You don’t need a demographer to see that Dallas isn’t sharing in the rapid growth of its northern suburbs. This reality is beginning to settle in at City Hall, where, in discussions around land use and other policy decisions, planners wrestle with how to encourage more people to move, and afford to stay, in the region’s largest city.
The trend affects transportation decisions, too. Dallas is now staring at a future where it no longer controls a majority of the Dallas Area Rapid Transit board, whose seats are appointed based on the population share of Dallas and the transportation agency’s 12 suburban partners.
DART and the City Council’s transportation and infrastructure committee held a dual meeting on Monday to explore the region’s changing demographics. The population trends show the board makeup flipping as soon as 2025, the next time apportionment gets reviewed, and almost certainly by 2030. (The makeup of board seats is adjusted every five years based on how many people are living in DART’s service area.)
Why is this important? The state statute that created DART tipped the scales to allow the region’s largest city to have a critical eighth seat on the body that sets policy. But since 2010, Dallas’ population has increased by only 9 percent while the surrounding service area has jumped by 40 percent. By 2030, projections show that most of DART’s service population will live outside the city of Dallas for the first time in the agency’s existence.
“I’ve been on the board, at the pleasure of the City Council, for almost three and a half years,” said Trustee Rodney Schlosser, a Dallas appointee who put the report together. “In those three and a half years, I have picked up on what I think is obvious for any of us who are watchful of what’s going on in the region, which is there are differences of opinion between what someone in Dallas might consider to be a priority and what someone in a suburb might consider to be a priority.”