Planes, trains, fewer automobiles: How to avoid another DFW Airport traffic debacle | Opinion

Our former columnist Molly Ivins once wrote that if Texas had a more honest motto than “The Lone Star State,” our license plates might be brandished with something like “Too Much Is Not Enough” or “Texas: Land Of Wretched Excess.” Either would have been a more appropriate slogan for the bumper-to-bumper traffic that flooded the typical trek to Dallas-Fort Worth airport this Thanksgiving.

How bad was the traffic? The airport reported that the 292,000 customers on Dec. 1 made it the third-busiest day in its 50-year history. The airport’s social media channels sent repeated warnings to commuters about the traffic issues flowing from the historic volume.

One commuter claimed he witnessed “people walk with luggage around the traffic (on the ramps into the terminal) to try to make their flight” while he was stuck in his Uber. A disgruntled commenter told DFW’s Facebook page she saw crew members “sitting on employee buses for hours waiting to get to employee lots.”

We did our best to fill in the gap by publishing an explainer on how to beat the traffic come Christmastime.

Our answer was simple: Take the train!

For just two bucks, you can ride from Fort Worth to the airport on TEXRail. (For Dallas travelers, DART is $2 to $3, depending on the time of day.) The ride is about half an hour, which is about as good as driving and far better during Turkey Day gridlock. There’s ample affordable parking near train stations to leave your car while you’re gone, and you can buy a ticket from your smartphone or a station kiosk. Yet anyone who’s used this convenient, cheap service knows that these trains are usually nearly empty, with plenty of seats to spare.

The trains are quiet — too quiet — while the holiday highways are in crisis. And yet, airport officials addressed the immediate problem of too many cars on the road by reminding airport commuters to keep driving. Just earlier.

“We continue to ask travelers during the busy holiday-season weekends to arrive early [and] book parking online ahead of time,” DFW advised on Facebook, while remedying miles-long gridlock by “[using] the cell phone waiting lots to avoid prolonged stopping at the terminal curbs.” Putting a Band-Aid on your tumor would do you more good than calling someone from a waiting lot.

Locals flooded the comments with the obvious thing missing, the thing that actually reduces traffic congestion for people who need to drive. A DFW spokesperson told us the post “was specifically intended to help explain to the public the root cause of Sunday’s issues” adding that they would include future messaging on “alternative methods of transit to and from the airport ahead of the remaining holidays.”

But the root cause of our Thanksgiving debacle isn’t people trying to see their loved ones. It’s how those people had to get there.

We take issue with phrasing, too. Calling taxpayer-funded transit an “alternative method” rhetorically positions the safer, cheaper, and more reliable method of getting to the airport as a secondary option instead of the chief solution to our problem.

This problem isn’t solely on DFW, but the poorly crafted social media post reflects our state’s priorities, particularly in Tarrant County. As Fort Worth Magazine recently captured in a report headlined “Who Killed the Streetcar? The State of Fort Worth’s Public Transit,” the Fort Worth area spends just $100 per capita on transit compared to Dallas’ $227. There is much blame to share on why our highways are drowning, and trains and buses remain empty.

This isn’t a problem limited to the airport debacle, and it isn’t going away. We can’t build highways fast enough to keep up with population growth. And while a larger transit solution has been elusive, small steps could make available options more attractive. For instance, parking at rail stations, while cheap, requires yet another app. How about linking into the TollTag system, which many drivers already use and trust? Ideally, the Thanksgiving mess would prompt a top-to-bottom review to search for small steps such as these that could boost confidence and ease of use.

Rail and public transit can’t and won’t service every person in every situation. But improving access and promotion of so-called alternative transportation would, by its very nature, clear the roads for commuters who hate staring at the license plate in front of them but still need to drive (or be driven) to the airports — many elderly and disabled travelers come to mind.

Dec. 25 is coming. The days leading up to it don’t need to be hell on wheels.