Nadine Lee, President & CEO, DART (Dallas Area Rapid Transit)
The vision for the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) is focused on the future. “Our vision for the future is about making sure that DART is providing the capacity for the travel demand that we have coming down the pipeline,” Nadine Lee, president and CEO of DART, told Invest:.
What were DART’s key highlights from this past year?
The past year was exciting for DART on a number of levels. We focus on the customer, which is not something that government, transit, or transportation typically do. We’ve spent a lot of time here at DART focusing on the most basic things that our customers need to have a high level of confidence in DART. What that means to us right now is security, cleanliness, and reliability, which have been our three main focus areas related to our service delivery. We wanted to make sure that people feel good about their ride on DART, and that they always feel secure when they’re on DART. This means they have a high-quality ride in terms of the vehicles being clean, but also a reliable ride, which is vehicles being on time and services delivered to their expectations.
One of the greatest things that we’ve learned is that our overall customer satisfaction ratings have gone up significantly in the last two years. We’re at 72%, which is a tremendous improvement. It reflects the hard work of the 3,800 employees who work here at DART and understand and are aligned with the mission that we’re trying to achieve.
At the macro level, from a regional perspective, we approved our Point B strategic plan in June of this year. One of the most important pieces of the plan is the concept of leveraging DART as a true economic and mobility asset for our service area. We have 13 cities that are members of DART right now. The compelling piece of this for these cities is that if we do everything right vis-a-vis our strategy, people will be proud to have DART in their city. They will use DART in a way that they’ve never thought they could use DART before, and that DART will deliver on the promise of transit and what it can do for development. DART is a distinguishing factor between cities like Plano and cities like Arlington.
What does the concept of transit-oriented development mean to you?
The whole idea behind that goal is to make sure that we become partners in the development process. We want to leverage funding that we can provide to help kickstart some of the developments and to ensure that they are transit friendly, creating that environment, creating, in some cases, density. We want to create the synergy around our stations that will be conducive to generating ridership and generally generating activity. We want to activate space because what we don’t want is a big lighted area between the surrounding neighborhood and our station platform, which is what happens when we just have a surface parking lot between those two areas. What we want to do is fill in that space and make it welcoming so that we start to blend the space between the surrounding neighborhood and the platform. As a result, you no longer need to walk a long way from your apartment complex to the station, and you feel like something is happening all along the way that generates interest and excitement. We call it creating social interactions and economic transactions. We’re activating that space, making it productive for both the community and the surrounding neighborhoods, as well as DART.
What untapped opportunities exist to integrate DART services within other modes of transportation?
There is a ton of opportunity. The way I like to describe this to other people is that DART is a big capacity add to the region. Even though we only currently serve 13 cities, there is a lot of demand for additional service beyond our service area. The question then becomes how to generate additional services or provide the availability of additional services in a way that makes financial sense for both DART as well as for our surrounding communities.
The fact that we have 50% more people coming to this region in the next 20 years and that we’re on a path to becoming larger than Chicago in the next 10 years, now is an important moment for us to make significant investments in transportation infrastructure. When I say transportation infrastructure, I mean transit infrastructure, particularly in the denser areas of the region. Transit doesn’t work everywhere, I get it, but we need to make the investments right now, not just in rail infrastructure, but also in our bus infrastructure and our roadway infrastructure that supports bus routes, for example. That’s not just pavement. It’s also things like transit signal priority, making sure we set aside the space for the 40 people who are riding, rather than the 40 people who are driving individual cars that take up a lot more space than the bus.
We’re trying to make sure that we’re using the space that we have wisely. I often talk about the fact that even now, we have millions of people trying to drive on all our highways and streets, and they’re all going to their individual places of business or their homes or whatever. They’re going to stores. But remember, all those stores and all those businesses also have local deliveries. We have goods that are being transported to and from all those different businesses and homes also. I’m not even talking about Amazon delivery or Uber Eats and all that other stuff that also adds more demand to the space that we have. What is really important is to understand that the commodity that we’re dealing with right now in our region is space. Do we have enough space to handle all the travel demand that is coming our way, both now and 20 years into the future when there will be 4 million more people putting demands on that space?
What is your vision for the future of public transit in North Texas and what are the top priorities for DART over these next two to three years?
We intend to follow our strategic plan. Our vision for the future is about making sure that DART is providing the capacity for the travel demand that we have coming down the pipeline. A lot of that is just knowing that we need to be reliable for people. We need to be clean and secure.
We’re trying to make sure that our service is a service people want to use and that they want to pay for. We’re thinking about it in terms of how we ensure everything that we do makes the customer’s life easier as opposed to making DART’s life easier. That’s the vision for the future. It is to make sure that DART becomes top of mind for people when they need to move around anywhere in the region. The top priority for us right now is to continue to make those investments vis-a-vis the DART transit plan. We want to make sure we’re taking care of our assets, that we keep them in a state of good repair, and that we’re prepared for any potential failures that could come around by preempting the failure.
Overall, our top priority is just to make sure that DART continues to be productive for everyone, and that we are providing the value that people expect. That’s both customers as well as our cities in terms of the development opportunities that we bring and that we can attract people to. At the end of the day, we just want DART to be this incredible asset for the region.
