Problems with Trinity Railway Express

This is out on Facebook, but I wanted to share it with anyone and everyone else who rides the TRE!
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Trinity Railway Express
by Melissa Broadway on Friday, 25 March 2011 at 15:07

It seems that despite being such a needed and well used service to the Dallas - Fort Worth community, Trinity Railway Express still has lessons to learn from its nearest kin. No matter how large or how exclusive a mass transit system is, it needs to listen to its riders and act in good faith to resolve issues that make riding less than it should be.

To begin, Trinity Railway Express seems to choose the least effective means of meeting face to face with its customers who truly care about its operation and actually ride the train daily. The vast majority of ridership takes place during the rush hours of roughly 6:00-8:00 AM and 4:00-6:00 PM. This is because many of us work between those hours Monday through Friday. TRE holds their semi-monthly business meetings mid-week and usually either around 9:00 AM or 1:00 PM when these same riders cannot attend. The most recent attempt to overcome this was to set up on the train platforms and converse with those in route at rush hour, which was only marginally more successful as most people do not include extra chat time in their schedule for getting to and from work. Several months ago there was a Facebook page for TRE, and there are still user-created ones, but their own has nothing but the Wikipedia explanation of who they are - no information for riders and certainly no means of communication between us and them. There have been evening transit meeting about expansion, but we need to communicate directly with those making decision about the day to day operations as a group, not with just a single phone line or email contact.

A more pressing issue for hundreds of TRE riders is what appears to us as a simple matter of how to expedite passenger loading and unloading the bi-level and tri-level coaches so that the trains can be on time and we can consistently make our connections to other parts of the DFW mass transit systems. After more than a year of inconsistent operation of the doors on the first car from the engine, it was just recently made clear to some of us by the conductors that a policy of not opening the forward doors of the car has been made clear to the employees.

Whoever made this decision is apparently unaware of its impact at major stations during rush hour. This failure to use both doors on the first coach, unlike all other coaches in operation, means that everyone must exit the same door in single file and then all those waiting on the platform for that car must board in single file. At most stations this is only a minor inconvenience. However, at stations like Medical Market Center, with more than 50% of the 123-152 passengers on that coach trying to disembark, this is a considerable delay. This is far too many people to accommodate through a single door with only 1 minute planned for the stop. The understanding and good judgment of a few engineers and exemplary conductors has proven over time that the forward door needs to be in operation, at least during rush hour.

This is also confusing for new and occasional riders at Victory Station and Union station that see all the other doors opening and wait by the forward door until other passengers explain to them that they need to use the other ones. This is often left to nearby passengers because this information is not provided by signs or announcements as the train is pulling into the station.

The current policy seems to prohibit it use except for those with handicaps requiring level boarding. Even so, there is no justification not to use the same door for able bodied passenger once other needs have been addressed. This has been done with success numerous times at Medical Market Center without problems.