Dallas Fort Worth Urban Forum

Why do the streetcars keep breaking down? It's been a regular occurrence for there to be a rider alert that only one (or sometimes zero) streetcar is in service due to "a mechanical issue." You'd think that with four vehicles they'd never have this issue. I vaguely remember hearing that one or two had issues when they first arrived, but surely any issues should have been fixed by now.

I get those emails too and since I don't delete them I can track how many times a day the streetcar is down. Is this a product of the way they report maintenance or are they actually sitting stuck somewhere that many times a week? I feel like even with their ridership numbers if they were truly having so much downtime we would have heard about it from someone besides the DART emails.

Which streetcars? MATA or the Bishops Arts cars?

joshua.dodd wrote:Which streetcars? MATA or the Bishops Arts cars?

Bishop.

These cars are the first time Brookville Equipment has produced a complete, new streetcar and they contain innovative technology that allows them to operate wirelessly. I know that they have kept the Brookville technicians very busy working out the bugs. I've heard some of the DART employees say that at times the Brookville guys would kick everyone out of the maintenance facility, shut the doors and work on the cars. (I don't know if that still happens but it sounds like they still have some issues to overcome.) The U.S. lost its streetcar building know-how decades ago and we still struggle to produce a modern car.

For those interested in such things, as part of the Commerce Street reconstruction project the contractor has started removing the existing pavement and is digging up (and cutting up) the old streetcar tracks.

I also know based on meetings for District 1 that DART is working on finalizing plans for the expansion down to Jefferson & Zang.

MC_ScattCat wrote:I also know based on meetings for District 1 that DART is working on finalizing plans for the expansion down to Jefferson & Zang.

Curious to see how this would go. I assume it picks up the route flanking the median and ends in a side plaza like it does on Davis?

Possibly. However, since they never really have 2 trains in this area at one time I think they could get away with only being in the right lane of southbound Zang.

MC_ScattCat wrote:Possibly. However, since they never really have 2 trains in this area at one time I think they could get away with only being in the right lane of southbound Zang.

It would be really short-sighted of them to do it that way. Granted, doing it the right way with two tracks all the way down would require redoing the existing end of the tracks. In theory they could keep the current station and add another platform in the median of Zang so that you could turn some trips there instead of going all the way south, but at the terrible frequencies they run at right now there's no point in doing that. The tracks as they cross Davis would need to be altered anyways.