By Steve Knight/editor-in-chief
Dallas, we have a problem.
For the second consecutive year, some major screw-up occurred during the Texas-Oklahoma football game Oct. 17.
Last year, hundreds of cars belonging to game attendees were illegally towed from what turned out to be illegal parking lots.
This year, thousands of football fans, after seeing advertising from Dallas Area Rapid Transit urging the use of the new Green Line from downtown to Fair Park, waited for hours for trains to deliver them to the game.
Many of them arrived late and angry.
“People pay $600-$700 and missing two quarters of the game. It’s not worth it,” said one disgruntled fan to CBS 11 News.
“I love the idea of light rail, but there are some problems that need to be fixed with it,” another fan said as the understatement of the day.
“The problem we ran into was because we had so many people, that caused the trains to move slowly through downtown,” DART spokesperson Morgan Lyons said, trying to explain the transit agency’s failure.
Those fans were just as comforted by those remarks as Clark W. Griswold was when Marty Moose told him Walley World was closed in National Lampoon’s Vacation.
“We know we didn’t do it right. And the hard part is the why,” Lyons said.
Why?
Because DART’s dismal plan and lack of backup plan was ill-conceived.
Thanks to a 2006 $30 million bond approved by Dallas voters, the Cotton Bowl now seats 96,000 fans.
Unless thousands of metal folding chairs were thrown into the stadium at the last minute, DART knew 96,000 people were attending the game.
Because many visitors stay in Tarrant County hotels and eat in Tarrant County restaurants, this problem concerns everybody.
And although the two universities may choose to change venues to Cowboys Stadium when the current contract expires in 2015, changing to a home-and-home series is a possibility as well, denying the entire Metroplex badly needed tourist dollars.
If Dallas fails to solve these problems that continue to inconvenience visitors, they will take their business and money elsewhere.
