The women of Route 237: After Highland Park left DART, these are the bus riders with changed commutes

Araceli Campos says bye to a friend and hops off the bus on Route 237, colorful purse in hand and blue sneakers on her feet. She starts her walk through the tree-lined streets of Highland Park, past historic estates and designer stores. It’s been nearly two hours since she first boarded the bus at 7 a.m. in Pleasant Grove. 

This has been her settled routine for the past six years. But on Thursday, the bus didn’t stop, her bus stop the casualty of a vote by Highland Park residents to end the town’s relationship with Dallas Area Rapid Transit. Overnight, the walk on the last stretch of her commute to work at a house in the town nearly tripled.

It takes a toll on her 59-year-old legs. And she’s dreading July.

“The people who work there are already older, 50 and up,” Campos said. “We’re tired — we get home and we’re exhausted. … Now that they added more distance, there’s more fatigue.”

Between Bentleys, Porsches and G-Wagons zipping by, a big yellow and blue DART bus rumbles down Preston Road. Route 237 is the only bus line in Highland Park, but it no longer pulls over at the 15 stops within the town’s boundaries.

During the morning rush, the bus half-full, mainly with women like Campos — housekeepers, nannies and restaurant employees who traverse multiple buses, trains, cars and sidewalks for hours each morning to get to work, and who have done so for years or even decades.  

The Dallas area is reckoning with the value of public transportation and how it is provided after several cities called elections to leave DART, with leaders saying it costs too much for too little. While the elections resulted in only one city jumping ship, it’s the women on Route 237 who are paying the price.

Their routes to work, already lengthy and complex, just got a little more difficult, and alternatives are unfamiliar to years of routine.

In place of the banished bus stops, Highland Park launched a local van service at a fraction of the cost for the town.  

A fleet of four on-demand vans can be reached by phone or through an app to shuttle people around town and up to a mile outside its borders. The rides are free for the next six months, then the Town Council will reevaluate.

Most women on Route 237 said they haven’t heard of Highland Park On-Demand, don’t know how to access it or worry it won’t get them to work on time, although some were interested in the service. Some signs advertising the on-demand app at closed bus stops were in English, while many of the women commuting speak only Spanish.

Highland Park Mayor Will Beecherl said DART did not make financial sense for the town, which has a population of around 8,700 and is 2.3 square miles, located around three miles north of the center of Dallas.

It’s one of the wealthiest towns in Texas, with a median household income greater than $250,000. Residents may not need to take the bus, but their housekeepers and restaurant workers do, Campos said.

“We workers are the ones who always use the bus,” she said. “We are few … [but] we serve them.”

The town pays around $9 million annually to DART through a one-cent sales tax for a route that sees about 35 boardings each weekday. The agency does not report the average number of riders who disembark at each bus stop in the town.

While service ended Thursday, the town will continue to pay until all debts associated with its contributions are paid off. That’s too much, Beecherl said, for DART’s paratransit, on-demand service and the one bus on Preston. 

Margarita Mendoza, 62, works as a dishwasher at Sadelle’s in Highland Park Village, an upscale restaurant with caviar and a nearly $30 cheeseburger on the menu. She works morning and evening shifts three or four days a week — “otherwise, it’s not enough,” she said.

It takes an hour, a 25-minute walk and two buses to get from her home in Addison to the shiny gold-lettered storefront, a commute she sometimes begins before six in the morning three or four days of the week. For four years, that’s been her routine, disembarking at Mockingbird and Preston.

She has a car, but the employee parking lot fills up and the $6 she pays to use DART every day is cheaper than paying to park. Mendoza wasn’t informed on how to access the on-demand service.

“We have to leave earlier because we have to walk and wait,” Mendoza said. “When it rains and with the heat … it does affect us.”

For two decades, Alicia Medrano’s husband has driven her from Princeton to Plano in the morning, where she then takes DART to get to work as a housekeeper in University Park. She followed the elections closely, concerned what it would mean for the women who take the bus. The on-demand service is not known to many riders, she said.

“Nobody has talked about it, so nobody knows about it,” Medrano said. “You don’t know how long you’re going to have to wait. … Some people have to be at a certain time at work.”

The service works like other ride-hailing platforms, similar to Uber or Lyft. While the paratransit services can be pre-booked, regular rides cannot, and wait times are subject to location and demand. 

Medrano has concerns about how DART is run and believes the services could be improved. But Highland Park’s withdrawal will complicate the commutes for “the people that need it most,” she said.

DART Board Chair Randall Bryant said his agency is focused on informing the riders who are impacted by the service cuts triggered by Highland Park’s withdrawal. In a system covering a dozen cities, losing members causes disruptions to connectivity, he said.

“The most unfortunate part of this process … is the voices of those that probably rely on and depend on the services most … were probably not the voters,” Bryant said. “Our rides cross multiple city lines.”

The women on Route 237 chat in Spanish beneath the roar of the bus engine during the morning commute. Campos greets a friend on every bus and train.

She’s seen the same faces boarding the same routes for years. They sit together and get coffee and donuts while waiting for their next ride. It’s a community you can’t find in a car on Highway 75.

Maria Romo, 57, has been taking Route 237 to get to work for nearly 30 years. She cleans a house in Highland Park, and her trip from Oak Cliff takes nearly two hours.

“There’s sadness, anger and discontent among the workers who go there,” Romo said. “It’s unfair … because it’s a very wealthy area, but many of us workers use public transportation to get there and serve them — it’s very sad.”

The bus passengers will settle into new routines, get used to a new walk or try the on-demand vans. And the 237 bus will keep rolling through Highland Park. It just won’t stop.