DALLAS — A suburban mutiny against North Texas’ largest public transit agency threatens to upend how tens of thousands of Texans get around in the state’s most populated urban area — at a time state transportation planners say the state needs more public transit.
A quartet of Dallas suburbs — Plano, Irving, Farmers Branch and Highland Park — plan to vote in May on whether to leave Dallas Area Rapid Transit, or DART, following years of tensions between the suburbs and the North Texas region’s transit agency. Suburban officials complain that for how much they shell out to fund buses and light rail, their residents hardly use it. Among the four cities looking to pull out from DART, most kick in more sales tax dollars than they receive in bus service, rail and other forms of transit service, according to a consultant’s report last year.
“We have just been dissatisfied with the service, the safety and certainly the ridership that is woefully low,” Plano Mayor John Muns said in an interview. “We're paying an extraordinary amount for the service that we're getting back.”
Instead, the cities want their money back so they can try their hand at providing public transit the way they think may be more suitable for their communities. The main idea: ditching traditional buses in favor of taxpayer-funded ride-hailing services run by the cities themselves.
That wouldn’t happen right away. The sales tax the four cities pay to DART wouldn’t immediately go away if voters withdraw from the agency, but transit service would. If voters go along with their city leaders, DART would halt all services, including bus and light rail, as soon as each election is canvassed. However, cities would have to keep collecting sales tax to pay off any outstanding debt owed to DART for capital projects such as light-rail lines and rail stations, while the cities also try to stand up their own transit services.
There are other motivations afoot. Suburban officials have enviously eyed their neighbors who aren’t part of a transit agency, as those places use sales tax dollars to woo employers and sports teams and fund economic development. As cities have faced increasing financial strain, they’ve eyed the sales tax that goes toward DART to help plug budget holes.
DART moves tens of thousands of people through the Dallas area each day. Such a move would make it harder for residents to move around the country’s fourth-largest urban region — a sprawling expanse larger than the state of Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Jersey. Particularly, it would make it harder for those without a car to access economic opportunity in corporate centers in the suburbs like Plano and Irving.
People who rely on transit — including lower-income folks, young people, elderly Texans and those living with disabilities — will effectively not have access to those parts of the region, said Yonah Freemark, a transportation researcher at the Urban Institute, a left-leaning nonprofit think tank.
“People will have no option other than to drive,” Freemark said. “When you put those things together, it means you're creating a region that is inaccessible to a large number of people.”
Guqueena Baker, 33, doesn’t own a car and has never learned to drive. Baker said she moved to Dallas from New York in August for the lower cost-of-living. She takes the bus from North Dallas to work at a hair salon in Plano.
If bus service in Plano went away, Baker said she would have to find a salon closer to her, but she worried it wouldn’t be as lucrative as the Plano salon. Buying a car and taking driving lessons aren’t expenses she can afford, she said.
“There are people who travel to do the job that you don't want to do,” Baker said. “I'm a hairstylist. You don't want to wake up and have to do your hair every day. I have to get to work.”
It’s not clear how many riders would be affected if all four cities withdrew from DART, but it would undoubtedly deal a serious blow to the transit agency’s finances.
Like many major U.S. transit agencies, DART’s ridership hasn’t rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. Nationally, transit ridership remains below where it stood prior to the pandemic, which transportation experts have attributed to a number of factors such as the rise of remote work and service cuts to transit agencies.
DART gave 46.4 million rides to passengers from January to October, according to the latest Federal Transit Administration data, a 20% dip from the same period in 2019. Comprehensive, publicly available data showing what ridership looks like in each member city is hard to come by. Ridership in Dallas, which accounts for about three-quarters of the system’s total ridership, remains below where it was just before the pandemic hit, according to a DART presentation to a Dallas City Council meeting in December. DART gave 565,662 rides in Plano in the first quarter of this year, a 6% drop from the same quarter in 2020, according to figures provided by Plano. DART officials did not respond to a request for ridership data broken down by city.
Between them, the four suburbs account for about a third of the transit agency’s sales tax revenue. DART officials haven’t said just how much of a financial blow they’d see or what impact it’d have on service levels. But in the past, officials have said threats to their revenue would eventually result in fewer buses and trains — kick-starting a death spiral for transit service in the region.
DART CEO Nadine Lee at a ribbon cutting event for Eviva, a newly developed mixed use apartment complex in Carrollton, on Nov. 10. Eviva is walking distance to the Trinity Mills Dart Station, allowing residents to access parts of the Dallas area car free. “There are a number of people who access their jobs and a variety of services and education who rely on DART to get to those destinations,” DART CEO Nadine Lee said at an October news conference. “I would hate for any of our riders to lose that access as a result of the actions of their city councils.”
The elections come at an awkward time. The month following the vote, nearly 4 million visitors are expected to descend upon the Dallas-Fort Worth region for the 2026 FIFA World Cup — snarling the region’s already gnarly traffic congestion. If those cities pull out of DART, visitors who stay in those cities may have a harder time getting around, transit officials and transportation planners have said.
The number of people living in the Dallas-Fort Worth region is expected to balloon from 8.3 million to 12 million by 2050. That means more people will need access to public transit, not fewer, transit planners and advocates said, and the region already is grappling with how to improve mobility as it grows. Even the Texas Department of Transportation, the state agency in charge of building the state’s massive freeways, says Texans need more ways to get around if the state’s going to continue to grow.
The four suburbs wouldn’t be the first to leave DART. Coppell and Flower Mound withdrew from the transit agency in the late 1980s.
Though suburban officials have pointed to surveys showing low resident satisfaction with DART, voters may not be keen on the idea of pulling out of the agency. Voters in Plano, Irving and Farmers Branch have rejected past measures to withdraw from DART at the ballot box. More than half of voters in Plano and Farmers Branch said they oppose withdrawing from DART, according to a November poll conducted by Republican consultant Ross Hunt.
It’s possible the decision to leave DART never makes it to voters. Plano and Irving have laid out terms in negotiations with DART that would theoretically allow them to remain in the system, albeit at a lower cost and with fewer services. If DART meets those terms, city officials say, they won’t hold the election.
The big sticking point for suburban officials: they don’t get as much out of DART as they invest in the system. Some 13 cities are DART members and chip in revenue gathered from a one-cent sales tax to fund buses, light rail and other transit services. But a study conducted by EY, a consulting firm formerly known as Ernst and Young, found that many suburbs don’t receive benefits in proportion to how much they contribute. Plano contributed $109 million in sales tax revenue to the system in fiscal year 2023, but received about $44 million worth of investment, including the cost of operating buses and light rail, the report found.
Dallas, meanwhile, pitched in about $408 million in sales tax revenue that year but received about $690 million worth of services, the report found. Compounding the suburban angst: the smaller cities don’t have equal representation on the 13-member board that oversees DART. Dallas alone gets seven seats and the remaining member cities share the rest.
That imbalance, the suburbs say, makes it harder for other member cities to get their fair share of services. That’s led some suburban officials to complain that they’re effectively subsidizing transit service in Dallas.
“Dallas controls it … and they're taking advantage of that, and those of us are losing because of it,” Irving Mayor Rick Stopfer said.
Irving is in a different boat: The city actually received more in agency spending than it contributed that year. Still, its leaders are unsatisfied. DART plans to reduce the number of bus routes in Irving from seven to five, according to the city’s website — and as a result will only provide bus service to three of the city’s eight rail stations.
“DART really doesn't pay attention to the rider,” Stopfer said. “The rider is the last thing they think about.”
DART officials and transit advocates have disputed the EY survey’s findings, arguing it doesn’t capture the full financial benefit transit service brings to member cities. For one, the report only covers one year, its detractors note.
Most notably, the report doesn’t take into account the Silver Line, a 26-mile rail line that ferries riders from Plano to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, with stops in six other cities along the way, for as little as $3. The route hadn’t opened when the report published last year.
The report also doesn’t factor in economic development that has sprouted near transit. Developments around DART stations have generated more than $18 billion in economic impact to North Texas over the past 25 years, according to recent research from the University of North Texas.
Dart CEO Nandine Lee and Carrollton Mayor Steve Babick at the Eviva apartment complex ribbon-cutting ceremony on Nov. 10. That development continues. In December, officials with Carrollton and DART attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new mixed-use development right next to one of the city’s three light-rail stations. That building, with more than 400 apartments and 10,000 square feet of retail, is the first phase of an expected 25-acre transit-oriented development that will eventually include offices and a hotel.
Building homes and businesses close to transit means people don’t need to travel by car as much, reducing congestion and helping residents spend less money on transportation, Lee, DART’s CEO, said during the ceremony.
“This project goes beyond housing or commercial space,” Lee said. “It represents access and opportunity.”
Carrollton officials, meanwhile, are weighing whether to hold their own withdrawal election, though they haven’t reached a decision. Like Plano, Carrollton, a city of about 135,000, pays more into the system than it gets out of it.
“We’ve been overpaying for some time,” Carrollton Mayor Steve Babick said in an interview.
But Carrollton would still find some way to provide transit to residents, Babick said, whether that’s a limited partnership with DART, membership in Denton County Transit Authority, or a new agency.
Officials in Plano and Irving have pitched replacing regular bus service with “microtransit” — smaller buses or shuttles that can be hailed on-demand like an Uber or Lyft ride. DART already operates such a service called GoLink, including in Plano and Irving. Arlington, which isn’t a DART member and is the nation’s largest city without traditional public transit, also employs such a service. Plano and Irving officials want to go all in on microtransit, arguing it’s a better fit for suburban residents than standard buses.
“DART decides that they have a (fixed-route bus) system, and most of these people that might consider it will have to walk a half a mile to a mile to get to the bus stop,” Muns said. “This is 2025. We don't have to do that.”
Microtransit is usually thought of as a last-mile service to get riders from a transit stop to their final destination, not a substitute for regular bus service, transportation experts said. Microtransit services also tend to cost more per rider than a fixed bus route, Freemark said.
“It's an approach that is extremely expensive per passenger and is incredibly ineffective in actually increasing the number of people using transit,” Freemark said.
Pulling out of DART isn’t solely about transit. Texas cities have felt a budget crunch as inflation and economic uncertainty have helped to crimp their finances as demand for public services grow amid the state’s population growth. In particular, cities have strained under strict state limits on how much in property taxes they can collect each year without asking voters. State lawmakers capped that amount at 3.5% in 2019.
That cap combined with the town’s sales tax contribution to DART has put Highland Park “at a distinct financial advantage,” officials said in a news release announcing its May withdrawal election, adding that those “combined constraints have made it increasingly difficult to invest in essential municipal priorities such as public safety, emergency response, and infrastructure modernization.”
Just because state law is crimping city budgets doesn’t mean DART should bear the brunt, said DART board chair Randall Bryant.
“I'm very sensitive to those needs that they have within their cities, all of our cities,” Bryant said. “I just don't believe that their budget shortfalls or potential budget shortfalls should be at the expense of the riders that we serve.”
Even as they criticize DART, suburban officials have shown interest in keeping their access to the agency’s 93 miles of light rail, the longest light rail line in the country. Plano officials, for example, said the city would call off its election and continue paying into DART to access the light rail line — if the agency nixes standard bus service there and refunds the city a certain amount in sales tax revenue per year, among other conditions. DART officials have said they’re weighing whether the proposal makes sense for the agency.
That kind of compromise is a sensible outcome, said Michael Morris, transportation director for the North Central Texas Council of Governments, with suburbs negotiating just how much in other kinds of transit service they receive from the agency.
The Trinity Mills Dart train station in Carrollton. Dallas-Fort Worth is growing, and officials across the region have wrestled with how to provide transit services across the region’s sprawling expanse. Some big ideas have been floated, like consolidating the region’s three transit agencies under one umbrella and extending into fast-growing Collin County. Otherwise, most of the region’s residents would live in areas without transit service, Morris said.
“We're never going to solve the transportation needs of 12.5 million people under that situation,” Morris said.
Providing transit service to the full region would undoubtedly require heavy financial investment, and the Dallas-Fort Worth area already lags its peers, spending less on transit than places with high ridership like New York, Chicago and Seattle, Freemark said.
“You get what you pay for,” Freemark said.
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