch to say this proves North Texans are willing to take mass transit. It proves people will take mass transit if they have no other alternative. And again, the blame is on the number or passengers and not on the amount of time it took DART trains to move from point A to point B (about 2 hours). DART proved to be completely incompetent. Next year, the cab drivers will be overwhelmed.

• The passengers all tried to get on the light rail "Green Line" at the Pearl Station and or the American Airlines Station. The Green Line MLK stoped at West End Station and pasengers going to the game had boarded a few there and a few more boarded at Akard Station and St.Paul Station then those that Pearl would not have any problem boarding because there were no more seats to set. A few could have stood and the train could have moved on. DART should have had Supervisors or Police at Pearl with BullHorns offering the people the best advice. i.e. next time arrive earlier. And stay at the Fair later.

• DART is a joke. Bus routes that don't even run on a grid pattern, much less intersect with the rail lines and each other. Train cars designed by some guy on acid. I've never seen so many stairs on a train. There are vast areas of Dallas that you can't get to on DART. I remember council members gojng on lots of expensive world tours to see other transit systems. I think they all went to Amsterdam and hung out in the "coffeehouses"

• I wonder if Dallasm is right. We voted down the real transit like other major cities that would move the kinds of crowds we're going to have. So what we have is this watered down pseudo-transit which looks good on paper...But.... unless they start having 3-4-5 car trains on the regular we're going to be screwed.

• DallasM: I don't see why people are so upset about this. Really? You wouldn't be upset if DART advertised itself as a great way to get to the game - a really big game and you took them up on the offer and it turns out that DART was about the worst way ever to get to the game? And then you found out that DART knew it was going to be overwhelmed but continued to advertise and didn't do anything to ameliorate the problem? None of that would make you upset? You must be Ghandi's son or something. Or just an idiot. Do you work at city hall?

• It's kind of like the South Dallas briefing they had last week where they touted the fact the 311 calls were down 20-30%. Duh--- it's because now you can only call 311 from 7-7 on weekdays rather than 24 hours a day. And even then, last week on 2 mornings I got a recorded message that the service was not available. On a third morning, it rang 100 times and I finally gave up. This morning it took 4 minutes and 56 seconds for someone to answer. So the fact that calls are down does not translate into things being 20-30% better. Just a matter of citizen giving up.

• I want some of the drugs those city hall folks are on....mainline some happy Koop!

• Sure, DART should have had buses ready to go to shuttle people from rail stations to Fair Park, I don't see why people are so upset about this. I see two points: 1. Dallas and Dart member cities didn't pay for a system that was designed to move 60,000 people to one location in under an hour. That system would have been much much larger than the one we have, and cost exponentially more. AND people would complain that it sits idle the other 364 days/year. 2. While I feel sorry for the ticket holders who missed part of the game, and embarrassed for DART for making them late, this whole mess is actually caused by a very good thing. This proves, beyond any and all doubt, that North Texans are willing to take the train and mass transit. And it's not just a few poor people, like some suburbanites like to think (*COUGHalington*). Rather, this is wealthy and educated people. These people could have driven, but instead chose DART over their own cars. So the next time you hear someone say that Texans won't take the Train, point them to this and tell them that not only will we take the train, We'll take down the entire system. Arlington, Grand Prairie, Flower Mound, etc. It's time to stop dragging your feet. Commuter rail has to be a fundamental part of any future transportation plan for North Texas.

• Councilman Dave Neumann asks Thomas what happened. Thomas tells him, �It starts with what do you anticipate the ridership to be. Based on what you anticipate that ridership to be, you plan equipment.� Sounds solid so far. But then Neumann asks Thomas why, after the first disaster when people were trying to get to the game before it started, a second disaster happened when people tried to go home on the train. �What happened on the route home?� Neumann asks. �Did we do better?� �It depended on when you left,� Thomas says. �It seemed to be later in the day when a lot of people were leaving, six or seven o�clock, we had some fairly significant lines.� Uh, yeah. If you left in the middle of the game, you were O.K. It was those damn people who watched the whole game and then all left at once. The idiots. Councilman Ron Natinsky agrees with me. �You can�t just show up a the last minute and expect a train to be waiting for them to zip them down to Fair Park,� he says. You fools! You think you can just show up and ride the train? Damn you!! �They�re going have to alter some of their habits,� Natinsky says. �At the end of the day there is no way we can carry everybody that wants to ride DART to Fair Park, so I think communications is going to be key.� So true, so true. I think big billboards all over town would be great: �STAY THE HELL OFF OUR TRAINS YOU CRAZY IDIOTS!� These people are absolute geniuses. I love this place.

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