3 May 22 - 28, 2025 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents A fter six years behind the wheel of a Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) bus, Sandra Cooper is embarrassed to say she still doesn’t know the streets of Dallas well. She knows major landmarks, like NorthPark mall, but street names are tricky for her to recall. For instance, she remembers being near the shopping center the second time she ex- perienced a DART bus powering off mid- ride last year. She remembers the road being busy, but as for which road the incident hap- pened on exactly, that’s where things start to get a little bit fuzzy. What she does remember is the feeling of clenching her hands around the steering wheel, which, without power steering, seemed impossible to move. The fate of her- self and of her riders suddenly felt fragile as every worst-case scenario played out in her mind. “You can’t turn [the steering wheel], so I had to hold it to try to make [the bus] go straight, and then ease down my brake and try to move out of the way so nobody ran into me. I don’t want to slam on the brakes because I’m worried about who might smash into me,” Cooper said. “But really, when it shuts off, I’m not even thinking about the back. I’m looking to the front, try- ing to make sure I don’t run into a wall or something.” That sort of thing didn’t happen when Cooper started her job, but these days, she’s surprised it doesn’t occur more often and with a worse outcome. Cooper is one of five current or former DART bus drivers who spoke to the Ob- server about a culture of neglect pervading the transit agency. Drivers described a fleet of broken buses moving across the city, and a system that has failed to protect the peo- ple charged with getting Dallasites to where they need to go. Injuries to hands, shoulders, backs and necks are common- place, the Observer was told, and medical care for those injuries is kept behind lock and key. “They already know these vehicles are damaged and falling apart, because all of them fell apart in that heat last summer. They’re endangering the public’s lives,” Cooper said. “It’s our lives, and the pub- lic’s lives, and they’re sending us out there.” Responding to the claims in this article, Jasmyn Carter, director of public relations for DART, emphasized the organization’s commitment to its employees. Many of the concerns voiced in this article, Carter added, are issues that are covered during the multi- week training divers go through before hit- ting the road. “Our leadership roundtable is very aware of the things that our people are doing to keep DART moving,” Carter said. “We know that rail and bus [driving] is not easy every day, but we try to make sure that we give them the best quality response times and services and leadership. When these [em- ployees] call, it’s not lost upon us the hard work that they do.” Get Off the Road N early 700 buses make up the DART fleet, with 522 of those used daily. While Cooper said she has encoun- tered more mechanical problems the longer she’s driven the buses, most issues aren’t as dramatic as a full power shutdown in the middle of a busy thoroughfare. Oftentimes, she’s dealing with mundanities like a finicky seatbelt that has to be tied to the seat be- cause it won’t click into place. “All the buses are broken,” Cooper said. “There’s smashed in headlights that, instead of pointing to the ground, they point up at the trees so we can’t even see what’s in front of us.” In many cases, the state of the vehicles is more frustrating than dangerous, said Ryan Morris, a driver who recently left DART. Morris and Cooper, along with each of the other drivers interviewed for this article, have been given pseudonyms to preserve their anonymity. In some cases, the drivers who spoke to the Observer are still employed by DART, and others are now employed by other municipalities or transit agencies. Sometimes the problems with the buses are purely mechanical. Whether or not a bus window can open is a 50/50 bet, Morris said. He’s made do with everything from a bent-out-of-shape steering wheel to dash- boards held together by duct tape. When the COVID-19 pandemic started, the agency built clear security shields around the bus operators. Morris estimates 70% were rolled out without latches. Eventually, drivers found ways to use a transfer card and a plas- tic garbage bag to MacGyver the shields closed, he said. More than a dozen images and videos of equipment provided show ripped seats, chipped plastic dashboards, unanchored fare machines, loose side mirrors, wobbly driver’s seats and bus kneels — the feature that allows the loading side of a bus to lower itself to the curb — that are too high. In other cases, the grime is manmade. He once ended a long day by finding feces dropped discreetly in the back corner of his bus. He is visibly skeeved out, recalling the “very disgusting” conditions he occasionally encountered while a driver. “The [seats] have rips and tears in them, and some people get bit,” Morris said. “It sounds crazy, man — the cushion is actually showing, like the little yellow part, and some people actually got bed bugs from the DART bus.” According to Carter, the seats in all of DART’s buses were switched to a vinyl ma- terial in 2024 “to ensure cleanliness and minimize the risk of pest exposure.” The buses also undergo daily cleaning and disin- fection and routine pest control, she said. Candace Martin, a driver who says she lost her job after suffering an injury that left her unable to work, said that the lifts meant to accommodate wheelchair users often broke down and had to be manually oper- ated. The lifts are required for compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and Martin said when she’d occasionally call a dispatcher to report faulty wheelchair lifts, she’d be given instructions on how to work the machinery herself. Many of the mechanical issues that driv- ers noted have simple fixes that are taught in driver’s training, Carter said. For instance, drivers are taught how to operate wheel- chair lifts electronically and manually, and a lift is not considered truly faulty if one of those two options is still functioning. For more serious malfunctions, drivers are able to report vehicles to a mechanic shop using a defect card system, Carter said. But drivers said reporting an issue often does little good. Irene Garcia, a driver for nearly a decade, said that when a bus is damaged, drivers drop it off at a mechanic shop, where they fill out a defect card detailing the issue that needs to be repaired. For years, Garcia said, she believed that the process was truly solv- ing the problems she was reporting. Then she “started paying more attention” and be- gan to believe the defect cards were often lit- tle more than a symbolic formality. “They’d just give me right back the same bus,” Garcia said. “I just told them that that bus just hurt me, and they still give me back the same one.” Cooper has witnessed the same system of buses being taken in for repair, only to be handed back in what she believes to be a similar condition. She once had a bus blow an air bellows — a tire-like device that acts as a spring to soften the jerkiness of a bus — and was shocked to see the vehicle returned to the fleet less than 24 hours after The Wheels on the Bus Are Falling Off Illustration by Tatyana Alanis | UNFAIR PARK | >> p4 With equipment failures and calls to slash funding, DART is under more pressure than ever. Are bus drivers the collateral damage? By Emma Ruby
