DART has what can best be described as a policy of non-confrontation. DART instructs its employees, for their safety, to avoid confrontations with riders who may appear intoxicated or under the influence, and allow them to ride freely. Employees have also reported a sharp drop in fare enforcement but this has not been possible to verify. DART is also somewhat secretive with its data, so this makes direct public examination of many aspects of DART’s operation challenging. It turns out, however, that DART's actual data may be unnecessary when quantifying the agency’s impact on municipalities.
Scholarly research has observed that transit facilities tend to correlate with violent criminal activity such as assaults and robberies. If this is the case in Dallas, the data provided by the City of Dallas would be expected to provide better insight into DART-generated externalities.
As a starting point, a visualization can be constructed of DART’s primary routes and transit stations using geospatial data.
Next, the data used to construct the heat map can be aggregated to consolidate all reports within 250 meters of each other into single data points. The following visualization compares the heat map to these summary data points.
These summary data points can be added to DART’s route map in order to visualize where they reside in comparison to DART’s routes.
Since this map contains data points, it is now possible to integrate geospatial crime data, from the Dallas Police Department, in the form of a heat map. The Dallas Police incident data captures acts in terms of violations of specific sections of the Texas Penal Code. From this data, it is possible to aggregate broader categories of offenses and specific offense levels of felonies and misdemeanors (F1, F2, F3, FS, MA, MB, MC). Since research has already drawn correlations between transit facilities and increased incidents of assaults and robberies, these can easily be visualized.
Research has also suggested a disparate prevalence of substance abuse that tends to victimize homeless persons. Given the strong correlation between drugs and homelessness, locations of felony arrests for manufacturing or delivering controlled substances can be added to the DART map to further visualize where these arrests are occurring—and, by extension, where dangerous drugs are likely being sold.
To reiterate: all data used in these visualizations are produced and maintained by the City of Dallas. City data is simply placed on maps.