The challenges in funding and governing public transit in North Texas, as seen in DART's turbulent last few months, are not unique.
Traffic flows along Stemmons Freeway next to DART tracks, as seen from Reunion Tower in downtown Dallas, March 19, 2026.three of which will go forward May 2, the challenges in funding and governing public transit in North Texas are not unique.
, said Randy Machemehl, professor of transportation engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Service was reduced and routes were cut in some cases. Ridership has increased since then, but Machemehl said it’s still struggling.“It didn’t come back very quickly because a lot of the people … had to get to work. So they found another way,” he said. “It’s kind of hard to get those guys to come back.”As agencies recover from that recent blow, issues of regional collaboration, local needs and limited funding have come to a head in sprawling, fast-growing metro areas ill-suited for efficient mass transit. From coast to coast, local governments are grappling with the glaringIn the Denver area, the Regional Transportation District serves more than 3 million people over 2,345 square miles — for comparison, DART’s service area spans 700 square miles. Created in, RTD is governed by a 15-member publicly elected board of directors and is funded mainly by a 1% sales tax on purchases made within the district.Michael Davies, government relations officer at RTD, said he sees similarities between DART’s situation and Denver’s. Just like in Texas, it’s hard for the Colorado agency to balance regional needs with local ones, especially as cities grow and ask for a clearer return on investment for their tax dollars.“RTD set up to be a regional transit agency. But we often hear from our local jurisdictions about that very localized transit need, and inherently that is a tough battle to grapple with,” Davies said. Some regions try to strike a balance. In Los Angeles, the LA Metro’s 1,433-square-mile service area is supplemented by localized transit agencies “that then coordinate and feed into the larger LA County regional system,” Davies said., the agency has proposed transferring regional rail systems — including the Denton County Transportation Authority’s 21-mile A-train commuter rail line, Trinity Metro’s Trinity Railway Express and DART’s Silver Line — to a broader, independent management authority. Doug Monroe, RTD’s manager of corridor planning, said it’s important to see transit’s value on a regional scale when planning public transportation systems. “These services are not specific to one municipality. It’s helpful to be able to travel across 40 different municipalities here,” he said. “Recognizing the regional benefits of it is important in the value of RTD.”could have made more sense for DART, said Stephen Mattingly, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington. Atlanta’s Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, for example, receives a 1% sales tax from three counties and 1.5% sales tax from the city of Atlanta. “County-level taxes … would have been a far more effective way for us to be thinking about this,” he said. “The fact that the entire region is not bought in and contributing, likely led to this opportunity for politicians to say … ‘We’re not getting what we want out of this system.’” Michael Morris, director of transportation for the North Central Texas Council of Governments, a regional planning group, said North Texas will especially need wider support for a regional transit system to meet the needs of thefinancial pressure on cities “We have to confront it,” Lee said. “It’s not popular, but I don’t think the population can expect … DART to thrive and produce the services that they’re looking for if their revenues are constantly being decreased.” “Within the last couple of years, the state has passed some legislation really focused on fees … that can help fund transit,” Davies said. “That’s still a small amount of funding in the grand scheme of things, compared to RTD’s annual operating budget.”, its leaders plan to pursue a new revenue stream in coordination with member cities and regional stakeholders, such as a vehicle registration fee. This would need action by state lawmakers to come to fruition, and would also apply to cities not in DART., the transit funding pinch has been felt hard. Bay Area Rapid Transit expects to run out of the state and federal emergency funds provided by its lawmakers during the COVID-19 pandemic. BART is funded by a mix of sources, including local and state funds, passenger and parking revenue and sales tax, but a shift to remote work in the Bay Area has hit the agency’s finances hard. If a November ballot measure to increase sales tax funding fails and no new revenue becomes available, the agency is bracing for drastic cuts and fare increases. Monroe said it’s hard for his Colorado agency to serve such a broad geographic area — 40 municipalities in six counties over 2,345 square miles.of the region, RTD offers more fixed-route service, he said, and more on-demand service in lower density areas “to continue to be able to provide some return on the tax investment that all these areas pay into the district.”in DART have decried a lack of adequate service in their less dense municipalities and asked the agency for a better return on their sales tax investment. Density is a key factor. Services like fire rescue, trash pickup and road repair are more expensive to provide in a city designed to sprawl, said DART board member Enrique MacGregor. Denser cities collect more taxes that can be spent more efficiently.provide public transportation , Machemehl said. That’s why in the northeast, where development is more concentrated, more people use public transportation, he said. “Under those conditions, public transportation actually works quite well,” he said. But Texas cities typically lack that degree of density, he said. “We’re so dispersed,” said former Dallas City Manager Ted Benavides. “If we were more compact, it would work better.”“The opportunity that we provide for captive riders should not be neglected, even in these wealthy cities around Dallas,” he said. A DART train makes the bend as it heads past Reunion Tower on the way to Union Station in downtown Dallas, March 19, 2026.Morris said he believes the region needs to increase density around rail stations and invest in train systems to avoid “having people live 80 miles away from their jobs and spendingWhen she worked for the LA Metro and RTD, Lee said the attitude around investing in transit was very collaborative.In North Texas, “the cities are not just competitive with each other within our service area, but they’re also competitive with ones that are not in our service area,” she said.That’s why sales tax became competitive, she said, which contributed to some cities seeking to end their use of sales tax on DART. “That competitive disposition undermines the regional nature of DART’s offering,” she said. “This region probably would do well to… That’s the only way we’re going to sustainably grow, because we can’t build ourselves out of the problem.” With more people on the way, Benavides said the region will have to be more flexible, leverage new technologies and work together.“We have to be much more collaborative,” Benavides said. “Collaboration is going to be the word of the day, not competition.”Lilly Kersh is a local government accountability reporter at The Dallas Morning News covering Collin County with a focus on McKinney and Plano. She graduated in 2024 from the University of Georgia with a degree in journalism and was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia.Olivia Miles powers TCU to win over Virginia in Sweet 16 as Frogs return to Elite Eight
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