Houston Transit: Back to Basics Not Enough

Houston’s Metro transit is going back to basics, focusing on public safety and giving up its expensive light-rail and bus rapid transit plans. This follows the election of a new mayor, John Whitmire, who took office on January 1, 2024 and quickly replaced several members of the Metro board. Though Whitmire is a Democrat, he took office at a time when Houston was facing serious financial problems and so he is taking a fiscally conservative approach to spending.

By many measures, Houston’s Metro is doing better than most U.S. transit agencies. At the end of 2015, it implemented new bus routes, changing from a downtown-centric system to a grid system, as recommended by Jarrett Walker. Partly as a result, ridership grew by 5 percent between 2019 and 2019, a period during which ridership declined in most other urban areas. As of December 2024, ridership has recovered to nearly 88 percent of pre-pandemic levels, compared with a national average of 76 percent.

While that sounds great, a closer look reveals serious problems. Between 2014 and 2019, while transit ridership was increasing by 5 percent, the urban area’s population grew by 6 percent and auto driving increased by 31 percent. Moreover, while ridership grew, transit passenger-miles declined by 4 percent, so transit’s share of motorized passenger-miles fell from an insignificant 0.9 percent in 2014 to an even more insignificant 0.7 percent in 2019.

In addition, to get that 5 percent increase in ridership, Metro had to increase bus vehicle-miles by 11 percent while it spent 29 percent more on operating costs. To recover transit to 88 percent of pre-pandemic levels, Metro restored vehicle-miles to 93 percent of pre-pandemic levels and as of 2023 its operating costs were 38 percent more than in 2019. Even more discouraging, despite the rise in ridership between 2014 and 2019, 2019 ridership was still 12 percent below its 2006 pre-financial crisis peak.

After Walker’s plan was implemented, I applauded his efforts but argued that they weren’t enough to save transit from growing irrelevance. This prediction proved to be accurate and it may be that the grid system can do little more than slow transit’s decline. While it is good that Metro’s current focus is on public safety rather than expensive transit infrastructure, that is not enough to make transit relevant to most people.

In 2023, only 1.7 percent of Houston workers commuted by transit while 82 percent drove and 13 percent worked at home. Transit isn’t even relevant to most low-income Houstonians. Only 2.3 percent of workers who earned less than $25,000 a year commuted by transit while 83 percent drove in 2023.

In 2023, Houston Metro spent $795 million on transit operations, of which fares covered only $38 million or about 5 percent. Why should the 98 percent of people who don’t ride transit pay higher taxes to subsidize 95 percent of a system that does so little?

Even though Houston’s bus system may no longer be downtown centric, it is still too slow. As comedian Andy Huggins notes above, thanks to improvements in Houston transit, he can now get anywhere in the region in a mere 4-1/2 hours. That may be a slight exaggeration, but the University of Minnesota’s latest accessibility data found that the average Houston resident could reach more than 3.5 times as many jobs in a 20-minute auto trip as a 60-minute transit trip.

If Metro’s goal is to be as vital to Houston as board chair Brock likes to pretend it is, it needs to speed up the buses. Fortunately, with three belt line freeways and six interstate freeways radiating from the city center, Houston already has the infrastructure needed to do this. Most of the region’s major job centers are located at the intersections of belt lines and radial freeways.

Red stars are possible primary transit centers; blue are secondary centers. Non-stop buses would run from every primary center to every other primary center and from every secondary center to the two or three closest primary centers. Not shown are six to eight local buses radiating from every transit center.

While Walker’s grid system was a modest improvement, I would completely scrap it and locate a dozen or so primary transit centers, plus a few secondary centers, at most of the freeway junctions. I would then run non-stop buses from every primary center to every other primary center plus from every secondary center to two or three primary centers, and radiate local buses away from every transit center to provide complete coverage of the urban area. This would allow most transit riders to make most of their journeys at freeway speeds. Where Houston has HOV or HOT lanes, this would actually give transit riders a speed advantage over single-occupancy auto drivers who weren’t willing to pay a toll.

If the region can’t bring itself to make transit more relevant to more people, it would probably be best to scrap the entire system. The government could help those few people who are unable to drive due to age, disability, or extreme poverty by giving them transportation vouchers that they could apply to taxis, ride shares, or any private transit that happens to spring up once public transit subsidies are ended. Otherwise, I don’t see any need for Metro to continue running transit services.