If you live in Dallas and haven’t taken a ride on the light rail in a while, go explore some of the station art I wrote about. So this is me hoping that good design does make converts. Increasing ridership is the only way to make public transit more inviting - busy trains police themselves. But in my own experience being a regular rider for the last six months, the agency’s new transit security officers have been effective and the police chief’s plan to reach out to vulnerable passengers is promising. We cannot ignore the fact that DART trains are sometimes a refuge for those who have nowhere else to go. … In this context, good design serves an evangelical purpose it can raise hopes and make converts.”Įven 27 years on, negative perceptions of public transit in the United States, especially in Dallas, haven’t changed. In 1996, when the light rail system opened, David Dillon, The Dallas Morning News’ erstwhile architecture critic, wrote: “Design is only one aspect of light rail … but indispensable to wooing a public that believes transit is dirty and dangerous. Trammell’s words conjure up images of a Dallas in years gone by, when Lovers Lane was just outside city limits, an area lined with bois d’arc trees where couples would rendezvous. The station’s windscreens are adorned with colorful typography of verses by the late Robert Trammell, a freelance poet who cultivated a literary community in the city. 75, I discovered one man’s affair with poetry. But at Lovers Lane station, along DART’s Orange and Red lines that hug U.S. A city for poets and romanticsĪs a newcomer, it’s easy to write off Dallas as a city of Fortune 500 companies and no artistic soul. Without these displays, I would never have thought of Dallas as a thriving center for railroads and streetcars, considering its tangle of freeways and car-centric design today.

Louis-San Francisco Railway, not the Collin County boomtown. EBJ/Union features “drumheads,” circular plates with the colorful logos of old passenger trains from a time when “Frisco” referred to the St. Freight trains run through the station as well. Now the station plays a similar role, receiving Amtrak, Trinity Railway Express and DART trains. Just one train stop away is Eddie Bernice Johnson Union station where, in 1921, all rail traffic was consolidated.

Dart freight train schedule