In early June, a reporter walked into Highland Park Village and asked the people working the counters a simple question: how are you getting to work now that the bus doesn't stop here? Staff at Barsotti's and Sadelle's hadn't heard of the app the town spent months building for exactly that purpose. A manager at Mi Cocina had it downloaded on his phone but couldn't say what area it actually covered.
That gap matters more than it sounds like it should, because the town is about to make a permanent decision using ridership numbers collected from exactly the people who did know about it.
What DART Actually Ran Here
For most of the last four decades, Highland Park's connection to regional transit came down to one bus line. Route 237 ran along Preston Road, with the Park Cities GoLink zone filling in shorter trips nearby. On an average weekday, that route carried about 35 boardings spread across 15 stops, a figure town officials leaned on to argue the existing service wasn't doing much for the roughly $8 million the town sent to DART last year, a number projected to climb toward $9 to $10 million this year, through its 1 percent share of local sales tax.
Voters agreed. On May 2, 2026, nearly 70 percent of Highland Park residents voted to leave the Dallas Area Rapid Transit system, a decision that put the town in rare company. Highland Park is only the third DART member city to walk away since the agency's founding in 1983, joining Coppell and Flower Mound, who both left in 1989. The same ballot asked Addison and University Park the identical question. Both chose to stay.
DART shut down service inside town limits at midnight on May 14. The 15 stops along Preston Road came down that week, and Route 237 buses now pass through Highland Park without pulling over.
Leaving didn't erase the town's history with the agency. DART has estimated Highland Park's share of its outstanding debt at roughly $30 to $40 million, and the Texas Comptroller will keep collecting that same 1 percent sales tax until the obligation is paid off. What changes is where the ongoing revenue goes from here, and town leaders were candid about why that mattered to them: Highland Park runs on a pay-as-you-go budget with no municipal debt, and keeping public safety pay competitive was part of the calculation. As Town Administrator Tobin Maples put it after the council canvassed the vote, the goal was making sure "no rider was left behind" while redirecting money the town felt it wasn't getting back in service.
The App That Took the Bus's Place
The replacement launched the day after DART's exit became official. Highland Park On-Demand is a microtransit service the town contracted through Via Transportation, running a four-vehicle fleet that covers Highland Park plus roughly a one-mile buffer beyond town limits, with connections to Mockingbird Station and Dallas Love Field built into the app. It runs seven days a week from 5 a.m. to midnight, and rides are booked either through the Via-powered app or by calling the town's dedicated line.
A separate arm, Highland Park Access, handles paratransit for riders who can't use the on-demand side unassisted. That requires an eligibility application first, either proof of prior paratransit status with DART or a doctor's note from within the past six months, and trips have to be booked up to four days in advance, with reservations closing at 5 p.m. the evening before travel.
Right now, all of it is free. That wasn't the original plan. Council members had floated a flat $3 one-way fare and a $3.50 paratransit fare before deciding to run the six-month pilot without charging riders, in part to avoid the awkward optics of charging former DART riders twice for a service their town had already paid into for years.
The Numbers Look Good. The Question Is Who's Missing From Them
By the town's own count, three weeks after launch Highland Park On-Demand had logged 595 completed trips and 479 created app accounts, with six active paratransit riders on Highland Park Access. By the August town council session, policy director Letecia McNatt reported ridership still climbing on the same four-vehicle fleet, with Highland Park Village and Mockingbird Station standing out as the two most popular pickup and dropoff points.
Those are the numbers the town will use to decide what happens after the pilot ends, sometime around mid-November. And that's the part worth sitting with. A free service collects a very different kind of ridership data than a paid one, and the population showing up in June's app-download numbers looks a lot like residents choosing convenience, not workers who lost their only way into town.
Managers at Mi Cocina and Honor Bar in the Village told the same reporter that most of their staff wouldn't need a DART replacement anyway, because they already drive to an off-site parking area and take a private shuttle the employer arranges. An employee at Coupe's in the Shops of Highland Park said she knew of a few people who'd had to change their transportation plans since the vote. The town has since put up English- and Spanish-language signage along Preston Road near the old bus stops, after criticism that the first round of signage didn't include Spanish at all.
None of that means the service is failing. It means the ridership figures the town will lean on this fall were built during a window when the people who most needed a free replacement for Route 237, hourly workers commuting without a car or without English as a first language, were among the least likely to know it existed. If that gap doesn't close before the free window ends, whatever fare and vehicle decisions come out of it will be based on a sample that never fully reflected who DART actually carried.
What's Still Unresolved Before November
Two decisions are still open. The fare question came back up at the August council meeting, with the possibility of fee-based rides discussed again after the free pilot period. Whatever the town lands on, it will be built on ridership data gathered when nobody was paying, which is a different animal than the demand you'd see once a fare shows up.
The second is the Workforce Circulator, the shuttle originally floated as a way to get contractor vehicles off residential streets during the town's ongoing wave of home construction. Mayor Will Beecherl described the idea back in May: van workers in from off-site parking instead of letting their trucks line neighborhood curbs. As of the most recent public reporting, it still hadn't launched.
For residents, the practical version of all this is short:
- Book through the app or call 214-785-4345. Rides run 5 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week.
- It's free right now, through the six-month pilot ending around mid-November. A $3 base fare had been proposed before the town decided to run it free.
- Coverage reaches a mile past town limits, including built-in connections to Mockingbird Station and Love Field.
- Paratransit riders need to apply first, with proof of prior DART eligibility or a recent doctor's note, and book at least a day ahead, no later than 5 p.m. the evening before travel.
- The Builder Shuttle for construction crews hasn't launched yet, even though it was part of the original plan.
What This Actually Changes for You
If you live in Highland Park and haven't needed the bus in years, none of this touches your daily routine much. If you employ anyone in the Village or the Shops, or if a member of your household relies on a ride to get to Mockingbird Station without driving and parking, the free window is worth using now rather than waiting to see if the town's signage catches up. Mayor Beecherl was blunt about the town's reasoning for making the switch in the first place: "We're not opposed to mass transit. We just don't like paying a disproportionate share for it." Whether that math holds up depends on data the town is collecting right now, during the one stretch when the ride costs nothing and the people who need it most may still not know it's there.
The town's own microtransit page and the Via-run service page for Highland Park both spell out the current details if you want to see them directly. Worth a look before the free window closes.
Highland Park's daily rhythms change in small ways like this more often than the real estate conversation usually captures. If you're weighing a move within the Park Cities, or just want a read on how a neighborhood actually runs day to day, the team at Vancleve | Garcia Group knows this market from the ground up. Let's get started.
