Metro keeping projects on track
Carrin Patman greeted the supporter by grabbing both of his hands in a packed downtown Houston event space above a bustling sports bar. The buffet laid out for Metro’s 2019 election night watch party was thoroughly picked through and waiters and waitresses were bringing out more.
“I don’t want to jinx it, but everything is looking great. It’s going to pass,” Patman, chairwoman of the Metropolitan Transit Authority board, told the man among a throng of celebrants clinking glasses and talking about the big win for buses and trains. As she let go, Patman said she was looking forward to starting the “real work” of building Houston’s future transit system.
A year later, Metro has to work its way through a pandemic that took away more than half its ridership and still is roiling its financial outlook before it can tackle more than a decade of rail, street and transit stop construction.
Nonetheless, transit officials are moving ahead with millions of dollars in engineering and design of new lines and services, confident they can plan now for major projects that riders eventually will demand.
“We don’t want to lose that time,” said Roberto Treviño, Metro’s executive vice president for planning, engineering and construction. “We don’t want towait. Now is the time to plan.”
After months of discussion, contracts for design oversight and preparation of the lengthy federal environmental process for a major bus rapid transit line could be solicited by the end of the year, as Metro starts the work Patman predicted.
At the same time, transit officials are trying to avoid the hiccups that have hurt timing for some projects, including ongoing efforts to improve bus stops, as they unveil a marquee service that has struggled to attract even the paltry previous transit demand along the route, not to mention the thousands of new riders it was built to lure from their cars because those people
are not headed into their offices.
Still, Metro CEO Tom Lambert said the agency is “in a good position to move forward” and remains committed to the long list of promised projects.
Pandemic effect
More than two-thirds of voters last November approved Metro’s $7.5 billion long-range plan, allowing transit officials to borrow up to $3.5 billion for a long list of projects, including light rail to Hobby Airport, a major expansion of bus rapid transit around the region and faster park and ride service via two-way lanes on many Houston freeways.
Most of those high-dollar projects, however, are years away from putting shovels into the ground.
Officials already “scrubbed” the long-range plan for what fit into their revised 2021 budget, shelving a planned light rail extension to Houston’s municipal courthouse while keeping others, such as a planned Interstate 10 bus rapid transit line from Uptown to Downtown.
Engineering and construction for two of the projects that are proceeding — improving bus service and amenities along three major routes and transit stop improvements to increase access for disabled and elderly users — can be done in a matter of weeks or months at each location, Treviño said. Some upgrades already are hitting the streets, such as newdigital signs giving riders at some stops upcoming arrival times.
In some cases, bus service around the region remains in flux and focused on critical needs and not luring riders. In March, COVID-19 shut down all transit service in the region and shrank demand to half of normal levels even after officials required masks. Commuter bus service to all destinations except the Texas Medical Center fell off a cliff and remains 88 percent below 2019 levels, according to August ridership estimates.
Virtually every offering Metro provides — local buses, park and ride routes, light rail, HOT lanes along freeways — has been dramatically affected by the pandemic, leading to a corresponding dip in transit revenues. Sales tax collections for the agency for fiscal 2020, totaling $766.7 million, were 5 percent below Metro’s budget estimates. Fare revenues fell to $38.5 million, a 43.4 percent decline from expectations.
Meanwhile, the collapse of commuter demand has cratered use of Metro’s move into bus rapid transit, which the long-range plan heavily relies upon to meet future travel demands. The Silver Line, a rebuild of Post Oak by the Uptown Management District and operated by Metro, is sputtering out of the gate. The new 60-foot buses meant to deliver a rail-like experience with stops at dedicated stations and boarding from platforms are carrying a fraction of the riders the line was built for through the normally clogged Post Oak corridor as offices sit empty.
For its first two weeks, the Silver Line averaged 724 daily weekday riders, putting it in the bottom 10 percent of Metro routes in terms of riders per hour of operations.
Lambert said the lack of use was expected since Metro is not advertising the line.
“We have not been doing anything to encourage people to take trips that are not essential,” Lambert said.
Progress on one thing that critics and riders say has discouraged transit use — the sorry state of some of Metro’s 9,000 bus stops — remains mired despite being a high priority in the past two years. Though officials met their goal of designing repairs at 1,100 stops to make them more easily accessible to elderly and disabled riders, they fell far short on the construction side. Officials had hoped to fix 750 stops in fiscal 2020 but made repairs at only 312.
Treviño said some of the delay was by design, so Metro could set up federal funds awarded by the Houston-Galveston Area Council for the improvements instead of paying from its transit coffers.
Future demand
Delays are nothing new for Metro projects. Expansion of light rail, an associated overpass along Harrisburg and the new Silver Line BRT all faced delays of more than 12 months.
It is a streak officials want to break by getting all their planning in place for the next major projects: new transit lanes along I-10 within Loop 610 and a 25mile bus rapid transit line from Tidwell to the University of Houston and Texas Southern University and finally west to Westchase. The I-10 lanes could be ready within six years, but it could be a decade or more before big buses roll down major Houston streets and freeways between northeast and far western Houston.
“It is going to take a little bit of time to understand where everything is at,” Treviño said, adding that work will take years to navigate environmental review, public meetings and final design. “Regardless of where we are today, we feel confident by the time these projects are under construction they will have the riders.”
Transit backers who voted for the bond agree the region will need new bus and train offerings, even if some are unsure what future demand Metro will have.
“If fewer people are going into the office, that makes some of the projects moot, or moot for now,” said Steve Motley, 55, a Museum District resident who often rode the Red Line light rail to his job in the central business district.
Lambert, however, is not ready to rule out a major return in commuter transit, citing the need for Metro to have the same type of redesign for its park and ride system that the local bus network received five years ago.
“That is something we still need to do,” Lambert said. “It is just not the right time right now.”
With millions of dollars set to flow from Metro to engineering firms in the next year for construction that could take the better part of the next decade, setting the right expectations is critical, transit officials said.
“In spite of everything COVID has done to us … the one thing we absolutely need to have through the duration is predictability and reliability and transparency,” Metro board member Sanjay Ramabhadran said.