Texas loves its trucks, but Dallas is non-discriminating, vehicle-wise. It loves the Mini Cooper and the Dodge Omni, the Hummer and the Plymouth Voyager. What you drive doesn't matter. It matters that you drive.
Lots of cities are built for cars instead of pedestrians. But Dallas has retrofitted itself for cars, a much tougher thing to do. Its downtown, once bustling, has become a wasteland where workers funnel through underground tunnels to avoid the heat, leaving automobiles to prowl among the skyscrapers. Trolley systems, which used to be a major form of transit even in Dallas' wealthier neighborhoods, have been systemically eliminated. The streets that used to accommodate them now seem uncommonly wide. Two of Dallas' most important architectural feats in the last decade have been the widening of an arterial freeway (that used to be a railroad) and a five-level highway interchange. They're both elegant.
My wife and I own two cars. Recently, this has struck me as wasteful. I'm not going to get into all the reasons I feel this way - some I'll explain later - but suffice it to say that the costs of owning two cars are beginning to surpass the benefits. By "costs," I don't just mean our financial expenses. I'm also talking about our impact on the environment and on our lifestyle. In all those senses, it's becoming a hassle.
But is it worse than the hassle of being a one-car, two-driver family in a city where drivers rule? That's what I'm trying to find out. I want to test myself, to see how dependent I've become on my gas-burning, carbon-monoxide-emitting friend. And I want to test Dallas, to see if its public transit, sidewalks and taxis can support people who choose not to drive.
That's a special distinction -- "choose not to drive." I can't put myself in the position of people who can't afford car ownership. I assume that many of the people I see on public transit are in that situation, and I'm interested to learn about their lives. But I don't feel as if I can speak for them, and I won't. I'm still able to jump in a car and drive somewhere when I really, really need to. I won't apologize for that luxury, but neither will I pretend to be something I'm not.
What I am is a guy who's trying to cut down on driving and is rooting for his city to be able to help him do it. And that's why I'm keeping this blog. I want to talk about the frustrations and satisfactions of going carless, and indirectly I expect I'll end up talking about a city for which I have enormous affection.
My personal rules:
1) Take the bus to work. (I rarely have to leave the office during the day for appointments. When I do, I allow myself the use of a car, though I may attempt to go without it.)
2) Don't drive after drinking, and don't rely on others to drive after drinking an unsafe amount. This is a good rule to follow anyway, obviously. And it gives me an opportunity to evaluate how Dallas' mass transit and taxi fleet holds up after hours. (I can tell you already, the answer's not good.)
3) Be independent. Don't mooch rides when a mass transit or taxi alternative will do.
We still own two cars. Wish me luck in getting rid of one.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
What will the neighbors think?
I was pretty proud of myself coming home from work today. My homeward route -- good ol' #42 -- requires a two-stop train ride, then a bus, which does a pickup at DART's West Transit Center, a fascinating place I shall have to tell you more about sometime.
I missed the train that would have gotten me to the transit center with time to spare, and the train I boarded meandered up to the dropoff point just as my bus was scheduled to leave the transit center. Fortunately, I remembered the location of the bus' next stop. I speedwalked that way and flagged it down in the nick of time. Sure, it's my daily route and I should know it by now, after riding it for a month. But contingency planning is part of the challenge of city bus riding, and I was happy to have done it successfully.
Since I skipped the gym today, my trip home was a little earlier than normal. I noticed three professionally dressed, white-collar-looking people - two guys and a woman in jackets and collared shirts. One dude even had a tie. Three is a new personal record. (Why does it matter? Not because I want DART buses to look like country clubs. But I've found that in cities with developed, successful mass transit systems, economic diversity is a given.)
On the third-of-a-mile walk home from the bus stop, I heard a voice shouting my name. My landlord was sitting on a neighbor's porch. Eyeing my backpack and my work clothes, he stammered, "What are you- What- Are you just taking a walk?"
He wouldn't be the only Dallasite to fail to comprehend the visual cues. It's just not that normal to see people walking around the neighborhood in office wear. I wonder what went through his mind. What could I have been doing, wandering around a few blocks from my house with a backpack and button-down shirt on? He probably didn't know there was a bus stop nearby. I didn't, until a few weeks ago.
I missed the train that would have gotten me to the transit center with time to spare, and the train I boarded meandered up to the dropoff point just as my bus was scheduled to leave the transit center. Fortunately, I remembered the location of the bus' next stop. I speedwalked that way and flagged it down in the nick of time. Sure, it's my daily route and I should know it by now, after riding it for a month. But contingency planning is part of the challenge of city bus riding, and I was happy to have done it successfully.
Since I skipped the gym today, my trip home was a little earlier than normal. I noticed three professionally dressed, white-collar-looking people - two guys and a woman in jackets and collared shirts. One dude even had a tie. Three is a new personal record. (Why does it matter? Not because I want DART buses to look like country clubs. But I've found that in cities with developed, successful mass transit systems, economic diversity is a given.)
On the third-of-a-mile walk home from the bus stop, I heard a voice shouting my name. My landlord was sitting on a neighbor's porch. Eyeing my backpack and my work clothes, he stammered, "What are you- What- Are you just taking a walk?"
He wouldn't be the only Dallasite to fail to comprehend the visual cues. It's just not that normal to see people walking around the neighborhood in office wear. I wonder what went through his mind. What could I have been doing, wandering around a few blocks from my house with a backpack and button-down shirt on? He probably didn't know there was a bus stop nearby. I didn't, until a few weeks ago.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Love and Basketball
I've just completed my first nocturnal DART trip. For reasons that I'll make clear later, I decided tonight to go carless, to traverse Dallas from northeast to southwest using only mass transit. This required about 10 minutes of waiting at a bus stop and roughly 1.5 miles of walking.
My trip began at 5:50 p.m., when I began walking from my apartment in Oak Cliff to a bus stop about a mile away, on DART bus route #1. Fortunately, the bus was 2 minutes late, so I got there in plenty of time. I've discovered, in my DART experience thus far, that it's best to get to a bus stop about five minutes before the scheduled stop, and to allot a window of about 5 minutes for the bus to be tardy. This generally has eliminated any missed-bus episodes.
I took the bus to a stop near Greenville Avenue, Dallas' hardiest bar scene, for a meetup with buddies to watch the Mavericks beat the crap out of the Hornets, which they did with gusto. The Billiard Bar has become a sacred spot for Mavs Watch Parties since last year, when we watched Dirk & Co. get robbed by referees in the Finals fiasco.
I took my leave at 9:45 p.m., knowing I needed to hightail it to the bus stop at Munger and Live Oak. The bus may have stopped somewhere closer, but I was relying on a route #1 map I managed to obtain on the way to the bar. DART schedules give the approximate times for a few select stops, not every stop, and this was the closest guaranteed pickup I could find. I got to my stop 15 minutes early, watched a man in a cowboy hat hold vigil aimlessly outside an apartment building, and boarded my bus at 10:06 p.m., four minutes ahead of schedule.
It's difficult to time the stop on a bus when you're riding a route for the first time. I was trying to time my stop to the intersection of Beckley and Davis. Stopping the bus required pressing a horizontal strip that runs just under the window on each side of the bus, which causes a dinging sound audible, most of the time, to the busdriver. I saw my intersection's traffic lights approaching and rang the bell, only to find I was to be let off a block short of my destination. Close enough. It was about 10:40.
At 11 p.m., I was home, walking through my front door after checking my mail, a task which, in my fulltime driving days, was an afterthought for one accustomed to exiting his car and entering through the rear door of the apartment. My walk home had been uneventful, and I won't be ashamed to admit a small bit of relief for that. I live in a developing neighborhood, by no means crimeridden but certainly not a gated community.
I will talk more about my neighborhood, about my bus rides and about my mission, if you could call it that, in subsequent posts. For now, I just want to feel good about this fact: I had a few beers and took mass transit home in Dallas. I'll consider that victory for the evening.
Oh, a footnote (or an epigram, really, overheard on the bus home): "Grand Prairie is a great place to meet women. A lot of their men are locked up or deported."
My trip began at 5:50 p.m., when I began walking from my apartment in Oak Cliff to a bus stop about a mile away, on DART bus route #1. Fortunately, the bus was 2 minutes late, so I got there in plenty of time. I've discovered, in my DART experience thus far, that it's best to get to a bus stop about five minutes before the scheduled stop, and to allot a window of about 5 minutes for the bus to be tardy. This generally has eliminated any missed-bus episodes.
I took the bus to a stop near Greenville Avenue, Dallas' hardiest bar scene, for a meetup with buddies to watch the Mavericks beat the crap out of the Hornets, which they did with gusto. The Billiard Bar has become a sacred spot for Mavs Watch Parties since last year, when we watched Dirk & Co. get robbed by referees in the Finals fiasco.
I took my leave at 9:45 p.m., knowing I needed to hightail it to the bus stop at Munger and Live Oak. The bus may have stopped somewhere closer, but I was relying on a route #1 map I managed to obtain on the way to the bar. DART schedules give the approximate times for a few select stops, not every stop, and this was the closest guaranteed pickup I could find. I got to my stop 15 minutes early, watched a man in a cowboy hat hold vigil aimlessly outside an apartment building, and boarded my bus at 10:06 p.m., four minutes ahead of schedule.
It's difficult to time the stop on a bus when you're riding a route for the first time. I was trying to time my stop to the intersection of Beckley and Davis. Stopping the bus required pressing a horizontal strip that runs just under the window on each side of the bus, which causes a dinging sound audible, most of the time, to the busdriver. I saw my intersection's traffic lights approaching and rang the bell, only to find I was to be let off a block short of my destination. Close enough. It was about 10:40.
At 11 p.m., I was home, walking through my front door after checking my mail, a task which, in my fulltime driving days, was an afterthought for one accustomed to exiting his car and entering through the rear door of the apartment. My walk home had been uneventful, and I won't be ashamed to admit a small bit of relief for that. I live in a developing neighborhood, by no means crimeridden but certainly not a gated community.
I will talk more about my neighborhood, about my bus rides and about my mission, if you could call it that, in subsequent posts. For now, I just want to feel good about this fact: I had a few beers and took mass transit home in Dallas. I'll consider that victory for the evening.
Oh, a footnote (or an epigram, really, overheard on the bus home): "Grand Prairie is a great place to meet women. A lot of their men are locked up or deported."
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