Last week, when I took my field trip to City Hall to see the Council debate the thing I’m not writing about, I took DART instead of driving. And a very pleasant experience it was.
I’ll admit that I’m a mass transit guy, and have been since I was a teenager. I even take DART out to DFW when I can. So I didn’t think much of getting the DART blue line at White Rock station, getting off at St. Paul downtown and walking the five or six blocks to City Hall. On the way back, I walked west about the same distance to the Convention Center blue line station, and caught the train there. The entire episode, back and forth, went quite smoothly. The total cost was $2.50 with a day pass, and it took me about 30 minutes each way, which is about what it would have taken me to drive and park.
I noticed three things. First, that the train downtown during rush hour was full of suburban commuters — Anglo suburban commuters, in fact. And who said Texans wouldn’t use mass transit? Second, the Convention Center station is quite dark and foreboding, hardly enticing to the conventioneers it is supposed to attract. And third, DART needs to teach its conductors how to mumble. I could understand every word the man said when he announced the stops over the PA system. This, as anyone who has ever ridden mass transit anywhere else in the world knows, is quite odd. One is not supposed to understand a word the conductors say.
