DART says public transportation is making a comeback
NORTH TEXAS - When COVID-19 swept through North Texas, many of us were asked to keep a distance from each other, take safety precautions, work from home which led to a significant decline in people using public transportation to get around—but now it's making a comeback.
CBS News Texas asked DART for data in terms of the number of rides taken throughout the last five fiscal years.
DART LIGHT RAIL SERVICE 2019-2023 FY
- 2019: 28,334,785
- 2020: 20,081,037
- 2021: 14,487,240
- 2022: 17,675,954
- 2023: 20,495,388
DART BUS RIDERSHIP 2019-2023 FY
- 2019: 27,932,664
- 2020: 27, 053,671
- 2021: 19,318,671
- 2022: 22,663,778
- 2023: 25,926,026
DART Spokesman Gordon Shattles tells CBS News Texas they're at about 75% of pre-pandemic levels with the help of seeing people return back to the office or some companies are doing hybrid work or allowing workers to come in 2-3-4 days a week and that's helping drive up these numbers.
"We actually saw our bus ridership return much quicker than our rail ridership and of course rail is very visual," Shattles said. "Everyone sees that one but because bus has that ability to be at different locations, we can actually very quickly flex twice a year we look at our entire ridership and we determine where are people needing to go."
Shattles also tells CBS News Texas DART continue to stress the importance of safety and security as looking to hire more officers.
"The goal, of course, of this is to make sure we have a security personnel of some kind on all of our rail vehicles and we're going to be able to expand that to our buses as well and people, I think, have the aspect that you see someone is uniformed, they are looking out for their safety and it just makes the entire experience a lot better," added Shattles.
DART is also making sure to clean the rail and busses frequently as that's been a rider complaint for some time.
There are several benefits to the use of public transit rebounding, according to Shattles—retail, restaurants near the stops and it can save you money on gas.
To take a look at trends from other public transit agencies, click here: North Central Texas Council of Governments - Transit Trends.
