DART — Dallas Area RAPID Transit? My Bicycle Is Faster!

Why Dallas-Area Cities Are Ready to Ditch DART – And Why They’re Not Wrong

Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) was sold to voters in the 1980s with a simple, seductive promise: get people where they’re going faster and easier than sitting in traffic on I-35 or the Tollway. Build some trains, run some buses, watch the region breathe easier.

Forty years and billions of dollars later, the verdict from actual riders is brutal: unless you have literally no other option, DART is almost always slower than driving – and sometimes slower than walking or riding a bike.

Now cities like Coppell, Rowlett, and others are openly talking about pulling out of the agency altogether. And honestly? It’s hard to blame them.

The Math Doesn’t Lie

Let’s take a real-world example that any North Texan will recognize:

• Drive from Addison to downtown Dallas at 8 a.m.: 30–45 minutes (even in traffic).
• Take DART: Walk or bus to Addison Transit Center → wait for a bus → ride to a rail station → transfer downtown → walk to final destination.
  Total time: 75–110 minutes on a good day.

Want to go from Plano to Las Colinas on a Saturday afternoon? Driving: 30–35 minutes. DART: two trains, a transfer in downtown Dallas, and probably a long wait because weekend frequency is 20–30 minutes. You’re looking at 90–130 minutes door-to-door.

In many cases, a moderately fit person on an e-bike beats the train.

The Network Was Built for 1980, Not 2025

DART’s fatal flaw was designing a classic “hub-and-spoke” rail system centered on downtown Dallas in a metroplex that has spent four decades becoming aggressively polycentric. People don’t want to go downtown – they want to go Frisco to Legacy West, Las Colinas to Grapevine, Uptown to the Design District.

But DART forces almost every cross-town trip through the same bottleneck in the central business district. It’s like making everyone in Los Angeles transfer through downtown to get from Santa Monica to Pasadena.

The Ridership Tells the Story

DART’s own numbers are damning:

• Pre-pandemic ridership: ~200,000 weekday boardings across a 13-city, 7-million-person region.
• Comparable to Portland’s system, which serves an area one-fourth the size.
• Parking garages at suburban stations fill early while trains outside rush hour run with many empty seats.

Translation: the only people who reliably use it are the ones who can’t drive. Everyone else votes with their keys.

The 1% Sales Tax Revolt

DART is funded by a 1-cent sales tax in member cities. That’s real money – Plano alone sends over $80 million a year to the agency. When residents see shiny new trains running mostly empty while their own streets crumble and it still takes two hours to get across town on transit, resentment builds.

Now cities are doing the math: if we leave DART, we keep that 1 cent and can spend it on roads, local buses, microtransit, or anything that actually serves our residents. Coppell and Rowlett have already started the formal exit process. Others are quietly exploring it.

Could DART Have Been Saved?

Maybe – if it had:

• Built a true grid network instead of a radial one
• Prioritized 10-minute frequencies over shiny extensions to nowhere
• Forced transit-oriented development around stations instead of parking craters
• Embraced on-demand microtransit and e-bikes as feeders instead of doubling down on 1980s thinking

But it didn’t. And now the political will to keep throwing good money after bad is collapsing.

The Bottom Line

DART isn’t evil. It’s just a 40-year-old system trying to solve 2025 problems with 1985 tools in a metroplex that grew in ways nobody predicted.

When cities start voting to leave – and voters cheer them on – it’s not a tantrum. It’s the market speaking in the clearest possible terms: this product doesn’t work for us anymore.

Maybe it’s time to admit the experiment failed and try something that actually gets people from Point A to Point B faster than their car. Because right now, for 95% of trips in DFW, even a bicycle is beating the “rapid” in Dallas Area Rapid Transit.

And that’s not a flex. It’s an embarrassment.