Unfair Park from p4 behind schedule. “People are missing work,” Jarvis said. “I pay for a monthly bus pass, so I should have a way to work every morning.” That’s not always the case. His bosses cut him some slack when de- lays leave him running late. They know there’s not a lot he can do about it. Other employers aren’t always so understanding. Timothy Reddick, 62, lives near Love Field but works in Oak Cliff. He’s worked at a company in the area called Pallet Logistics of America for about four years. For the last two years, he was able to get to and from work and around the city without a car with relative ease, or as much ease as Dallas’ pub- lic transit can offer. He could get to work on time and go grocery shopping without hav- ing to get a friend to give him a ride. But since DART redrew its bus routes, he’s been working to get his driver’s license and a car so he doesn’t have to rely on public transit anymore. Before the routes were re- drawn, taking the bus wasn’t exactly a cake- walk for Reddick. He would still have to take three separate buses and sometimes hop on the train to get to his destination. This meant most times he would get off work around 11:30 p.m. and make it home by around 1 a.m. But, it was pretty much a straight shot, the buses were consistently on time, and his stop was just around the cor- ner from his house. “It was simple,” he said. He just became a team lead recently where he works, but now he’s worried about losing his job because the buses can’t get him there on time. “I’ll be tired by the time I get to work,” he said. These days, he has to walk up to 3 miles to his bus stop. GoLink, a shuttle service provided by DART, is supposed to make some of that trek a little easier. But, he said, this service isn’t reliable either. “When you call GoLink, half the time they cancel the ride,” Reddick said. “Then, you have to call back and try to get another ride. Then you have to wait on that. Then, you have to pay a double fare because you have to pay $2.50 for the GoLink. Then you have to pay to get on the train or the bus.” So, it’s less convenient and takes a toll on his wallet. If the GoLink cancels on him, DART will usually send him an Uber. By then, though, he’s already behind schedule. At night, he catches a ride to the train sta- tion, where he doesn’t always feel all that safe. “The trains are dangerous now, espe- cially at night,” Reddick said. “They don’t have no security on that train at night time, and people get on there and act a fool. Half of them … on there [are] drunk, wanting to fight, looking at you crazy and everything else.” Inconvenience or not, he has to take the red line downtown to get on the 207 bus. That bus drops him off about a half-hour’s walk from his home. That walk is virtually his only option as the GoLink shuttles don’t operate late at night. “Sometimes my legs don’t feel like walking,” he said. Worse still, the city’s streets aren’t the safest either. These days, he can get home around 1:30 a.m. A few hours later, he’ll be up to do it all over again. It’s only a 30-minute difference from 6 6 when he used to get home, but there’s a lot more struggle in that time now. On top of Jacob Vaughn that, Reddick said, the buses are less consis- tent. “Now, you don’t know what time the bus is going to come or not,” he said. One day, he waited about an hour and a half for bus 207, and DART ended up having to send him another ride. Luckily, that day he just needed to go to the bank. Asked if his bosses would be understanding if the bus made him late to work, Reddick said, “They don’t care about that. They get mad. They want you there on time.” There have been meetings for riders to give their input, but Reddick said he’s usu- ally at work during when they’re held. If he could, he’d tell DART to change his route back to the way it used to be. Hosanna Yemiru was appointed to the DART board last August, around the time the new routes were being approved. Yemiru has been a pretty consistent DART user throughout her life. Growing up, she’d use DART to get to school and to work. Her commute was more of a straight shot than Reddick’s, but she’d still run into issues. “Sometimes I would have no idea when the bus would show up,” Yemiru said. This was before the new routes were imple- mented. Eventually, the cost for DART rid- ers started to rise. The amount of money she would have to pay to ride DART kept going up by the year. “It was still kind of the only option I had. It was very difficult to pay for transit,” she said. She joined the DART board just as it was getting ready to approve the new bus sys- tem. “In general, the point was you wanted to have a system that was going to be faster and easier to use and it was going to be pro- viding this really good balance between cov- erage and consistency,” Yemiru explained. For a long time, DART has tried to cover as much area as possible, “Sometimes at the expense of frequent service,” she said. The relaunch was able to get that balance to an extent, but staying budget neutral has made it difficult, Yemiru said. R emember when Walker said DART would have to choose between in- creased ridership and increased cov- erage? Well, DART wanted a little of both. In November 2020, DART’s board of di- rectors decided they wanted to go with a hy- Artis Jarvis has trouble with DART’s unpredictable schedule from lack of staffing. brid model for the new bus system. The idea was 70-75% of DART’s resources would go toward ridership-oriented services, while the remaining 25-30% would go toward cov- erage-related service. They expected initial complaints from regular riders, Yemiru said. “There’s always that learning curve,” she said. “So, of course the first round of complaints were like ‘What is going on?’” Then, the complaints started to sound much like the ones they were trying to fix with the new routes. People were missing their rides because buses were too early, too late, or not showing up at all. The walk to the bus stops grew for many. The shuttle service meant to make the walk easier wasn’t reli- able. Riders weren’t getting where they needed to be when they needed to be there. It turns out DART had a decent game plan, just not enough people to help execute it. “We’re having a retention problem,” Yemiru said. “We’re hiring a bunch of peo- ple, but we’re losing a lot of people.” Why? Put simply, “being a bus operator is hard,” Yemiru said. Plus, a transportation job in the private sector often pays more and provides better benefits. If you asked random people at any given DART station what they think of the new routes, a handful might say it’s changed their commute for the worse. Another hand- ful may say it took time to adapt to the new routes, but overall, they feel the rides are more frequent and their commute is easier. If you ask the bus drivers, they may tell you the increased frequency is crushing them, mostly because they don’t have enough people. “They bit off more than they could chew as far as upping the schedule,” one driver said. “They want buses stopping every 15 minutes. We don’t have the man- power for that.” DART recently made adjustments to a few of the bus routes to account for the shorthanded system. The wait times at bus stops may be a little longer under the adjust- ments, but they should also be more reliable. At a special meeting of the Dallas City Council’s Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Rob Smith, DART’s vice presi- dent of service planning and scheduling, ex- plained the changes meant to address their driver shortage. He said the bus route redesign rolled out this year was “the most significant change to bus service in DART’s history.” The work on the redesign began in October 2019, the point being to improve access and cover- age. That meant increasing the number of jobs accessible by transit within an hour of travel, and making it more accessible to people across every demographic and socioeconomic group. “In the process of doing all of that and seeing it in operation since January, we’ve learned a number of things along the way,” he said. “What we did not anticipate, how- ever, when we kicked off this process, was the impact of operator shortages on what we have done.” Based on feedback they’ve received in that time, they made some adjustments and implemented them on June 13. The majority of those adjustments, Smith said, “are aimed at bus operator shortages.” “Similar to what’s happened to many transit agencies around the country, DART has faced some real labor shortages over the past couple of years, and we didn’t antici- pate when we designed the network and went back to full service levels that we would see the impact we ended up seeing,” Smith said. “We’ve had missed trips throughout the bus system,” he added. “And the goal of the changes we’ve made are to help temporarily deal with those situations while we are hir- ing operators to fill in the gaps and then re- store regular service as soon as possible.” The changes they made on June 13 af- fected 31 bus routes, about a third of the bus system. That increased some service times. For example, the buses meant to come every 15 minutes will now be there closer to every 20. Some 20-minute waits could stretch to half an hour in the middle of the day and early evening. Rosa Medina-Cristobal, DART’s vice president of human resources, said her de- partment is at work trying to lure new bus drivers and keep the ones they have. Medina-Cristobal said DART increased operator pay from just over $17 an hour to $21.13. That’s after a recent cost of living adjustment. They also did a survey to see why they were losing operators. The sur- vey found drivers are leaving DART for various reasons: a higher paying job, want- ing more workforce development oppor- tunities and because they don’t like their supervisors. Many other employers were offering sign-on and referral bonuses, so DART rolled out its own on April 1. In the first week, 100 applications poured in. The pandemic halted a lot of DART’s hir- ing processes. They’ve beefed up hiring since then, but DART is still short 163 driv- ers, Medina-Cristobal said. Getting people hired is the easy part. The tough part is keeping drivers there. “I’m not worried about the hiring part. It’s the hiring part plus attrition,” Medina-Cristobal said. “Let’s say you hire 20 people every two weeks, but you lose just as many in two weeks. It’s the net gain that I’m concerned about.” >> p8 MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 JULY 7–13, 2022 DALLAS OBSERVER DALLAS OBSERVER | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | MOVIES | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | SCHUTZE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.comdallasobserver.com
