Light rail specifically is an investment in the future, a piece of infrastructure around which a city can partially be reshaped and a modest corrective to the untold billions in public dollars spent to accommodate cars. They are a public good that enables the non-trivial (even in Dallas) segment of the population who can’t or don’t want to drive to navigate an urban area. Assessing transit systems purely based on dollars is misguided and misses the whole point of transit systems. That figure doesn’t mean much on its own. (Update on June 13: According to DART spokesman Mark Ball, who points us to DART's handy, 88-page Reference Book, the figure is $5.1 billion.) The grand total, then, is in the ballpark of $5.5 billion - not adjusting for inflation - or the price of 11 new Rangers ballparks. The Orange Line opened in 2012 and pushed to the airport in 2014 and seems to have cost somewhere around $1.8 billion. The green line, connecting Carrollton and Farmers Branch with Pleasant Grove, debuted in 2010 with a total price tag of $1.8 billion. Extending the Red Line to Plano and Blue Line to Garland a few years later came to $1 billion. You won’t find the information on DART’s website, at least not in a place that a normal human being can find it, which leaves the inexact but good-enough method of tallying up figures from old news reports. What DART is less eager to boast about is how much the system cost. More than that, “changing the way the region grows and how North Texans live,” according to DART CEO Gary Thomas. According to DART, it has carried 360 million passenger trips, had $8 billion in economic impact and generated $5 billion in transit-oriented development around its 62 stations. New York’s MTA operates 660 miles of track, the Chicago Transit Authority has 224 miles and Washington D.C.’s Metro has 117 miles, but those are all “heavy rail” in transit parlance and so don’t count when tallying up superlatives.ĭART is also happy to cite impressive-sounding statistics that highlight the light-rail system’s transformative effect.

With 90 miles of track, DART boasts the longest light-rail system in the country, as the transit agency will happily point out. Since then, the system has grown to truly prodigious proportions, adding lines and snaking deep into the suburbs. Twenty years ago on Tuesday, Dallas Area Rapid Transit officially got into the light-rail business, opening an 11-mile “starter system” that carried passengers between downtown’s Pearl Station on the north and Oak Cliff in the south (Westmoreland Station on the Red Line, Illinois Station on the Blue Line).

Dart train schedule to dallas