A Cold Day at Operations

Nadine Lee: You're listening to Mobility in Motion, a podcast produced from Dallas Area Rapid Transit. I'm your host, Nadine Lee, President and CEO of DART.

When you step onto a DART train or bus, all you want to do is get from one place to another, safely and hopefully as quickly as possible. My colleagues and I at DART want that too. But sometimes unexpected events come up that slow the system down. I'm talking about vehicle breakdowns, road closures or even unruly passengers. Extreme weather events and the impacts of climate change are also affecting our transit system.

To manage this ongoing and ever-changing list of challenges, there are hundreds of people working behind the scenes at DART in our Operations Control Center. It's their job to keep our complex system of buses and trains moving.

Today we're going to meet the people who keep DART running and see how it's done. We start in one of our bus control centers.  We start in the DART Operations Center in South Dallas.  It’s five in the morning, but the place is buzzing. At least half a dozen people are at their desks looking at monitors and fielding phone calls.

On the morning we visited it was one of the coldest days of the year. The temperature was 10 degrees, and the freezing weather was causing a lot of stress on the system.

Adrian Lewis: It's kind of like a live 911 center. Every second counts and we don’t know what we might get.

Nadine Lee: This is Adrian Lewis. He’s the Assistant Vice President for bus support.

Adrian Lewis: We're just busy. Everything's going on. Buses are breaking down. Basically, we're just trying to restore service. That's what we do. We protect the service and we restore service.

So basically what we have here, we have the lead manager here in the morning overnight. And basically we have an a.m. manager comes in. And then we got bus controls, dispatch, supervisors that in each one of those cubicles and basically receive calls: Buses are broken down, 911 calls, emergency disturbances on the bus, accidents. We might get probably one morning rush hour. We might get total of maybe a hundred calls. That could be. That could be even bit busier. So basically you're talking about ... Can you tell me how many we got far?

Kirsten Fox: Yeah, for today. Right now, we have 72.

Nadine Lee: This is Kirsten Fox. She's an assistant manager for the bus operations divisions. It's her job to monitor any issues with the buses and then communicate them out to the appropriate people.

Kirsten Fox: So, for example, when the issue is a mechanical failure, we're the ones that coordinate with the shop. We let the next bus know that, hey, we got a bus down. We let customer service know. Hey, this time points are going to come. We're going to do this instead to modify the schedule.

So we basically look at the resources we have available and try to find the most equitable way to make sure passages are not just getting stranded for an hour with no idea what's going on.

Nadine Lee: And the day’s freezing temperatures are causing buses to break down and some operators are calling in sick. Kristen's trying to make sure that riders know which routes are cancelled before they leave home.

Kirsten Fox: This morning we've had a lot of people call in, so we haven't had manpower. So not only are we trying to cancel the service, so people aren't actually trying to go out and wait for a bus that's not coming because that's just not going to help anyone. And sometimes it's a matter of operators are out there, but we're having issues: We've got black ice. We've got to get that alert out. We've got to notify people there's a problem here and to either avoid it, take an alternate route, or if they're stuck, to give them an idea, it might take them a certain amount of time. We're letting customer care know.

I mean, it is a circus!

Nadine Lee: To help handle this "circus" bus operations is broken down into divisions. Each division has a certain number of bus routes and each route contains three to six buses. One dispatcher is assigned to oversee just one division. It's their job to communicate directly with the bus drivers and send supervisors out into the field to deal with any problems that come up.

Kirsten Fox: So the intent is to keep it seamless and when we have one dispatcher just on that division They can keep all those little pieces in the back of their head. Instead of us taking multiple people saying: “I got this person calling. I've got a shop call on this. What's going on with this? and yelling across the room.”

We've got the one person going: “Oh, no, I got that. This is how I'm gonna piece this together and I'm so this in here and I'm gonna get this patch work and it's gonna be pretty when I finish.”

Unfortunately, the bad side of that is sometimes it's feast and sometimes it's famine.

Nadine Lee: Each dispatcher sits at a desk surrounded by monitors that track the buses and shows incoming service requests.

Kirsten Fox: So we have at least two computers, I have three monitors, two mice, two keyboards. It's great. Plus my phone never stops ringing.

So I'm pretty much sitting at a desk with a headset on, plus my handheld radio, plus the phone ringing, plus the DART cell phone.

And they're all trying to get my attention at the same time. And it's not just me. There's also the other dispatchers for each division experiencing the exact same thing. So everybody's phone is ringing. Everybody's radio, when it goes off, says, hi, answer me. So, it's sometimes loud, sometimes noisy.

Nadine Lee: Everything seemed to be running pretty smoothly considering all the challenges they were facing. But things can change quickly, especially during extreme weather events.

These are becoming more common these days as a result of climate change.

If you lived in Dallas in 2021 then you probably remember the ice storm that shut down the city and our transit system. Then in 2023 we had a major heat wave that overheated our electrical system and caused some major problems.

Because of those extreme weather events we started something called the Transform Initiative. Our goal is to modernize the DART Transit system in order to better prepare for the impacts of climate change.

One of the people overseeing this project is Darryl Spencer. Darryl is the Vice President of Engineering and Technical Services. He's a busy man, with text and email alerts constantly pinging in the background.

He's looking back at past events to help DART prepare for the future.

Darryl Spencer: That's the thing that's going to be really important, is to take the lessons learned of what we've been experiencing over the past 60 months, right? To future-proof our system, to transform our system, to allow our system to, combat, severe weather and operate through those severe weather exchanges.

Nadine Lee: After that ice storm in 2021 Darryl and his team started to look at what could be done to make the system more resilient.

Darryl Spencer: When that event hit, we decided that we were going to conduct a study, a winterization study. And within that study we learned that there were approximately 30 different strategies that we can employ to combat this winter weather and, allow our system to operate and fight our way through it to move people.

Of those 30 different recommendations at the consultants supported us on, there were about a dozen of those that we felt were feasible. Uh, that we can truly implement.

Nadine Lee: Darryl and his department discovered that one of the most vulnerable elements of the train system was something called the catenary line. This is the overhead electrical wire that powers a train. A train attaches to that line with a long arm called a pantograph. But during extreme cold weather that essential power line can freeze, cutting off power to the train.

Darryl Spencer: So nothing moves. And when the train doesn't move, it backs up all the trains behind it. So it's very crippling. It delays our service. Uh, we can't move people from point A to point B. So here's what we've done. We’ve identified, an ice cap or an ice shield that can snap and be mounted on top of that that catenary wire to prevent it from freezing over. So underneath the wire, that collector head pantograph can still draw power and then move people.

But let me transition to the summer season because there’s multiple seasons within Texas as you can well imagine. The summer season what we had to occur was just the opposite of that: heat.

When that occurs, the line sags, we have to slow the system down to a crawl—to 15 miles per hour—and walk our way through the line, which is going to impact time points for people using our system. Everything impacts that.

Nadine Lee: To prevent this sag in the catenary wire, Darryl's team has replaced passive counterweight systems with automatic tensioning systems. The automatic system adjusts the tension on the line as temperatures fluctuate. This is more efficient than the older system and requires less maintenance.

Darryl says the power lines aren't the only vulnerability when it comes to extreme heat.

Darryl Spencer: We also had an event where the temperature got so hot for those consecutive days, the track base itself, the track itself, began to warp. And when the track warps, it has potential for a fracture. Particularly because we have an aged system. You know, our infrastructure is over 30 years now, and you can well imagine that steel is only as resilient as the ambient temperatures in the climates.

So we have to look at ways to combat that over time.

We looked at piloting a program where we paint the rails white to keep those rails cooler. So those are some really intriguing pilot experiences that we've identified. And it reduced the temperatures around 10 degrees

Nadine Lee: Other resiliency strategy plans include upgrading backup power systems and installing air conditioning in the maintenance facility. DART gas a five-year capital improvement plan of 70 million dollars will be used to pay the cost

Darryl Spencer: I think the system, uh, potentially would have been built differently 30 to 40 years ago had we known that the climate in Texas was going to take this turn, you know, in this era that we find ourselves in. Regardless if you believe in climate change or not, it is real.

Nadine Lee: There is a separate operations center for rail. This is where dispatchers keep track of the trains. Like bus operations, each desk has five monitors which give access to CCTV cameras and the radio system.

In front of the room there is a giant TV screen that displays a map of all the train lines lit up. Sharon Pierce Hunter is the Chief Rail Operations Controller. She explains what the colored lights on the map mean.

Sharon Pierce Hunter: Well, one, I don't want to see green. Okay. Green's not good in this room. good. Green's not good. Red is good. Red is, red is excellent. Interesting. Mm hmm.  And I just want to see the trains are moving. I watch the junctions, make sure everybody's going through safely.  And just moving our customers from point A to point B.

Nadie Lee: So far on this very frigid morning things have been running fairly smoothly. An example of progress being made toward a more resilient system.

Sharon Pierce Hunter: We had track circuits go down and they're back up. And right now the trains are moving the way they should move.  And the most rewarding part of the job is going home at the end of the day with no incidents.  No incidents. That's great.  

Xavier Harrell: We try to provide you the information in a timely manner, but at the same time, not everything is under our control.

This is Xavier Harrell. It's his job to monitor all the information coming into the train and bus operations center from the DART staff as well as the public.

Xavier Harrell: We monitor DART social media accounts, whether it be Facebook and X, monitoring, recording and responding to questions and concerns that come through from customers, from passengers.

Nadine Lee: If it's a service issue, Xavier will communicate that to the other members of the operations team so they can figure out next steps. He'll keep the rest of the DART staff updated, as needed. Once an operations plan is figured out, he'll communicate that information to the public as quickly as possible.

Xavier Harrell: You know, we have to give it as we get it, pretty much. And a lot of times we want to make sure before we send something out to you that we have it correct, we have it up to date. The last thing we want to do is send you some information, and within the next couple minutes, it's about to change.  know, because that doesn't look good on our part,

Nadine Lee: Keeping a major transit system operating 24-hours a day, seven days a week takes a staff of hundreds, working behind the scenes in our Operations Control Center. Darryl Spencer calls it the silent service. And our staff take great pride in their work.

I think Kirsten Fox in DART bus operations sums it up best.

Kirsten Fox: My goal at the end of the day is to know that, “Hey, I've made an impact. I made a difference.” We work together. I mean, it's really a team effort.

When you really think about the whole philosophy from point A to point B, that's literally what we do. We start the beginning of your day at this location and the actual goal is to get everybody home. It literally is whether there are passengers whether our whether it's our operators our supervisors. At the end of the day I want everybody to get home safe wake up and just join the circus again tomorrow. I'm just saying if you got to work at a circus be the ringmaster.

Nadine Lee: Thanks to all DART operations staff for their hard work keeping our buses and trains running.

You're listening to Mobility in Motion. I'm your host, Nadine Lee.

We’d love to hear from you. If you’d like to share your feedback with us, please email us at [email protected].

This episode was produced by The Glue and Jim Gates, edited by Michael May. If you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe and tell a friend. Episodes come out every other week and are available on your favorite podcast platform.