TX: What happened to Dallas’ public transit network of the 1930s? Curious Texas investigates

At around 7 a.m. on a recent morning, the Green Dragon emerged from McKinney Avenue Transit Authority’s trolley barn in Uptown.

Throughout the day, the vintage trolley will travel on the same tracks that were once part of Dallas’ vast streetcar network. The car will ferry locals and visitors alike between landmarks like West Village, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Winspear Opera House.

Today, Dallas’ public transit system looks very different from a century ago. MATA offers a nostalgic glimpse into that past, but it also underscores how much of the city’s streetcar network has vanished — and how far the modern network is from it.

The state of the city and the region’s public transit system prompted Courtney Hunter to ask Curious Texas: What happened to our extensive public transportation system of the early 1900s? And why is it so difficult to restore what we once had?

Look backward

Railroad tracks — whether those connecting Dallas with other cities or among its neighborhoods — have been an integral part of the city almost since its beginning.

“Dallas really is the metropolis that it is today because of the intersection of two major rail lines,” said Bob LaPrelle, president of the Museum of the American Railroad in Frisco.

The meeting of the Houston and Texas Central Railway and Texas and Pacific Railway in Dallas in 1873 transformed the city into a major rail hub and brought to it unprecedented economic growth, LaPrelle said.

And like many cities in the 1900s, Dallas boasted an extensive public transit system based on rail.

Streetcars, which first appeared in the city in 1871 in the humble form of two mule-drawn trolleys, expanded to over 20 lines and 300 cars that connected every part of the city at the network’s peak in the 1930s.

From the Interurban Terminal Building in downtown, riders could also catch electric trains going to the city’s suburban sprawl and beyond — north to McKinney and Denison, south to Waco and Corsicana, east to Fort Worth and west to Terrell.

“For a lot of people, it was just a reliable, quick way to get around,” LaPrelle said. “There was kind of a sweet spot there, around 1900 to 1930, before improved roads and cheap automobiles, where the interurbans flourished.”

Historian and cartographer Jake Berman, who reimagined Dallas’ transit network in 1919 in his book The Lost Subways of North America, said public transit was the preferred way — and often the only way other than walking — to move around the city before the advent of affordable automobiles.

This system didn’t last. After World War II, a combination of forces began the dismantling of Dallas’ transit infrastructure.

The nation’s newfound obsession with automobiles diminished the need for mass transit. Government investments in freeway construction and the growth of suburbs also made automobiles the preferred form of transportation, Berman said.

For Colin Yarbrough, a lifelong Dallas resident and the author of Paved a Way, a book on infrastructure development’s unequal community impacts in Dallas, the stories of streetcars’ demise and the construction of highways in Dallas have another common theme.

Both led to the disruption and decline in the transit system’s accessibility and mobility for the city’s marginalized communities, said Yarbrough, who now researches infrastructure systems at Southern Methodist University.

“Very quickly, the politics of Dallas becomes centered around car movement,” Yarbrough said. “If you don’t have a car, then you’re not a part of the political discourse in Dallas around the midcentury.”

Much of the public transit system in Dallas and elsewhere was also controlled by private monopolies or had ties to current corporate giants. In 1917, the three competing streetcar companies in Dallas merged into the Dallas Railway Company.

As the streetcars struggled to compete with cars and buses, both financially and in traffic, they fell into disrepair, Berman said, and there was little appetite for using public funding to support the system.

“The system withered away and was replaced by buses, and people were like, ‘Well, that kind of stinks, but this is the future now,’” Berman said.

The final interurban trains ran in 1948. And Dallas’ last streetcars stopped operating in January 1956.

Look forward

So what will it take to bring Dallas’ rail-based system back — or build one with equity and accessibility in mind?

While the system as Berman captured in his project has mostly vanished, traces of it still remain in the city.

DART descends from Dallas Railway Company. The agency operates a combination of bus, light rail and commuter rail lines — and, since 2015, one 2.5-mile modern streetcar line between downtown and Bishop Arts.

In Uptown, three decades after Dallas streetcars’ last trip, the McKinney Avenue Transit Authority was founded and soon began running vintage streetcars from a co-founder’s collection on the original streetcar tracks along McKinney Avenue, said his son, John Landrum, MATA’s vice president of systems and technology.

Today, MATA is a major piece of Dallas’ public transit system. Its original route was twice extended and now connects with DART’s Cityplace and St. Paul rail stations at each end. Landrum said during the company’s peak year, its trolleys carried 680,000 passengers.

But more importantly, Landrum said MATA has been at the heart of the rebirth of the Uptown neighborhood — “a walkable, streetcar-ridable community.”

“In the 1920s, people moved away from Uptown and McKinney Avenues, and we began a long, slow glide path to oblivion. The area went downhill. It became quasi-industrial,” Landrum said. “It just kind of withered until the late 1970s, when it began to be a fashionable area again.

And he thinks this recipe is replicable for other parts of the city.

“I’d like to point to Uptown as a ‘build it, and they will come’ scenario,” Landrum said. “It was nothing, and now it rivals downtown Dallas in real estate value. So from that standpoint, MATA has been a tremendous success.”

The company is planning another expansion to the Knox- Henderson neighborhood, Landrum said. DART also has plans for a looped service downtown that connects the existing MATA and Dallas Streetcar routes.

Berman, the historian and cartographer, is more doubtful that streetcars can once again be the centerpiece of Dallas’ public transit system — “unless you have a time machine somewhere, you’re not gonna uninvent the automobile.”

But he said the city should take inspiration from its older neighborhoods like Uptown, Bishop Arts and Highland Park, or look at how places like Houston and Fremont, Calif., develop around public transit.

“If you want to build transit-friendly neighborhoods, you have to actually do it,” Berman said. “The real bread and butter of how you get those types of neighborhoods is by establishing standards that allow people to do it that way.”

Janille Smith-Colin, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at SMU, said the suburban sprawl and the fast growth of Dallas-Fort Worth create both challenges and opportunities for designing its public transit network.

“That disconnect between the rapid pace of development and a limited will to fund transit is a challenge, because it typically impacts those of us that have the fewest transportation options to begin with,” Smith-Colin said.

One model that has worked elsewhere to respond to this challenge, Smith-Colin said, is to ask new employers to contribute to the transit system, similar to the public-private partnerships for supporting infrastructure and road expansions.

As the suburban areas around the city of Dallas grow in both population and employment opportunities, Smith-Colin said she looks forward to seeing the performance of DART’s Silver Line, a 26-mile commuter rail connecting cities in Collin, Dallas and Tarrant counties set to open later this year.

“We have so many cities within the region that have the opportunity to think about transportation in their own unique way,” Smith-Colin said. “I think within the city of Dallas, we have some of the greatest opportunities for diversifying the way people travel.”

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