The Dart 365 Preamble

On my way to moving back to Dallas this year, my car died. Recently out of work, on unemployment, living off the graces of friends, I was in no place to buy a new vehicle. Fortunately, Dallas has a pretty solid transit system. It’s not NYC, San Fran, or Chi-town, but it’s better than trying to commute in Houston or Austin or San Antonio or Oklahoma or Denver or where ever you may be.

I spent about half a day getting to know www.dart.org and the mobile site, http://m.dart.org, learning the routes and plans and times and general stuff. It’s a daunting task when you haven’t dealt with it before. How to pay for tickets, what tickets, what routes make the best choices, is going one direction to catch another direction more efficient, etc…

My job started on June 22^nd. And so did my life with DART. One year, carless, is the plan. What challenges are there? What benefits? Do I decrease my carbon footprint? Do I save money vs time? We’ll find out.

I’m not going into this blind, however. I have ridden DART before. I lived up in Plano for a period of time and frequent the Deep Ellum area in Dallas. The vehicle I had ate up a couple of gallons of gas going from northern Plano to Deep Ellum, so it seemed economically (and drinking wise) smarter to grab the DART from Parker Rd, take it to Pearl, and jump the Green Line to Baylor Medical Station, drink with friends, and then reverse the process. Not driving drunk and instead of (gas was $3.00 a gallon) $6 of gas, it was $3.50 of ticket. The price has gone up to $4 now for a day pass. It’s still cheaper.

Where I live now, I take the #39 to downtown, jump the Red Line to my job, and reverse it when I come home. The #39 is my constant starting point. What happens after that is based up on whether I’m working or heading to meet people elsewhere. Some of my days off, I’m going to purposefully take some different routes to look at the characters of that world.