The first couple of weeks

I've been without internet at home or work for a few weeks and my usual watering hole, The Elbow Room, has ALSO been without it's usual WiFi. So instead of daily updates or getting this blog started at all, it's been delayed.

The first couple of weeks of DART travel have been an eye opening experience. I'm going to do several posts of different topics, I'd like to keep these individual posts as short as possible.

Let's first start with planning a trip anywhere. DART does have a website where they offer trip planning. They also have a mobile site. The main website is good if you know the bus or train you want to take. Otherwise, I'd advice against using the trip planner (on either site). To give you an example, I needed to take a bus from near Abrahms and Walnut Hill to the Red Line train. The trip advisor had me taking 3 different buses, totaling almost 2 hours of transportation. To start with it had me grabbing a bus in the complete opposite direction of my travel.

The mobile site is even worse. When planning a route on my phone last night, it's first suggestion was that I walk to Love Field from my apartment, which is SEVERAL miles away. There's a bus that stops IN FRONT of my apartment many many many times a day and goes DIRECTLY to Love Field. Maybe it knows I'm trying to lose weight, but that seems excessive.

The best thing to do, if you need to handle a new route, is to call DART directly at 214-979-1111. They're not open outside of "standard business hours" so even that's not perfect.

Today, while taking #39 to a location I hadn't been before, I asked the driver if he went by Inwood and Lemmon (the place where I'm typing this now at a Starbucks) and he said "yes". He then drove me up to the airport and said "I don't go anywhere near Lemmon"...so I walked about 2 miles to get back here. Nice.

I did speak with a DART IT person one day at a rail station and there is supposed to be a big revamp of the online system soon, but it doesn't work today.

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.