Metro’s park and ride service rebounding slowly, unevenly
Alec Greenaway had some lonely days at the bus stop at the height of the pandemic.
“Sometimes I would be the only one waiting,” Greenaway, 45, said on a recent Wednesday afternoon, getting an early start heading home from downtown.
Some commuter buses headed back to the Grand Parkway park and ride would have two or three riders. Others might have 10, he recalled.
These days, the buses are a little more full, the parking lot a little more crowded. Often, there is a small line forming at his Louisiana Street bus stop downtown, just like the old days before COVID-19.
For the Metropolitan Transit Authority, however, the return to normal for park and ride has been uneven, leading to challenges in safely resuming service and adding back services as riders demand them while the agency addresses its own staffing needs.
“We are going to continue to make service adjustments as long as we have the resources to do so and as long as the need justifies that,” said Jim Archer, Metro’s director of service planning and scheduling.
Figuring all that out comes with complications.
Local bus routes, the backbone of Metro’s system, remain below pre-COVID levels but have seen a much faster rebound as many travelers had no choice but to return to buses.
For the first couple months of 2022, local bus use is about 70 percent that of pre-pandemic levels.
“The park and ride system barely scrapes one-third on its highest days,” Archer said.
Some of that is because local buses cater to a different crowd than commuter lines. Local
bus riders are less likely to own a vehicle, while park and ride users are more likely to have office jobs that more easily converted to work-from-home status during the pandemic, national studies show.
As that has eased, however, Archer said Metro is seeing more people driving back into the park and ride lots. It just has been a much slower return.
“Where we are right now is where we were with the local service in May (2021),” he said.
Days are different
Complicating how Metro maintains commuter bus service is a decidedly uneven approach to trips, depending on the day.
“They are returning for one day a week, three days a week,” Archer said.
Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are the highest use days, and often the dropoff can be dramatic. Friday ridership is half that of Tuesday, Archer said.
Steve Swift, a longtime Grand Parkway park and ride user, since the days when users parked at the curb before a parking garage was built, said he definitely has noticed a difference on certain days.
“You can tell nobody is going downtown Friday, unless they have a meeting,” Swift said. “And no one schedules Friday meetings unless they have to.”
As happens with freeway congestion, holidays seem to predictably throw everything off, Archer said. The Tuesday after President’s Day, ridership surged.
“We have been ahead of the game and had more seats out there,” he said.
Location matters
The origin and destination of park and ride routes also have been major factors in ridership, Archer said.
Service to the Texas Medical Center was scaled back but always remained strong during the pandemic because of the huge workforce going into the hospitals.
Downtown, once the mainstay of local commuter bus service, cratered, coming back only slightly since September.
“While we are seeing a return on the downtown park and ride, it is nowhere near where it was, and even while it is growing, we still have several corridors where there is available seating,” Archer said.
That is because the demand is uneven in the suburbs, so far. Along the Interstate 10 and Interstate 45 corridors, where traffic also has seen an uptick, demand for seats on commuter buses is strong. Along Interstate 69 meanwhile, both north and south of downtown, rider interest is less.
Hiring hurdles
In some cases, Metro is slowed in offering service.
“The riders are coming back faster than we can hire and train drivers,” Metro board member Jim Robinson said.
Since mid-2021, Metro — along with many other local firms — has aggressively recruited new drivers and mechanics after many retired or found other work during the pandemic. The agency continues to offer an $8,000 signing bonus for mechanics and $4,000 for bus operators.
The lack of drivers will continue to determine how Metro returns many park and ride routes.
“If we do not have operators, we cannot do some of the changes we have proposed,” Archer said.
Constant adjustments
Handling the demand has forced Metro to be more nimble, officials said. It is not necessarily about retiming routes as much as having a spare bus ready to go when spikes happen.
“The supervisor has the discretion to put that bus into service as he or she sees fit,” Archer said.
Often it is that one bus that makes a big difference in how riders view the service with COVID still lingering. Some mornings, riders arrive en masse, and that single bus is jammed, Archer said, while the trip before and trip after are mostly empty.
Getting Houston moving more by transit likely is going to be reacting to increased demand when it happens as new travel patterns emerge. Two years into the pandemic, officials just do not know what those patterns will be.
“We are in week 109,” Archer said in late March. “I am not sure what normal is anymore.”