A Look at Week One of the Collin County Connects Committee

Plano has its mind set on microtransit, but is it viable for the city and its residents?

I didn’t walk into Training Room A with high hopes about the ‘Collin County Connects Committee’ that first night, but I left with less than I had. One would hope that one’s city, when faced with the possibility of no longer having access to a vital public service such as public transportation, that a replacement plan would be in place long before the possible end of service date. A timeline of less than three months to get a viable alternative to a long-standing service is ill-advised, and invites unnecessary hardship to the lives of those who are reliant on public transportation to live. These decisions have a strong impact on the elderly and disabled communities, and that impact affects us all.

My general impression of that first meeting was that the city has no plan, has no clue what their citizens actually want and/or need, and have already made up their minds on what they, the City of Plano, want. Microtransit is not viable for a city the size of Plano, yet it seems that it’s the only option Plano is considering. The options for the committee to review feel stilted and narrow, with members being told to limit their questions, making me wonder just what the point of the committee was. The fact that Via, a service frequently disparaged by those who have used it, was still on the list of possible vendors shows how little regard Plano has for its own citizens. Many residents spoke about their irritation with the service directly to the council at the November 4th meeting, and yet Plano continues to consider it. A feeling of dread grows in my heart with every dismissed question about finances, every half answered question intended to distract rather than actually respond in good faith, every shrug of uncertainty and lack of response from city officials. This theme of ignoring constituents grows stronger as each moment passes without clear and honest communication from the city.

Many of us left that room filled with more questions than answers, and no small amount of disappointment. I love this city, it has been my home my entire life, and I had no plans to change that anytime soon. After such a disappointing first meeting, my hopes for the remaining ones are bleak, but I have to hold out hope that my city will do the right thing, or I, like many other public transit reliant residents, may be faced with the reality that Plano will no longer be a safe place to call home.

With a heavy heart and worried mind, the next day passed with my brain filled with thoughts about what the next meeting would bring. Would the committee be able to ask all their questions? Given how insistent Andrew Fortune, Plano’s Director of Policy & Government Relations, and Phil Dyer, former mayor and the head of the committee, had been on Tuesday about limiting how many questions the committee could ask, it seemed unlikely. We knew that at least one possible vendor would speak, possibly two, but who would be there was unknown to us until the next evening, where we all found out together who the first speaker would be.

Via

It’s a word that puts an immediate grimace on my face. After seven times of getting stranded using the service in Arlington, it’s no surprise. At the November 4th special session of city council, many Plano residents and other speakers spoke out about their poor experiences with the service in both Arlington and Grand Prairie, and yet here we sat, listening to that very company attempt to pitch themselves to the city.

One speaker said that Uber and Lyft were sometimes the best option within a Via system, which seems counterintuitive to the service they are supposed to provide. Another said it was sometimes part of their strategy to push overflow from their systems to Uber and Lyft since they had more capacity than Via itself. One of their main talking points was about their safer drivers and vehicles, with subtle hints on how it made them better than other rideshare services, and yet they admitted their fleets often are not large enough to handle large capacities on their own and sometimes relies on Uber and Lyft to fill in the gaps. They say they are not a service that provides city subsidized Ubers, and that statement opens the door to more questions about just how functional this system would be, and how cost effective it would be, should Plano choose to move forward with Via.

Much like the Plano City Council itself, the representatives from Via didn’t fully answer all the questions posed to them by the committee, in part because they simply did not have the numbers, information or data to do so. Speakers for Via outright stated that they are unsure exactly what will be needed to serve Plano in the long term, which is the exact opposite of reassuring coming from DART’s possible replacement. The city representatives stated they didn’t have the data from their other departments like finances, and didn’t have answers when questioned on what would happen if the replacement service couldn’t handle the needs of the city. The main representative from Via seemed unsure about how well he felt Via could serve Plano, stating that their most successful projects used a combination of buses on fixed routes and microtransit, but was ultimately reliant on the budget provided by the city. “If the city budget runs out, yeah, we won’t be able to pick people up,” said one rep. Plano has been staunchly anti-bus in their recent statements, and with Via stating they will not exceed expenditures past a certain point, it stirs up worries about what will happen to myself and other riders when that limit is reached. “We know people are getting stranded,” said committee member Brett Cooper, and yet not a single person from Via or the city of Plano had an answer on how to address that serious issue, instead, they dismissed the subject and moved along with the meeting.

”The waits will be longer, the rides will be longer. It’s public transit”.

If that is true, then why would we spend the time and resources on changing what service we use, if at the end of the day it’s all public transit? If there is no improvement to service, if service possibly in all likelihood will get worse, if the service themselves is unsure if they can meet our needs, what is our city thinking? DART isn’t perfect, no system is. But it is a system we already have, with infrastructure already built and paid for, and the citizens are already familiar with the system and how it connects their city to the rest of the metroplex. DART has an expansive rail network of light rail and commuter rail, a massive fleet of buses, a fantastic paratransit service for disabled riders, and a thriving microtransit service, GoLink; already in rotation utilizing its own fleet and connections with both Uber and Lyft to handle overflow should the rider opt in to do so. It feels like it would be a better use of time to improve what we already have rather than start over with something new, and possibly worse. Most Plano citizens seem to agree, the question remains if our city council and representatives will listen.

Overall, the first two meetings did the opposite of what some members of the Plano City Council claimed it would do; answer questions. If the meeting on Thursday the 4th is the standard for what all the other meetings will be like, it doesn’t bode well for anyone. Members of both the committee and the public are growing restless, worried, and annoyed, Plano representatives remain apathetic to the impacts of their decisions, and tensions are rising as we rapidly approach the end of the year.

If the City of Plano continues down this reckless path of leaving DART in favor of microtransit, residents will need to band together to make sure that no one is left stranded by a city that no longer cares.