Bad transit planning or is it bad transit marketing?

As much hype as Dallas gets about the success of their light rail system, it's a relative thing. Not that many people use it and the throughput capacity isn't very significant. A heavy rail system, like the DC subway system, can run close to 40,000/track/hour, depending on the configuration. By comparison, some of the lines in Dallas have a maximum capacity of 4,000 people per hour per track.

Of course, it means you have to have a lot of equipment and personnel to be able to satisfy maximum (peak) demand. And normal rush hour demand can be exceeded by true crush levels, such as for a Presidential Inauguration or particular events.

It's why I have argued before that people who say the marginal cost of adding riders = zero are wrong, because they aren't considering how much equipment and personnel have to be bought or hired to run the base system at peak usage, plus they aren't taking into account the extra cost of building the system to be able to handle peak ridership.

This comes up because the Dallas Light Rail system had a massive public relations and operations failure over the weekend, in terms of providing service for a football game. See "DART knew limits of Green Line for Texas-OU but promoted it anyway" from the Dallas Morning News.

(cf. "Sound Transit and Sounders: Why isn't public transit ready after games?" and " Soccer Fans Encouraged to Arrive Early for Wednesday's match" from the Seattle Times, and this letter to the editor in the Montgomery County editions of the Gazette, "Where's public transportation when we need it?" about the failure to provide shuttle bus services to the US Open golf tournament)

From the article:

Long before the overcrowded rail cars began backing up on DART tracks Saturday, the transit agency knew that it could never handle more than a fraction of the crowd expected for the sold-out Texas-OU game that drew nearly 100,000 fans.

And yet, for weeks leading up to the game, it continued to promote the new Green Line as the best route to Fair Park, despite the likelihood of huge crowds. ...

Dallas Area Rapid Transit President Gary Thomas conceded Monday that the agency simply was not prepared for the crush of football fans and other fairgoers who overwhelmed the rail system on Saturday. Many fans endured trips of longer than three hours and arrived at the Cotton Bowl after halftime or even later.

"Obviously, the demand was a whole lot larger than we expected," Thomas said. "I am certainly apologetic for those riders who didn't get to where they were going in a time frame they felt was appropriate." ...

But this much DART did know: Under the best of circumstances, the agency can't deliver more than about 4,000 passengers per hour to Fair Park. Even with jam-packed trains stopping there every five minutes, with standing passengers overflowing the aisles, each two-car configuration would typically carry about 350 passengers.

DART said 36 trains were scheduled to arrive at Fair Park between 8 and 11 a.m., though it is not sure how many actually arrived due to delays on the tracks. But had every train arrived on time and been full, that would have provided rides for only about 12,000 fans.

No exact figures were available for service during those hours, though DART said that its entire light rail network provided passengers about 40,000 round trips Saturday, about 25,000 more than a typical Saturday. ...

Still, Lyons said the agency was right to advertise the Green Line as the best route to Fair Park, despite the obvious limitations of its rail cars.

"Based on the things we knew – that we would have a lot of people wanting to ride – and based on our experience throughout every day of the fair when we had good service – it was still the right thing to do, to tell people that [the Green Line] is the best way for people to get to Fair Park," he said.

The Dallas light rail system ought to have better planners and marketers than they seem to have. Or, as the title of a column in the Toronto Star puts it, "A 'world-class' transit system? Fat chance, unless we pay up."

But the big thing is to manage expectations in ways that are conscious of your constraints and your ability to satisfy the expectations you build.

Also see the past blog entries "More on Metro and rethinking transit marketing" and "Making Transit Sexy."