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.”
