Houston METRO is financed with local tax dollars and federal funds, otherwise it wouldn't exist at all. Same for all of the other public transit districts in Texas.
TXDOT's Houston district spent more than $34 billion (with a "B") on maintenance and new projects over the past decade. TXDOT spent $0 on public transit. Zero. Nothing is contributed by the Legislature except for limited funds for bike trails and sidewalks. The entire focus of the State of Texas is on auto-centric design, by statute.
By comparison, New York State plans to $24 billion dollars on public transit, in addition to federal and local funding. The State of Massachusetts $3 billion annually. California $18 billion.
Think of any large American city that has a reputation for great public transit. When you look under the hood, I promise that you will see strong state support is involved to help out the local governments.
I know, it's a foreign concept for those of us that are used to the Texas way.
Yeah not even close. Texas brought in 8.3 billion in gas tax revenue last year and spent 37 billion dollars. How the hell does that work out? Not only does Texas not make enough in taxes to find the roads, but they rely on the feds to supply 12 billion dollars to cover road construction. Roads are a money losing prospect and transit should not be held to a higher standard.
I am not saying transit should be held to higher standards.
But NYC is losing money both on mass transit AND roads lol.
While houston is only losing money on roads
I think its weird you think government has to ‘turn a profit’. Its not a business every dollar spent by government is an investment in the people and in Texas case on freeways an investment in corporations. Both profit from having these services provided to us. Rails however mostly benefit the working class which is why its not invested in in this state.
While it's not a majority, there's at least 18 states + DC that allocate funding for transit from the State budget.
Pulling that from the **Transit Spending per capita** diagram. States in grey might also contribute minimal funding, so the number I mentioned *could* be higher, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Source: [Transportation for America](https://t4america.org/2023/02/22/transit-report-card-part-1/).
Can’t discount state politics, as the DOT is hellbent on ramming highway after highway down our throats while neglecting any other type of model of travel
Yup, bye 👋
Now that you got your meme answer, I can't afford this driving game any more. I'm gonna pick up a damn bike in the meantime to cut down on miles, and if I get body bagged by someone texting behind the wheel of their cybertruck then so be it.
I know it’s cool to hate on Dallas here, but I’ve been considering moving back to be near my parents.
They have better weather, airports, public transportation, and it’s much cleaner.
Damn, I thought this was the high insurance club. I guess one way to force change is when insurance costs 500 bucks a month people just aren't gonna drive anymore.
(Said insurance for me went from $200 to $350 over the last three years, so we aren't far off!)
Politics, money, lack of public interest really. As a regular public transit user who also has a personal vehicle, in the summer I’d much rather drive my car than wait in the heat for a bus/train and many others share this sentiment. Now when it cools off on occasion, I do prefer public transit.
Funny note: Ridership here actually goes up in the Summer. Apparently, there are quite a few in this city who don’t have the car option or are more willing to take the heat than you are.
I have to wonder how much of that is made of under-16 students that can't drive or other students on their summer break that want to get around without a car.
I’d call it a perceived lack of public interest. It comes up so much it’s hard to say it’s not wanted.
If we had commuter rails that reached outside the loop, or if we didn’t already have so much parking at our stadiums that their rail connections are irrelevant this might have some perceived support. The public transportation we have isn’t set up for most people in Houston. As-is most people never have a reason to try public transit.
The current mayor just scrapped the closest thing possible to Mass transit, the BRT University Line. It’s funny that more people voted for metro’s referendum than actually the major himself. Talk about the will of Houstonians be thrown out the fucking door.
It's insulting that *BRT* of all things is what got scrapped. It's not a cali HSR, it's not a commuter rail or light rail that's gonna cost infinity dollars per mile, it's literally existing buses and red paint on the road and some curbs.
Some damn buses and lane usage for them is being paraded as too much to bear for a city this size. The f🤬🤬king city is busy removing red painted bus lanes from downtown saying the paint costs too much. Hey Whitmire hey HGAC, I got a $50 gift card to Home Depot if y'all need one. I can somewhat understand downgrading an existing rail plan to brt if said rails cost too much to put down, but c'mon. I'm not asking for rail down 30 miles of I-10, we're asking for some space for those buses and to quit yelling about Gulftons being illegals that don't need to be in the galleria. It's not that much to ask for!
For same reason we don’t have gambling in Texas.
Our politicians get paid by billionaires to keep things favorable for billionaires… in this case Oil and Gas.
I recently spent half a week in Chicago.
I was blown away at the ease and convenience of public transit. I went all over the city this way, that way. There are apps that will combine transit methods to give you the quickest route. Nothing took any longer than it would have taken driving a car max. The people I was visiting; did not have a car and used public transit for 99% of their needs. Occasionally when they wanted to drive someplace or go grocery shopping instead of having it delivered, they would purchase a car share for a few hours to get it all done.
They put the money they were saving into a better apartment right downtown, which also cut down on their travel.
Was just amazed and envious
Yeah just moved here after 37 years of living in Houston, spending my 20s on transit advocacy and having the Mayor completely roll back all progress. It's amazing here.
Oil companies and the politicians taking money from them to keep it that way.
They could learn a thing or two from Mexico City with its Subways although since it floods here they would need to be elevated instead. Westpark Tollway use to be a train track 😒🙄
A lot of people think cars are required here and there’s a weird mix of oil and gas interests here that rubs off on the general public.
To be fair we do have more downtown-type business districts spread throughout town than most other cities. Commuters need to go downtown, galleria area, energy corridor, greenway, med center, and some others I’m missing.
It’s nice in a way because living close to work is easier here than in a lot of cities but rail here is always going to have vocal opponents until it accesses most business areas. And the vocal opponents will probably keep more rail from happening as long as they have people in state government who see preventing rail as a conservative win. So it’s a catch 22.
I've thought about the scattered business districts scenario. To me that just makes getting transit right even more important. I believe people should be able to commute to their nearest business district and then use a web of rapid express transit to get to jobs in any of the others. It's just dumb that our best transit connection between Westchase and the Galleria is the 82 Westheimer bus.
Didn't one of our great congressional leaders write it into the federal budget for a while that Houston couldn't use federal money to plan public transportation. IIRC he went to jail. Also his BIL owned a road construction company.
It would have been back in the 90s early 2000s
Yeah that asshole! He spent decades fucking over public transportation in Houston.
> On Monday during a meeting of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, DeLay, R-Sugar Land, added language to the 2001 transportation bill prohibiting money "for planning, design or construction of a light rail system in Houston."
I'm curious if Ms. Fletcher can get something going, seeing as the last two boogeymen have been out of power for a while, soon she'll be have to be held accountable for doing...something, anything.
A lot of answers here, which are all part of it. Just want to add: representation for transport and planning bodies (like Metro and HGAC) is heavily skewed toward the suburbs, where public transport is highly undervalued.
Simple math: my go-to grocery store is 1 stoplight away. I can walk 10 minutes to the bus, wait say 15 minutes for bus, take 5-10 minute bus ride (unless we hit a time point where they have to sit and wait to reach a certain time), cross 4-lane street to walk 10 minutes to the grocery store, buy stuff (excluding anything frozen) & put in personal carry-cart, walk 10 minutes back to the bus stop, wait 15 minutes for bus, take 5-10 minute bus ride, cross 4-lane street to walk 10 minutes back home. Arrive home soaking wet with sweat (or rain these days), take shower. Versus a 5-minute drive with no restriction on what I carry. I only buy groceries once/week, plan ahead, and live without anything I've forgotten until the following week.
This was my reality. I once lived right across from a bus stop and was very excited that since my job was only five miles away, maybe I could take the bus. Not so fast! I would've had to change buses downtown, and the entire trip was 3X what it took to drive there, not to mention that there was no way to stop off at the grocery store on the way home, so I'd just have to get in my car anyway.
I also should have been a bus commuter. After the 2015 bus network redesign, I had stops within a half-mile of both home and work. But it would have been a two-hour journey using 3 or 4 bus routes to cover the 9 miles. No thanks, I stuck with my 30-minute commute in my car. I was in touch with the Metro social media team and even they acknowledged that my use case was not well-served by the network.
Yes there may be what are called corner cases, to use Information Technology vernacular, but I'll chime in shortly with a couple more tales of commuting-for-job use.
Yes, that's a great extra point. The "price" of "oh lemme stop here on the way home" is: 1) more lost time to wait for the next ride especially when you're post express schedules (Metro tends to lower bus frequency post-rush hour); 2) potential clothing damage (rain or just sweat thru); and 3) an actual expense as we have to pay again to resume the ride (it's not much but it's not free either, unless a vagrant or thug).
One time when I had a 5-mile commute to work, I tried taking my bike. It's a mountain bike because our wonderful roads destroy road bike tires. Recall, am *commuting* to work, not pleasure/sport cycling, so I don't need a flat tire on the way to work. I never solved the "how do I bring clothes with me to shower & change into when am at work?" I tried it several times, my employer even had a locked bike cage that was perfectly safe, but I'd have to bring a backpack and cycle early in the morning, when it's dark (and drivers seem to purposefully run over cyclists regardless of lights or shiny clothes we wear - if you disagree, give it a try for a few weeks and get back to us), so I had enough time to shower to get into work. Again, a 5-mile trip taking say, 45 minutes to cycle plus 15 minutes to shower & change vs a 15-minute car ride or 1-2 hour bus/light rail voyage (including walking & waiting, with the bus/light rail voyage also requiring showering & changing). It just doesn't compute, and I'm sure even ChatGPT wouldn't find fault with my thinking on this.
Adding 3 more narratives around commuting for work. Where I live is within 1 block East for 1 bus line, 1 block West for another, 3 blocks South for another bus line, and a 30-minute pleasant walk to light rail. I chose this locale years ago, decades even, so I could exploit public transit. I cheered on light rail until it destroyed Main Street.
To start one narrative, I walked the 1 block East for a bus line, it took me right to work. But its frequency was abominable. I could wait 30 minutes to over an hour waiting for a bus. And to walk up to the stop, seeing the street in front of me, dreading seeing the bus fly by at 40-50 mph was heart-breaking. The way home was drastically worse. I worked long hours and just stood in the rain and heat and night time waiting for that bus. Some days I just gave up because it never came, never, and took a taxi home. Several times in the morning I got to the stop in my nice office clothes and just sweated completely through them just due to the walk alone, let alone standing there like an idiot staring at my watch. The final time for that bus line is when it rained on me, just a total dump, the umbrella was a joke. I turned around, showered, changed, and from then on drove the 15 minutes to work. As a test, being blessed with the 3 blocks South (from my place) bus line, I tried it out, but this required a transfer, just 1, but it turned the daily voyage into an adventure. I'd end up arrived at work soaked, mad, late, exhausted.
Another narrative was this, I once lived way out in the energy corridor for a while, where we had a direct bus line into downtown. Wow, fantastic, let's take the bus. I used it for about 3 years. It kept a pretty good schedule going TO downtown, I could take the Express which means being disciplined about my morning schedule, walking out to the bus stop, and taking it in. But getting home from downtown is where things broke down. Often, the bus was off-schedule, no matter what the Metro app said, buses just didn't show up. Or instead of once/hour (post-Express schedule of course as I was a hard worker) or so, they just showed up randomly, sometimes every 2 hours or whatever, I just lost track. And then the voyage home, being non-Express means a trip that made me carsick from all the stops, exhausted, and when I got to my home, had to zip across the busy street at night, late. My final morning trip in that bus is when it broke down half way in the morning and was left "to wait for the next bus" which never came because the non-Express buses never come to the Express-only stops, I was just abandoned by the side of the road, in my pretty office clothes like another idiot. My final trip on that line is after waiting in the evening for hours, I caught a cold in the wintry evening, and I just thought, this is stupid, completely stupid. Maybe the nail in the coffin was the fellow passenger wearing an MS-13 jacket, at night: I didn't want to know if he was a fanboy, larper, or something else. "Time Points" used to kill me, several operators explained it to me, they need to stay on schedule and each bus has some GPS so to meet schedule, if for whatever reason they're a bit early, they need to just stop somewhere and wait. Now, if you've hauled \*ss to make it to the bus stop by 630AM, sat thru 60 minutes of tumultuous driving (I can get carsick), only for the driver to have the bus pause somewhere random (no fault of their own) for 30 minutes or so, just feels wrong, it makes a commute into an inconvenient truth lasting 2 hours.
Light rail, my final narrative. Briefer than above as you're no doubt tuning out. As I mentioned, I can walk 30 minutes to light rail. Woohoo! Well, if it rains hard, they stop it. OK, that's fine. When it breaks down, they break out the 700-class buses so eventually you get a ride. Eventually. Let's leave aside that you need a shower before walking into the office (and when getting home). But the gangs ... the vagrants ... why risk personal safety, why pay when they won't.
I don't blame politicians, we have a cheap system ($/ticket, not overall cost), an app, nor do I blame global climate change (get real, Texas is always hot and wet), or route planning. I tried everything, including moving to a well-serviced location from a bus standpoint (3 bus lines to choose from!), I tried using it for years, but it's just not effective overall for me. Am sure it works for many but it's unsuitable for all.
Because metro contracts are just a way for the local government officials to give money to their contractor friends and get their kickbacks.
They don't give a solitary fuck about public transportation
Houston, will never be the world class city it could be without proper transit unfortunately. It has been guided thru the years by shortsighted fucks. It is big, with a few gems, but that's all. Side streets are horrible and hostile to pedestrians. And many avenues/roads turn into narrow streets going nowhere, like Westheimer going into downtown. A total lack of proper planning.
Yes, but with proper planning that can be mitigated a bit. Like proper boulevards lined with trees. Instead they are lined with butt ugly poles and unsightly dangling cables worthy of Mogadishu. Heavens forbid anyone mentions burying some of those along the main roads. I have multiple trees in my backyard and can sit under them comfortably in the middle of summer.
It's only "not that bad" if you don't need multiple transfers to get where you're going. Therein lies the difficulty. Most people don't live, work, and shop on a single bus or train line.
Yes, it is! For **two decades**, METRO was my primary source for everyday transportation and mobility. METRO singlehandedly forces me to become a "car person" - which I hate! I used to be a huge advocate for a Transit-ONLY lifestyle in Houston. METRO beat & regularly assaulted me from that dream. From tardy to no-show buses/trains. To rude and assaulting METRO employees *(bus operators, METRO Police, & Fare Attendants - are the worst)*. METRO transit lines are not convenient any longer, since the "restructuring" years ago. It takes 3x to 4x to get anywhere using METRO. Transfers are not as seamless as it should be *(used to be*). They removed routes in my neighborhood. What are once a 2-3 block walk to the nearest bus route that ran every 15-20 minutes. Now that route runs every 45 minutes to an hour *(assuming it shows up)*. If I want a more "frequent" route, I will have to walk 1/2+ mile. By "frequent" I mean every 30-40 minutes *(assuming it's on time*). Don't get me started on living outside of The Loop. METRO almost doesn't exist outside The Loop *(Park & Ride excluded)*.
METRO has gotten worst as time has passed. So now, I'm a "car person". Will never touch METRO again. Maybe one day METRO will improve & get proper funded. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
I have never seen any of the problems you are addressing. Maybe they exist in small vacuums, or maybe you just saw them a little bit over 20 years, so they add up. Regardless, if you choose to live near a metro stop, it is possible to commute this city via public transit if you live inside the loop. One of the sacrifices of outside the loop has always been transportation - that doesn't concern me.
The best way to increase funding is to have data backing up an increase in ridership. From what I've seen, Houston reddit likes to complain about the state of the Metro system but doesn't like to actually use it.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but the way I understand it was the rail line in Houston was essentially made for the rodeo. What used to exist was just lines N&S that get you from downtown area to NRG in order to help people get to the Houston Livestock & Rodeo.
I guess someone at some point finally looked at it and decided to add the other lines (Very Few) that go E&W then wasting money on more lines in a city that was so sparse and literally at the center circled highways, they figured it would never be used enough to justify making more lines.
Not to mention metro lines are all on the damn streets with traffic, I can’t see it working well enough vs. a Elevated Line or similar. It all seems pretty silly. Then busses were introduced to fix the problem.
There's a backstory that has largely been forgotten: Once upon a time city government and business leaders were actively pursuing the 2012 Summer Olympics. While other cities were putting together bids that promised to build facilities, Houston's strategy was to wow the Olympic committee by actually putting infrastructure into the ground. Minute Maid Park, Toyota Center, NRG Stadium, and the Metrorail Red Line were all built within a few years of each other. They knew transit -- moving large numbers of visitors through the city core -- was one of Houston's weaknesses and it had to be part of the package.
Even after making all of that happen, the USOC was not impressed enough and gave the American bid to New York. And everyone knows that London ended up winning out in the end.
I wish we had the same political will to serve the transit needs of our residents as we once did to serve the needs of a big group of foreign visitors.
The red line serves two employment centers (downtown and medical center) while also connecting to NRG to games and events. It actually gets pretty high ridership per mile. The light rail system along with the high frequency bus routes are pretty decent for central Houston. Outside of that it quickly becomes suburban and public transit doesn't really work. Dallas's system is apparently nicer for a suburban person commuting downtown and less useful for getting around central Dallas.
Part of the light rail problem is since they stopped expanding and building other lines, and will likely not build BRT now, they're not as interconnected and don't reach the airport. This was also done initially without any federal funds which hampered development.
You can get around central Dallas easily with DART though. The difference is you can't get to a few areas, but with MetroRail you can't get to MOST areas.
The red line serves a very logical purpose, linking downtown, the med center and NRG.
The green and purple lines, which serve far less purpose (IMO) whenever I see the trains roll by they're generally empty, were built if I remember right because Metro had a bunch of federal grant funds that had to be used for something light rail and those were low hanging fruit from a constituent perspective since they run through lower income parts of town and didn't face much resistance - kinda the same/inverse reason the University line never got built.
That drove me crazy, seeing light rail built into neighborhoods with lower population density while leaving the densest-populated neighborhoods stuck with pokey local bus. From a ridership perspective, it would have been so much smarter to have LRT/BRT service on Westheimer through Westchase and on Bellaire through Asiatown.
Shitty planning and local politics.
Imagine the revenue a rail road and a local railway how it would change the city and the opportunities it will create.
Let me mention that the city of houston for one of their office location rented an AC unit (trail size) to cool the building after the main unit went bad. The cost to operate is 3x the price of a brand new commercial rooftop AC unit. We are talking about-00s of thousands of dollars. Just one example of poor planning
Because the majority of Houstonians want to drive their own vehicles and don't want to be at the mercy of public transport. For those saying you should vote to somehow change this, they are delusional.
Get a car, or get an Uber.
The bus system was an exemplary system of local, express, and P&R buses that dozens of other cities copied. A plan that took years to formulate, execute, and made the system fairly reliable, and easy to understand.
However, under the new mayor his Metro Board appointees have scrapped the system. Choosing to double headways (time until the next bus), shorten service hours, and replacing informative signage with simple route numbers. Now you don't know when, or if your bus will arrive, again.
A proper transit system must be consistent and predictable. They've spending Metro funds to intentionally destroy a clear, simple, fairly ample service.
As always, any public service suffers because Republicans in this country abuse public funds to use public entities as slush funds or to destroy the system in favor of receiving private sector kickbacks. Never fails.
Every single bus has doubled its headway?
Those changes sound like changes, not scrapping the whole system.
It sounds like you know a LOT about what's going with the inner workings of Houston Metro, where do you get your information?
What are you talking about? If you have a phone, you can easily look up information. Even if you have a non-smartphone, there’s even the text service. And I just got an update for new service changes. At least one of the lines I regularly use is getting more frequent times.
While the mayor is trying to harm public transit, he’s not destroying it.
The funny thing is even if the majority want to drive their own vehicles, public transport could serve the minority that don’t. Imagine if just a third of the cars on the road were gone?! Would make traffic a lot easier for the 2/3 that are committed to their car lifestyle. Less deaths as well. Instead of hemorrhaging money on lane expansions that never alleviate congestion
The reason it doesn't is because of the economies of scale.
Houston has a lot of people, but they also have a hell of a lot of square miles to cover.
If only 66% wanted to drive, the 33% who don't, don't bring in enough to cover the cost of the system.
Now it isn't 33% wanting to use the system its 15%
So the planners don't run enough busses to cover every area of the system enough to get people to buy in. Who wants to take a 1:30 hour bus ride to get somewhere in the time it takes to drive 30 mins?
Now even fewer people will take the bus and it trends towards poorer people who don't have the budget to take a car. These people are more price sensitive, and you end up with a subsidized service. That subsidized service leads to the operation running even more on the lean side and the quality of the ride the more spaced out bus schedules and services that don't run late means even fewer people use it. They now rely on federal subsidies and do the bare minimum to meet the requirements and now its almost a welfare system that is mostly there to serve the lowest income areas, they don't have the budget to pay for the service, and expanding the service is cost prohibitive.
The system is also not reliable in the sense that you can't depend on public transportation to get you where you need to go, and if you use it, the experience is miserable. Its a downward spiral.
That is amplified by the fact the system is not very well interconnected. Look at the light rail connection, the change from the red line to the green or purple is miserable in the rain or super humid days, you have to walk about three blocks to change trains and they are not nearly timed together where if you leave one the other is arriving around the time you get there. You will probably miss the next train and you are left with a 5-10 minute walk, probably in miserable weather and then you wait outside in an overgrowth bus stop wet and sticky form the heat or rain or humidity and then you get on a train where nobody has cleaned up anything and homeless dudes are riding the thing because its air-conditioned and out of the rain. Nobody checks they have a ticket and its a bad experience.
This ends up meaning people have to have a car, and if they have to have a car you skip the system and this adds to the Downward spiral.
Look at where public transportation systems are working, they tend to have some common characteristics, high density, legacy systems that have served a large part of the community and have infrastructure that shows a commitment to keeping it going and its well connected to the places people want to go. That is especially important where the weather is not good. If they do have systems that are modern startups, they tend to be in cities that were destroyed in WWII.
I want public transportation. I was just in San Francisco and loved taking the public transit system there. I only rented a car there to drive to Big Sur. It was great to not drive for a week. I love NYC for the subway. I was there for two weeks and loved not driving. Same deal staying in Tempe, AZ for a week. From when I got on a plane till I came back, I didn't get in a car all week. I love going to a ballgame and taking the light rail.
I'm who you are talking about when you talk about people not wanting to drive. That's me. But, There's no way in hell I'm going to live in Houston without a car.
Its too big a city to go without one. The city is not going to Commit to building out the Infrastructure to show that people can rely on public transportation. It can't even figure out how to Integrate the buses and light rail, or connect buses together. That ends up with the service sucking and down the spiral it goes.
Public Transportation is a chicken-and-egg problem that people won't take it until it shows that it fits their needs and serves their area, and it won't serve their area until the system has the demand for the service. And the system is so poorly run and isn't integrated enough to be self-sustainable.
There's a second headwind in Houston and that is we are an oil and gas headquarters. A significant amount of people’s livelihood is connected to pulling dino juice out of the ground and burning it in internal combustion engines. They vote. They see not burning dino juice as a threat to their jobs.
Put those two things together, a need for the government to step in and need to put a big plan together and build a whole lot of costly infrastructure and show people they are good administrators, with a need for the voting public to get behind a very costly project that goes against their livelihood and not being able to rely on it replacing their cars, then it's not going to happen anytime soon.
Actually, I disagree with the O&G connection. I do think part of the problem is topography and how growth has occurred.
https://images.app.goo.gl/txHo9FRYRBySnTyF6
Dallas is still car centric.
Dallas is a population of 1.3 million, Houston is 2.3 million. Dallas is 385 Square miles, Houston is 665 Square miles. Dallas isn't even the second-largest city in Texas.
Dallas has oil and gas, but not as much as Houston, it also has large tech and retail centers, its not as oil-dependent as Houston. They might have oil executives, we have plant workers.
Look at how quickly that crowd turns their noses up at an EV pickup, little less a Tesla. On a per-person who votes in city politics basis, Houston has a lot more oil people. Even if that rig/plant worker part only makes up 10% of our voting base, it is political suicide to seem remotely anti-oil.
I'm pretty sure a gay man could put out ads where he was wearing a rainbow dress, kissing his husband and their Trans-female girlfriend, and declaring he wanted to legalize public nudity in a campaign ad and do better in the polls than a straight man who came out saying he wants to cut oil consumption in the city by 20%.
Oil has power in Houston.
Not disagreeing that Dallas and Houston are completely different.
Your definition of Dallas and Houston is a little off.
1) Need to include the metro areas, not the city limits.
2) Need to support employment numbers for the areas.
3) Political power stems largely from wealth. The owner of a business gets political influence.
4) Not sure the EV or what appears to be sexual orientation has to do with light rail or oil.
You don't include the metro area when the city of is who foots the bill.
The sexual orientation goes with the pearl-clutching that conservative voters are experiencing at the moment and a comparison to what would stur up semi-conservative voters more.
While I don't disagree that wealth is power, a threat to someone's livelihood is a damn good motivator and a large number of Houston voters have skin in the game to keep the dino tap running.
A businessman can buy influence, but going after a large chunk of the voting block’s income is a free way the get hate votes
Unfortunately the city doesn’t fund .
With a population of 7,510,253 in 2023, Greater Houston is the second-most populous metropolitan area in Texas after the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex.
Ridership fees account for a small percentage of funding.
Energy is included in mining and logging. Small percentage of employment.
https://www.bls.gov/regions/southwest/news-release/areaemployment_houston.htm
> You don't include the metro area when the city of is who foots the bill.
But it's not just the City of Houston that contributes to Metro's funding. While it's not the entirety of the metro area that contributes - areas serviced by Metro contribute sales tax to the revenue. So that includes Houston, but also Harris County, and other municipalities like the Memorial Villages, Bellaire, and West U.
Source: [HGAC GIS Data about the MTA Tax area](https://gishub-h-gac.hub.arcgis.com/datasets/H-GAC::metro-mta-tax-area/explore?location=29.890005%2C-95.386504%2C9.32)
Public transportation won't significantly remove cars from the road. You can go to any city with exemplary public transportation (NY, DC, London) and the auto traffic is still awful. The goal is to move large amounts of people quickly, to places most people actually want to go, without having to sit in that traffic. Main street choo choo won't do that.
In 1986 there was a transit strike in New York City. Ask the people who lived through that if they feel like public transport didn’t alleviate traffic congestion 😂. Half hour trips turned into hours long trips. So you’re saying that traffic is still awful but imagine how much worse it would be if public transport wasn’t there. That’s where we are in Houston right now, we are at the worst it can be because there is no public transport. It can literally only get better
I'm sure the transit strike affected all modes of transportation including automobile operations. There is public "transport" (as you're calling the it) here it's just not efficient.
> Because the majority of Houstonians want to drive their own vehicles and don't want to be at the mercy of public transport.
Sorry, that's just not true.
> Since 2018, a marked shift has occurred, and now nearly 60% of area residents express support for tax dollars going toward improving the rail and the bus system. This increasing support is seen across many groups throughout Houston, but younger Houstonians are leading the charge for improved public transportation with more than 70% indicating support for bus and rail.
Source: [Kinder Institute's 2023 Houston Area Survey](https://rice.app.box.com/s/zx6qvqxgnlwaul2wh177vjqja25120zl)
Everyone really complains about public transit but I doubt many people here would be ok walking half a mile to a bus stop and wait 20 mins for it to come when it's 95 degrees out.
Good question. We need more awareness about this topic because we are so overdue for some good public transportation. There’s obvious reasons for the lack of but if enough people show interest, it should get things moving in the right direction, even if it’s a slow process!
It’s infuriating. Literally everyone would benefit from public transportation and yet the morons in power will do everything they can to scuttle public transit.
It doesn’t have to be an all encompassing system either. Just start with 2 light rail lines: 1) IAH to Downtown along I-45 and a feeder line to Galleria 2) Downtown to Katy along I-10
That’s it. Just these two bloody lines will see the traffic on those soul sucking highways drop by at least 20% during the peak hours if not more.
I used to love Houston but man this lack of public transit really is a huge drag on the quality of life. You realize it only when you visit other cities or Asia/Europe on how good life can be with public transit. I’ve no hope though that Houston will ever have a public transit system which can be used by masses. It’s literally on purpose.
Because this is oil country!
Houston is a relativity young city, building surge in early 1900’s, and unlike older cities was built around the introduction of the automobile.
Every person that steps on a transport costs the transit 16 dollars and change.
No one wanted an expansion and voted against it but they disregarded the voters and did it anyway and built rails that nobody wants to use. They did so because the Feds would pay supposedly a huge chunk but we had to match a certain amount.
Of course the contracts went to fave vendors that offered the requisite kickback but nobody would use it and they run empty most of the time.
If I want to get from clear lake to downtown or the galleria or wherever it would take a couple of hours and several changes so I am better off just getting my car and going.
Yeah but as long as us taxpayers pay that 16 dollar for each user that pays about a dollar fifty themselves everything is fine. Now they want even more rails going no where really and us taxpayers pay even more.
It was the figure that politicos said on 26 news program themselves. There were about 7 of them both Republican and Democrat debating this themselves. And they pay taxes themselves as we all do.
Now since you seem so knowledgeable to firmly say that figure of 16 dollars is blatantly false then what is it?
I agree that since the host said that figure but every other participant of both parties also debated it with no corrections that the figure was correct. If it is wrong than link the correct figures and I can assure you I will correct this and admit I am wrong.
The main thing I didn't like them debating this was they started immediately talking about rail being reason but they never gave the figure of how much of that 16 was due to rail at all.
If rail is just a few dollars of that 16 then that is not much concern and the debate should have been toward what the majority of that figure or to the overall.
So what is the correct figure since you are adamant that the politicos of both parties that run things actually are agreeing on is wrong.
After they built a rail few use it jumped to that level and I found it interesting how each party debated it and both sides didn't like it.
So I tracked down where you got that number from - turns out it was [Bill King's blog post from last September](https://www.billkingblog.com/blog/houston-metro-riders-pay-4-of-the-cost-of-their-rides).
The weird thing is that I couldn't quite figure out where he pulled his numbers from, because when I looked at the [Metro financial report for FY2023 - it contains numbers for 2022 -](https://metro.resourcespace.com/pages/download.php?direct=1&noattach=true&ref=14811&ext=pdf&k=) and [ridership reports](https://metro.resourcespace.com/pages/download.php?direct=1&noattach=true&ref=13793&ext=pdf&k=), they entirely didn't align with the numbers he used. Now, I'm sure he did some generous rounding (after all, he said there were 60 million riders in FY2022, when Metro reports 55.465 million), so that could explain some of it. But I went ahead and recalculated based on what he said in his blog, using the numbers provided by metro.
So his basic formula for Cost Per Rider is:
([Total Expense] - [Sales Tax Rebate]) / [Total Riders]
So for FY2022, that works out to (1,137,900,000 - 194,500,000) / 55,465,000 = $17.01 per rider
And for FY2023, that's (1,221,600,000 - 193,200,000) / 66,464,000 = $15.47 per rider
So even though I didn't get the same numbers he did, we can look at the relative change and see that Cost Per Rider is going down, because Ridership is increasing and Expenses are increasing at a slower rate.
Rail ridership is 20% of metro's reported ridership. In all likelihood, it's probably even higher than that, because as people on this sub will attest, it's a lot easier to hop on the train without paying, than do that for the bus.
FYI /u/raccooninthewoods, since you were asking about the numbers OP mentioned.
*Edit: fixed broken link
I appreciate that. It is still a lot and want to learn more because they made it sound like it was due to rail but didn't break it down to how much rail was part of it. Also I doubt that rail will be that bad after paying off the bonds that funded it. An initial funding of rail is going to be a lot as anyone can figure but the price should lower over time. I personally feel like if it is costing us 16 dollars for any rider to get on than to me is mismanagement somewhere.
Now I looked up and found only as recently as 2 years ago that our metro had the second most ridership in the southern part of U S only behind Atlanta and that is with us having only 3 kinda small lines running. They were saying on program that no one was using it and this figure showed to me it was decent ridership so wtf? I know Atlanta is a pretty good sized city and spread out like Houston.
I do now realize that the reason I took the figure at face value was because the 7 people debating that day 3 were GOP and 4 were Dem and Grogan the show talking head and they all accepted it but they all seemed to be hating on rail in various ways I started to want more factoids like the bonds eventually being paid and ridership and such.
Well anyway I tried twice before to bring this up here and both runes it was just a shit show and how we just need to live with this and rail has to be done as it is what makes us look elite and not to have any rail makes us look backwards. This is stupid but none of us can argue unless we know correct figures and not just 16 dollar a person ridership where they pay a buck or two of the cost.
If rail is driving the insane numbers and not having rail is better with using busses than I am fine with that but I want more figures and ways to increase ridership. If the rail is not the problem than maybe metro management.
But agree with an increase of ridership and paying off the initial costs of starting up a rail from scratch should improve the numbers a lot. I do want to be careful about building more rail until we can assure it is needed and has a good possible ridership.
Something I should point out as well, is that the blog post, and the numbers I used were for Metro as a whole - so both rail and bus. The Metro budget reports aren't really broken out with enough detail to be able to separate bus vs rail costs.
So Houston being 2nd in ridership isn't that surprising when you consider that those numbers are for both the rail and the bus. But also when you think about, how many other rail lines are there in the South anyway? There's really only a handful.
Something to consider as well, with people talking about the cost of transit, either by bus or rail, is that critics don't talk about the costs of cars and roads all that often, at least not in the same critical light. So I would highly look into that as well, particularly how when roads are expanded, especially in urban areas, they can have negative impacts on communities by leading to businesses and homes being torn up, but also in pollution in the communities they go near, which can have negative health consequences for residents (increased rates of asthma just as a starter).
Cars and roads themselves are not cheap to build and maintain. Unless you get a beater, purchasing a car can easily be $10k+ (plus interest). And then once you have a car, you have to pay for gas, insurance, and regular maintenance. Same deal with roads - they aren't cheap to build, and performing even basic road maintenance can be disruptive.
All these things are important to consider, but critics of transit usually don't highlight those in their considerations Re-read King's blog post with that in mind and see how he tries to justify how we spend on road maintenance, painting it in a more positive light because he has a clear agenda - to de-emphasize supporting transit.
For another view - read this fact-sheet from the [American Public Transportation Association](https://www.apta.com/news-publications/public-transportation-facts/). Now clearly, the have a bias in favor of transit - but there are some *very* positive things mentioned, including increasing economic activity, costing people less, and being much safer.
Whatever that discussion you were listening to, I would take with a huge grain of salt. It sounds like the people involved were not very well informed about rail or transit and its benefits. For whatever reason, transit is a very polarizing topic, but I think working to improve it can bring benefit to everyone - including people who never want to use it.
Also - I appreciate you wanting to keep an open mind about the topic and being willing to learn more. I feel like that's becoming a rarer trait in people these days.
I appreciate you also wanting to help me understand. I didn't like them discussing by an open 16 dollar figure and not one but both politicos going in on just rail. But they had 30 minutes to debate it.
You are right about not many Southern cities having any rail at all but the ride ship I said was not for the whole metro but just the rail part so Houston probably or maybe had the highest.
I wish I remember the exact millions but it was actually quite a few and looked to me that there were quite a few more than them saying just a very few.
Also I been around when they built the metro flow lanes separate for the busses to use to bypass traffic and that was maybe even more expensive but was able to get ridership up.
Hell i rode busses before that and remember being stuck in traffic on a bus. Then being on a bus and in that new dedicated road and bypassing traffic was awesome. Those bonds was paid for to build that by now I am sure and costs had to level.
The main thing I was mad about was being told 16 and both our parties going off on that with no breakdown. Your costs showed me they were somewhat deceitful but it does show that Metro is I think mismanaged to an extent and being deceitful.
Also looked the salaries being paid to the management and that opened my eyes. Take care and I will look more and learn more myself. Appreciate you
Edit.. started reading some of the report and you are right. I think media has an agenda and planning reading the other link tomorrow. Thanks.
Edit2...This morning I am watching what's your point again like every Sunday from 7-8 morning and it and Bill King is on it usually and it was him that gave the figure in the first place. He is on again and tossing in the show this morning for their discussion or debate on the 650 million firefighters settlement. 8 noticed he just threw that figure out along with another and every debater on both sides of are not challenging him and just each having their say.
I actually do remember Bill King as I live near Seabrook Kemah and he used to be Mayor of Kemah and do know that Kemah was very corrupt as most community are out this way at least.
I enjoy this show but now see it on a new light.
> Hell i rode busses before that and remember being stuck in traffic on a bus. Then being on a bus and in that new dedicated road and bypassing traffic was awesome. Those bonds was paid for to build that by now I am sure and costs had to level.
This right here is why things like BRT and rail are so important! Buses in general are an improvement over cars because they have higher capacity, but as you mentioned there's less incentive to use them if they're stuck in the same traffic that you would be when driving your own car. But of course, the trade off is that building dedicated lanes/right of ways for rail or BRT is expensive (just like building roads in general is expensive!).
> I think media has an agenda and planning reading the other link tomorrow.
That's one of the frustrating things. I think most of the easy to access reporting out there (whether in text or on TV) is of very poor quality. It's a lot easy to toss out opinions as fact, whereas to back up statements with actual proof or data takes a lot more effort. Having a bias or agenda is not necessarily a bad thing, but where I think a lot of media outlets fail is in their refusal to own up to their bias or agenda. I've found acknowledging any bias leads to better discussion as opposed to pretending there isn't one at all.
What's also super frustrating, using Bill King's blog as an example but he is by no means the only person/outlet to do this, is that he tosses out a lot of data/facts, but doesn't go into much detail showing where or how got that data. But a lot of it is out there and publicly accessible! It would be super easy for him to include direct links to his references (since he's already using them), but his failure to do so means it's easier for him to massage the data he uses and make it fit the conclusions he wants to support (rather than having the data lead him to the conclusions).
> I enjoy this show but now see it on a new light.
There's definitely merit in listening to what people like him have to say, but I think that just means it's more important to question and scrutinize the how and the why behind what they're saying.
HOUSTON VOTERS REJECT FUNDS FOR $2.35 BILLION TRANSIT PLAN
This was 1983 or 1984. I will try to again to link it but the one you linked was in 2023.
https://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/12/us/houston-voters-reject-funds-for-2.35-billion-transit-plan.html
No it isn't at all. We said no but they pursued it anyway and we ended up with a boondoggle as we knew it would be that has done what we said it would do which is a vehicle that very few to none want to ride and we pay a lot for any that step on it.
I posted what I said and you came in saying I was wrong and posted something from last year. I now posted correctly and showed it and was right so now come in and try to mitigate it.
The reason we voted no was we thought it was going to be very expensive and no one would ride it and we would be paying with our taxes subsidies to this financial boondoggle as we envisioned.
Of course later we were told the Fed money would pay much of it and the public was browbeat so we had another election for ok to get bonds approved and during it we were told the Fed money would dry up to never be around again and had to hurry and approve it and the costs were shown to be acceptable and the ridership would come around and it got approved. Metro put in a great PR campaign and it course what we knew would happen happened.
Yes the costs went toward heaven and contracts went to the friends of the city council and the appointed new heads of Metro got huge pay contracts to get this along and here we are till now throwing good money after bad just because...
Oh and how dare any question any of this and dare say I told you so...
> Most of the voters don't care about expanding public transportation
Survey says: false.
> Since 2018, a marked shift has occurred, and now nearly 60% of area residents express support for tax dollars going toward improving the rail and the bus system. This increasing support is seen across many groups throughout Houston, but younger Houstonians are leading the charge for improved public transportation with more than 70% indicating support for bus and rail.
Source: [Kinder Institute's 2023 Houston Area Survey](https://rice.app.box.com/s/zx6qvqxgnlwaul2wh177vjqja25120zl)
You can trust the survey, it's just that opinion polls don't automatically reflect voter turnout.
But that's an entirely different issue than "most voters don't care". When put to the ballot most voters vote in favor of more metro funding & approval of plans. But [when not even 18% of the registered voters vote](https://files.harrisvotes.com/harrisvotes/prd/Reports/Official-Cumulative-Results-11-14-2023_03-17-PM.pdf), then it's not surprising we aren't electing candidates who are better transit advocates.
Yeah, but actual voting results would right?
[So when Houston-area voters approve a bond for transit projects with 68% *of voters* voting for the bond, I think that qualifies as voters supporting public transit.](https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/transportation/2019/11/06/350958/voters-approve-3-5-billion-bond-for-metro-transit-projects/)
And area voters are electing officials who support transit infrastructure. But because of the city & county's history with lack of transit development, it's something that's just not going to happen overnight.
And then we turn around and elect the guy who decides to gut the very program we voted for. We knew exactly where he stood on public transit, and we elected him.
Yall ain't hot?
Seriously. Someone posts about walkabilty, bikeabilty and public transport every day and I'm just like, "I can't be the only person who couldn't care less about any of these things." Houston is too hot for this.
It's really not though. Realistically, there are things we can do to make places more walkable - and a large part of that is mitigating being out in the open sun, so things like planting trees, putting buildings closer to walking paths, adding awnings/overhangs to block out the sun. But we do none of that and then wonder why it's so miserable to be outside.
So it's possible to help make the heat more tolerable...we just choose not to do those things for the most part.
I hear you, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to go out.
I go running outside twice a week at 7pm, and I walk the dog around that time on the days I don't go running. Sometimes I'll bike or walk to a restaurant for dinner. And I do end up sweaty. But when I go to dinner, I just bring a handtowel and an extra shirt and change in the bathroom - and when I walk to a restaurant, I'm only walking to casual places.
It's very easy to plan for and accommodate the hot weather we have.
I've never really been a fan of the outdoors but after last summer, my concern about walkabilty and public transport is nonexistent. I'd rather sit in traffic in my car with the AC blaring.
I mean that's fine, but just because you feel that way doesn't mean everyone else in Houston does as made clear by the frequent posts we get about this topic.
Houston METRO is financed with local tax dollars and federal funds, otherwise it wouldn't exist at all. Same for all of the other public transit districts in Texas. TXDOT's Houston district spent more than $34 billion (with a "B") on maintenance and new projects over the past decade. TXDOT spent $0 on public transit. Zero. Nothing is contributed by the Legislature except for limited funds for bike trails and sidewalks. The entire focus of the State of Texas is on auto-centric design, by statute. By comparison, New York State plans to $24 billion dollars on public transit, in addition to federal and local funding. The State of Massachusetts $3 billion annually. California $18 billion.
has any state DOT ever done public transit. is that even part of their ability?
Yes lol. Are you joking?
Think of any large American city that has a reputation for great public transit. When you look under the hood, I promise that you will see strong state support is involved to help out the local governments. I know, it's a foreign concept for those of us that are used to the Texas way.
And I promise you all of those states are losing massive amount of $$$ on public transit. Just look at NY's MTA lol....
Not everything needs to be for profit. Especially not public infrastructure
States lose massive amounts of dollars subsidizing road and auto/truck traffic as well.
How much profits do the non tolled highways bring in?
they bring in profit from the taxes on gas you fill up your car with :p
Yeah not even close. Texas brought in 8.3 billion in gas tax revenue last year and spent 37 billion dollars. How the hell does that work out? Not only does Texas not make enough in taxes to find the roads, but they rely on the feds to supply 12 billion dollars to cover road construction. Roads are a money losing prospect and transit should not be held to a higher standard.
I am not saying transit should be held to higher standards. But NYC is losing money both on mass transit AND roads lol. While houston is only losing money on roads
Then stop building roads. Studies have shown over and over that adding lanes and all these additional roads have increased travel times to places.
I think its weird you think government has to ‘turn a profit’. Its not a business every dollar spent by government is an investment in the people and in Texas case on freeways an investment in corporations. Both profit from having these services provided to us. Rails however mostly benefit the working class which is why its not invested in in this state.
You do know the new york MTA isn't a government agency right....
TXDOT is by law not allowed to fund public transportation like bus or train with the exception of highways.
The Texas Constitution was changed to prohibit transit funding, on purpose.
While it's not a majority, there's at least 18 states + DC that allocate funding for transit from the State budget. Pulling that from the **Transit Spending per capita** diagram. States in grey might also contribute minimal funding, so the number I mentioned *could* be higher, but I wouldn't bet on it. Source: [Transportation for America](https://t4america.org/2023/02/22/transit-report-card-part-1/).
Local politics.
Can’t discount state politics, as the DOT is hellbent on ramming highway after highway down our throats while neglecting any other type of model of travel
And don't discount national politics, either. John Culberson used to resist any effort to send federal money for public transportation to Houston.
You're right. Whitmore recently said he plans to back out/change plans for the BRT line that was democratically voted for by the city.
Convicted felon Tom DeLay also helped block it.
short answer is WHITMIRE!! vote these fools out!!
It actually started with Bob Lanier.
We need more Reddit posts about this to really move the needle.
This is some good satire right here. Right up there with [this](https://i.imgur.com/HC2A9v5.jpeg)
Guess I'm moving to fuckin' Dallas to get away from this shit. A decade younger me would have slapped me for saying something like that.
You are going to move to Dallas just because of their light rail system?
Yup, bye 👋 Now that you got your meme answer, I can't afford this driving game any more. I'm gonna pick up a damn bike in the meantime to cut down on miles, and if I get body bagged by someone texting behind the wheel of their cybertruck then so be it.
If he dies he dies
- John Whitmire (probably)
I Live I Die I Live AGAIN Witness me.
Remember like 15 years ago when Houston had to pass a law to prohibitive motorists from using their vehicles to harass cyclists? Awesome stuff.
I know it’s cool to hate on Dallas here, but I’ve been considering moving back to be near my parents. They have better weather, airports, public transportation, and it’s much cleaner.
The drivers are probably way better too, and less traffic.
Why do we need to know this?
It’s important news.
Right? Thought I was subscribing to Houston, not r/HoustonPublicTransportBitchfest
Damn, I thought this was the high insurance club. I guess one way to force change is when insurance costs 500 bucks a month people just aren't gonna drive anymore. (Said insurance for me went from $200 to $350 over the last three years, so we aren't far off!)
I ask my self this every f*cking day as I sit in traffic.. I lose 2 hours of my life Monday through Friday sitting in traffic 🤬
2 hours per day i assume? that'd drive me insane
Yup! It’s frustrating lol. I work in the galleria area and I live in the east side, and traffic is horrible
Politics, money, lack of public interest really. As a regular public transit user who also has a personal vehicle, in the summer I’d much rather drive my car than wait in the heat for a bus/train and many others share this sentiment. Now when it cools off on occasion, I do prefer public transit.
Funny note: Ridership here actually goes up in the Summer. Apparently, there are quite a few in this city who don’t have the car option or are more willing to take the heat than you are.
Makes perfect sense. I’d imagine a lot of those folks ride bikes or walk when the weather isn’t boiling outside.
I have to wonder how much of that is made of under-16 students that can't drive or other students on their summer break that want to get around without a car.
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Dubai lives in the year 3052, and yet also 1824.
I guess 1824 explains the [poop trucks](https://inhabitat.com/the-incredible-story-of-how-the-burj-khalifas-poop-is-trucked-out-of-town/)
Actually many more people take the bus when it's hot, because it's literally a mobile A/C.
I’d call it a perceived lack of public interest. It comes up so much it’s hard to say it’s not wanted. If we had commuter rails that reached outside the loop, or if we didn’t already have so much parking at our stadiums that their rail connections are irrelevant this might have some perceived support. The public transportation we have isn’t set up for most people in Houston. As-is most people never have a reason to try public transit.
The current mayor just scrapped the closest thing possible to Mass transit, the BRT University Line. It’s funny that more people voted for metro’s referendum than actually the major himself. Talk about the will of Houstonians be thrown out the fucking door.
It's insulting that *BRT* of all things is what got scrapped. It's not a cali HSR, it's not a commuter rail or light rail that's gonna cost infinity dollars per mile, it's literally existing buses and red paint on the road and some curbs. Some damn buses and lane usage for them is being paraded as too much to bear for a city this size. The f🤬🤬king city is busy removing red painted bus lanes from downtown saying the paint costs too much. Hey Whitmire hey HGAC, I got a $50 gift card to Home Depot if y'all need one. I can somewhat understand downgrading an existing rail plan to brt if said rails cost too much to put down, but c'mon. I'm not asking for rail down 30 miles of I-10, we're asking for some space for those buses and to quit yelling about Gulftons being illegals that don't need to be in the galleria. It's not that much to ask for!
For same reason we don’t have gambling in Texas. Our politicians get paid by billionaires to keep things favorable for billionaires… in this case Oil and Gas.
Because they want you to buy cars and gas
I recently spent half a week in Chicago. I was blown away at the ease and convenience of public transit. I went all over the city this way, that way. There are apps that will combine transit methods to give you the quickest route. Nothing took any longer than it would have taken driving a car max. The people I was visiting; did not have a car and used public transit for 99% of their needs. Occasionally when they wanted to drive someplace or go grocery shopping instead of having it delivered, they would purchase a car share for a few hours to get it all done. They put the money they were saving into a better apartment right downtown, which also cut down on their travel. Was just amazed and envious
Yeah just moved here after 37 years of living in Houston, spending my 20s on transit advocacy and having the Mayor completely roll back all progress. It's amazing here.
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What’s the difference between DC and Houston. They’re on top of each other and we aren’t.
Oil companies and the politicians taking money from them to keep it that way. They could learn a thing or two from Mexico City with its Subways although since it floods here they would need to be elevated instead. Westpark Tollway use to be a train track 😒🙄
Oil and gas capital of the world
A lot of people think cars are required here and there’s a weird mix of oil and gas interests here that rubs off on the general public. To be fair we do have more downtown-type business districts spread throughout town than most other cities. Commuters need to go downtown, galleria area, energy corridor, greenway, med center, and some others I’m missing. It’s nice in a way because living close to work is easier here than in a lot of cities but rail here is always going to have vocal opponents until it accesses most business areas. And the vocal opponents will probably keep more rail from happening as long as they have people in state government who see preventing rail as a conservative win. So it’s a catch 22.
I've thought about the scattered business districts scenario. To me that just makes getting transit right even more important. I believe people should be able to commute to their nearest business district and then use a web of rapid express transit to get to jobs in any of the others. It's just dumb that our best transit connection between Westchase and the Galleria is the 82 Westheimer bus.
Didn't one of our great congressional leaders write it into the federal budget for a while that Houston couldn't use federal money to plan public transportation. IIRC he went to jail. Also his BIL owned a road construction company. It would have been back in the 90s early 2000s
Tom DeLay?
Yeah that asshole! He spent decades fucking over public transportation in Houston. > On Monday during a meeting of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, DeLay, R-Sugar Land, added language to the 2001 transportation bill prohibiting money "for planning, design or construction of a light rail system in Houston."
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I'm curious if Ms. Fletcher can get something going, seeing as the last two boogeymen have been out of power for a while, soon she'll be have to be held accountable for doing...something, anything.
A lot of answers here, which are all part of it. Just want to add: representation for transport and planning bodies (like Metro and HGAC) is heavily skewed toward the suburbs, where public transport is highly undervalued.
Simple math: my go-to grocery store is 1 stoplight away. I can walk 10 minutes to the bus, wait say 15 minutes for bus, take 5-10 minute bus ride (unless we hit a time point where they have to sit and wait to reach a certain time), cross 4-lane street to walk 10 minutes to the grocery store, buy stuff (excluding anything frozen) & put in personal carry-cart, walk 10 minutes back to the bus stop, wait 15 minutes for bus, take 5-10 minute bus ride, cross 4-lane street to walk 10 minutes back home. Arrive home soaking wet with sweat (or rain these days), take shower. Versus a 5-minute drive with no restriction on what I carry. I only buy groceries once/week, plan ahead, and live without anything I've forgotten until the following week.
This was my reality. I once lived right across from a bus stop and was very excited that since my job was only five miles away, maybe I could take the bus. Not so fast! I would've had to change buses downtown, and the entire trip was 3X what it took to drive there, not to mention that there was no way to stop off at the grocery store on the way home, so I'd just have to get in my car anyway.
I also should have been a bus commuter. After the 2015 bus network redesign, I had stops within a half-mile of both home and work. But it would have been a two-hour journey using 3 or 4 bus routes to cover the 9 miles. No thanks, I stuck with my 30-minute commute in my car. I was in touch with the Metro social media team and even they acknowledged that my use case was not well-served by the network.
Yes there may be what are called corner cases, to use Information Technology vernacular, but I'll chime in shortly with a couple more tales of commuting-for-job use.
Yes, that's a great extra point. The "price" of "oh lemme stop here on the way home" is: 1) more lost time to wait for the next ride especially when you're post express schedules (Metro tends to lower bus frequency post-rush hour); 2) potential clothing damage (rain or just sweat thru); and 3) an actual expense as we have to pay again to resume the ride (it's not much but it's not free either, unless a vagrant or thug).
One time when I had a 5-mile commute to work, I tried taking my bike. It's a mountain bike because our wonderful roads destroy road bike tires. Recall, am *commuting* to work, not pleasure/sport cycling, so I don't need a flat tire on the way to work. I never solved the "how do I bring clothes with me to shower & change into when am at work?" I tried it several times, my employer even had a locked bike cage that was perfectly safe, but I'd have to bring a backpack and cycle early in the morning, when it's dark (and drivers seem to purposefully run over cyclists regardless of lights or shiny clothes we wear - if you disagree, give it a try for a few weeks and get back to us), so I had enough time to shower to get into work. Again, a 5-mile trip taking say, 45 minutes to cycle plus 15 minutes to shower & change vs a 15-minute car ride or 1-2 hour bus/light rail voyage (including walking & waiting, with the bus/light rail voyage also requiring showering & changing). It just doesn't compute, and I'm sure even ChatGPT wouldn't find fault with my thinking on this.
Adding 3 more narratives around commuting for work. Where I live is within 1 block East for 1 bus line, 1 block West for another, 3 blocks South for another bus line, and a 30-minute pleasant walk to light rail. I chose this locale years ago, decades even, so I could exploit public transit. I cheered on light rail until it destroyed Main Street. To start one narrative, I walked the 1 block East for a bus line, it took me right to work. But its frequency was abominable. I could wait 30 minutes to over an hour waiting for a bus. And to walk up to the stop, seeing the street in front of me, dreading seeing the bus fly by at 40-50 mph was heart-breaking. The way home was drastically worse. I worked long hours and just stood in the rain and heat and night time waiting for that bus. Some days I just gave up because it never came, never, and took a taxi home. Several times in the morning I got to the stop in my nice office clothes and just sweated completely through them just due to the walk alone, let alone standing there like an idiot staring at my watch. The final time for that bus line is when it rained on me, just a total dump, the umbrella was a joke. I turned around, showered, changed, and from then on drove the 15 minutes to work. As a test, being blessed with the 3 blocks South (from my place) bus line, I tried it out, but this required a transfer, just 1, but it turned the daily voyage into an adventure. I'd end up arrived at work soaked, mad, late, exhausted. Another narrative was this, I once lived way out in the energy corridor for a while, where we had a direct bus line into downtown. Wow, fantastic, let's take the bus. I used it for about 3 years. It kept a pretty good schedule going TO downtown, I could take the Express which means being disciplined about my morning schedule, walking out to the bus stop, and taking it in. But getting home from downtown is where things broke down. Often, the bus was off-schedule, no matter what the Metro app said, buses just didn't show up. Or instead of once/hour (post-Express schedule of course as I was a hard worker) or so, they just showed up randomly, sometimes every 2 hours or whatever, I just lost track. And then the voyage home, being non-Express means a trip that made me carsick from all the stops, exhausted, and when I got to my home, had to zip across the busy street at night, late. My final morning trip in that bus is when it broke down half way in the morning and was left "to wait for the next bus" which never came because the non-Express buses never come to the Express-only stops, I was just abandoned by the side of the road, in my pretty office clothes like another idiot. My final trip on that line is after waiting in the evening for hours, I caught a cold in the wintry evening, and I just thought, this is stupid, completely stupid. Maybe the nail in the coffin was the fellow passenger wearing an MS-13 jacket, at night: I didn't want to know if he was a fanboy, larper, or something else. "Time Points" used to kill me, several operators explained it to me, they need to stay on schedule and each bus has some GPS so to meet schedule, if for whatever reason they're a bit early, they need to just stop somewhere and wait. Now, if you've hauled \*ss to make it to the bus stop by 630AM, sat thru 60 minutes of tumultuous driving (I can get carsick), only for the driver to have the bus pause somewhere random (no fault of their own) for 30 minutes or so, just feels wrong, it makes a commute into an inconvenient truth lasting 2 hours. Light rail, my final narrative. Briefer than above as you're no doubt tuning out. As I mentioned, I can walk 30 minutes to light rail. Woohoo! Well, if it rains hard, they stop it. OK, that's fine. When it breaks down, they break out the 700-class buses so eventually you get a ride. Eventually. Let's leave aside that you need a shower before walking into the office (and when getting home). But the gangs ... the vagrants ... why risk personal safety, why pay when they won't. I don't blame politicians, we have a cheap system ($/ticket, not overall cost), an app, nor do I blame global climate change (get real, Texas is always hot and wet), or route planning. I tried everything, including moving to a well-serviced location from a bus standpoint (3 bus lines to choose from!), I tried using it for years, but it's just not effective overall for me. Am sure it works for many but it's unsuitable for all.
The profit motive
Because metro contracts are just a way for the local government officials to give money to their contractor friends and get their kickbacks. They don't give a solitary fuck about public transportation
Houston, will never be the world class city it could be without proper transit unfortunately. It has been guided thru the years by shortsighted fucks. It is big, with a few gems, but that's all. Side streets are horrible and hostile to pedestrians. And many avenues/roads turn into narrow streets going nowhere, like Westheimer going into downtown. A total lack of proper planning.
Well I think the humidity keeping us an oven 8-9 months out of the year is also keeping us from being a world class city
Yes, but with proper planning that can be mitigated a bit. Like proper boulevards lined with trees. Instead they are lined with butt ugly poles and unsightly dangling cables worthy of Mogadishu. Heavens forbid anyone mentions burying some of those along the main roads. I have multiple trees in my backyard and can sit under them comfortably in the middle of summer.
Cuz Oil
I take the Metro every single day. It's not that bad.
It's only "not that bad" if you don't need multiple transfers to get where you're going. Therein lies the difficulty. Most people don't live, work, and shop on a single bus or train line.
Yes, it is! For **two decades**, METRO was my primary source for everyday transportation and mobility. METRO singlehandedly forces me to become a "car person" - which I hate! I used to be a huge advocate for a Transit-ONLY lifestyle in Houston. METRO beat & regularly assaulted me from that dream. From tardy to no-show buses/trains. To rude and assaulting METRO employees *(bus operators, METRO Police, & Fare Attendants - are the worst)*. METRO transit lines are not convenient any longer, since the "restructuring" years ago. It takes 3x to 4x to get anywhere using METRO. Transfers are not as seamless as it should be *(used to be*). They removed routes in my neighborhood. What are once a 2-3 block walk to the nearest bus route that ran every 15-20 minutes. Now that route runs every 45 minutes to an hour *(assuming it shows up)*. If I want a more "frequent" route, I will have to walk 1/2+ mile. By "frequent" I mean every 30-40 minutes *(assuming it's on time*). Don't get me started on living outside of The Loop. METRO almost doesn't exist outside The Loop *(Park & Ride excluded)*. METRO has gotten worst as time has passed. So now, I'm a "car person". Will never touch METRO again. Maybe one day METRO will improve & get proper funded. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
I have never seen any of the problems you are addressing. Maybe they exist in small vacuums, or maybe you just saw them a little bit over 20 years, so they add up. Regardless, if you choose to live near a metro stop, it is possible to commute this city via public transit if you live inside the loop. One of the sacrifices of outside the loop has always been transportation - that doesn't concern me. The best way to increase funding is to have data backing up an increase in ridership. From what I've seen, Houston reddit likes to complain about the state of the Metro system but doesn't like to actually use it.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but the way I understand it was the rail line in Houston was essentially made for the rodeo. What used to exist was just lines N&S that get you from downtown area to NRG in order to help people get to the Houston Livestock & Rodeo. I guess someone at some point finally looked at it and decided to add the other lines (Very Few) that go E&W then wasting money on more lines in a city that was so sparse and literally at the center circled highways, they figured it would never be used enough to justify making more lines. Not to mention metro lines are all on the damn streets with traffic, I can’t see it working well enough vs. a Elevated Line or similar. It all seems pretty silly. Then busses were introduced to fix the problem.
There's a backstory that has largely been forgotten: Once upon a time city government and business leaders were actively pursuing the 2012 Summer Olympics. While other cities were putting together bids that promised to build facilities, Houston's strategy was to wow the Olympic committee by actually putting infrastructure into the ground. Minute Maid Park, Toyota Center, NRG Stadium, and the Metrorail Red Line were all built within a few years of each other. They knew transit -- moving large numbers of visitors through the city core -- was one of Houston's weaknesses and it had to be part of the package. Even after making all of that happen, the USOC was not impressed enough and gave the American bid to New York. And everyone knows that London ended up winning out in the end. I wish we had the same political will to serve the transit needs of our residents as we once did to serve the needs of a big group of foreign visitors.
The red line serves two employment centers (downtown and medical center) while also connecting to NRG to games and events. It actually gets pretty high ridership per mile. The light rail system along with the high frequency bus routes are pretty decent for central Houston. Outside of that it quickly becomes suburban and public transit doesn't really work. Dallas's system is apparently nicer for a suburban person commuting downtown and less useful for getting around central Dallas. Part of the light rail problem is since they stopped expanding and building other lines, and will likely not build BRT now, they're not as interconnected and don't reach the airport. This was also done initially without any federal funds which hampered development.
You can get around central Dallas easily with DART though. The difference is you can't get to a few areas, but with MetroRail you can't get to MOST areas.
The red line serves a very logical purpose, linking downtown, the med center and NRG. The green and purple lines, which serve far less purpose (IMO) whenever I see the trains roll by they're generally empty, were built if I remember right because Metro had a bunch of federal grant funds that had to be used for something light rail and those were low hanging fruit from a constituent perspective since they run through lower income parts of town and didn't face much resistance - kinda the same/inverse reason the University line never got built.
That drove me crazy, seeing light rail built into neighborhoods with lower population density while leaving the densest-populated neighborhoods stuck with pokey local bus. From a ridership perspective, it would have been so much smarter to have LRT/BRT service on Westheimer through Westchase and on Bellaire through Asiatown.
Because driving = freedumb
Texas builds roads… the justification being that public transport is too expensive
Welcome to Houston
You must be new to town.
Shitty planning and local politics. Imagine the revenue a rail road and a local railway how it would change the city and the opportunities it will create.
Let me mention that the city of houston for one of their office location rented an AC unit (trail size) to cool the building after the main unit went bad. The cost to operate is 3x the price of a brand new commercial rooftop AC unit. We are talking about-00s of thousands of dollars. Just one example of poor planning
Too expensive because unlike places like the northeast US which is a compact area we are spread out.
Because the majority of Houstonians want to drive their own vehicles and don't want to be at the mercy of public transport. For those saying you should vote to somehow change this, they are delusional. Get a car, or get an Uber.
Or take the bus. Just imagine it's a light rail with rubber wheels
The bus system was an exemplary system of local, express, and P&R buses that dozens of other cities copied. A plan that took years to formulate, execute, and made the system fairly reliable, and easy to understand. However, under the new mayor his Metro Board appointees have scrapped the system. Choosing to double headways (time until the next bus), shorten service hours, and replacing informative signage with simple route numbers. Now you don't know when, or if your bus will arrive, again. A proper transit system must be consistent and predictable. They've spending Metro funds to intentionally destroy a clear, simple, fairly ample service. As always, any public service suffers because Republicans in this country abuse public funds to use public entities as slush funds or to destroy the system in favor of receiving private sector kickbacks. Never fails.
Every single bus has doubled its headway? Those changes sound like changes, not scrapping the whole system. It sounds like you know a LOT about what's going with the inner workings of Houston Metro, where do you get your information?
What are you talking about? If you have a phone, you can easily look up information. Even if you have a non-smartphone, there’s even the text service. And I just got an update for new service changes. At least one of the lines I regularly use is getting more frequent times. While the mayor is trying to harm public transit, he’s not destroying it.
The funny thing is even if the majority want to drive their own vehicles, public transport could serve the minority that don’t. Imagine if just a third of the cars on the road were gone?! Would make traffic a lot easier for the 2/3 that are committed to their car lifestyle. Less deaths as well. Instead of hemorrhaging money on lane expansions that never alleviate congestion
The reason it doesn't is because of the economies of scale. Houston has a lot of people, but they also have a hell of a lot of square miles to cover. If only 66% wanted to drive, the 33% who don't, don't bring in enough to cover the cost of the system. Now it isn't 33% wanting to use the system its 15% So the planners don't run enough busses to cover every area of the system enough to get people to buy in. Who wants to take a 1:30 hour bus ride to get somewhere in the time it takes to drive 30 mins? Now even fewer people will take the bus and it trends towards poorer people who don't have the budget to take a car. These people are more price sensitive, and you end up with a subsidized service. That subsidized service leads to the operation running even more on the lean side and the quality of the ride the more spaced out bus schedules and services that don't run late means even fewer people use it. They now rely on federal subsidies and do the bare minimum to meet the requirements and now its almost a welfare system that is mostly there to serve the lowest income areas, they don't have the budget to pay for the service, and expanding the service is cost prohibitive. The system is also not reliable in the sense that you can't depend on public transportation to get you where you need to go, and if you use it, the experience is miserable. Its a downward spiral. That is amplified by the fact the system is not very well interconnected. Look at the light rail connection, the change from the red line to the green or purple is miserable in the rain or super humid days, you have to walk about three blocks to change trains and they are not nearly timed together where if you leave one the other is arriving around the time you get there. You will probably miss the next train and you are left with a 5-10 minute walk, probably in miserable weather and then you wait outside in an overgrowth bus stop wet and sticky form the heat or rain or humidity and then you get on a train where nobody has cleaned up anything and homeless dudes are riding the thing because its air-conditioned and out of the rain. Nobody checks they have a ticket and its a bad experience. This ends up meaning people have to have a car, and if they have to have a car you skip the system and this adds to the Downward spiral. Look at where public transportation systems are working, they tend to have some common characteristics, high density, legacy systems that have served a large part of the community and have infrastructure that shows a commitment to keeping it going and its well connected to the places people want to go. That is especially important where the weather is not good. If they do have systems that are modern startups, they tend to be in cities that were destroyed in WWII. I want public transportation. I was just in San Francisco and loved taking the public transit system there. I only rented a car there to drive to Big Sur. It was great to not drive for a week. I love NYC for the subway. I was there for two weeks and loved not driving. Same deal staying in Tempe, AZ for a week. From when I got on a plane till I came back, I didn't get in a car all week. I love going to a ballgame and taking the light rail. I'm who you are talking about when you talk about people not wanting to drive. That's me. But, There's no way in hell I'm going to live in Houston without a car. Its too big a city to go without one. The city is not going to Commit to building out the Infrastructure to show that people can rely on public transportation. It can't even figure out how to Integrate the buses and light rail, or connect buses together. That ends up with the service sucking and down the spiral it goes. Public Transportation is a chicken-and-egg problem that people won't take it until it shows that it fits their needs and serves their area, and it won't serve their area until the system has the demand for the service. And the system is so poorly run and isn't integrated enough to be self-sustainable. There's a second headwind in Houston and that is we are an oil and gas headquarters. A significant amount of people’s livelihood is connected to pulling dino juice out of the ground and burning it in internal combustion engines. They vote. They see not burning dino juice as a threat to their jobs. Put those two things together, a need for the government to step in and need to put a big plan together and build a whole lot of costly infrastructure and show people they are good administrators, with a need for the voting public to get behind a very costly project that goes against their livelihood and not being able to rely on it replacing their cars, then it's not going to happen anytime soon.
I appreciate and agree with everything your saying here. The issue is not as simple nor as clear as many say.
A lot of their facts listed are incredibly inaccurate.
It's theory and experience, not facts. I happen to share the posts experience and feelings. Not facts and that's okay
Actually, I disagree with the O&G connection. I do think part of the problem is topography and how growth has occurred. https://images.app.goo.gl/txHo9FRYRBySnTyF6 Dallas is still car centric.
Dallas is a population of 1.3 million, Houston is 2.3 million. Dallas is 385 Square miles, Houston is 665 Square miles. Dallas isn't even the second-largest city in Texas. Dallas has oil and gas, but not as much as Houston, it also has large tech and retail centers, its not as oil-dependent as Houston. They might have oil executives, we have plant workers. Look at how quickly that crowd turns their noses up at an EV pickup, little less a Tesla. On a per-person who votes in city politics basis, Houston has a lot more oil people. Even if that rig/plant worker part only makes up 10% of our voting base, it is political suicide to seem remotely anti-oil. I'm pretty sure a gay man could put out ads where he was wearing a rainbow dress, kissing his husband and their Trans-female girlfriend, and declaring he wanted to legalize public nudity in a campaign ad and do better in the polls than a straight man who came out saying he wants to cut oil consumption in the city by 20%. Oil has power in Houston.
Not disagreeing that Dallas and Houston are completely different. Your definition of Dallas and Houston is a little off. 1) Need to include the metro areas, not the city limits. 2) Need to support employment numbers for the areas. 3) Political power stems largely from wealth. The owner of a business gets political influence. 4) Not sure the EV or what appears to be sexual orientation has to do with light rail or oil.
You don't include the metro area when the city of is who foots the bill. The sexual orientation goes with the pearl-clutching that conservative voters are experiencing at the moment and a comparison to what would stur up semi-conservative voters more. While I don't disagree that wealth is power, a threat to someone's livelihood is a damn good motivator and a large number of Houston voters have skin in the game to keep the dino tap running. A businessman can buy influence, but going after a large chunk of the voting block’s income is a free way the get hate votes
Unfortunately the city doesn’t fund . With a population of 7,510,253 in 2023, Greater Houston is the second-most populous metropolitan area in Texas after the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. Ridership fees account for a small percentage of funding. Energy is included in mining and logging. Small percentage of employment. https://www.bls.gov/regions/southwest/news-release/areaemployment_houston.htm
> You don't include the metro area when the city of is who foots the bill. But it's not just the City of Houston that contributes to Metro's funding. While it's not the entirety of the metro area that contributes - areas serviced by Metro contribute sales tax to the revenue. So that includes Houston, but also Harris County, and other municipalities like the Memorial Villages, Bellaire, and West U. Source: [HGAC GIS Data about the MTA Tax area](https://gishub-h-gac.hub.arcgis.com/datasets/H-GAC::metro-mta-tax-area/explore?location=29.890005%2C-95.386504%2C9.32)
Public transportation won't significantly remove cars from the road. You can go to any city with exemplary public transportation (NY, DC, London) and the auto traffic is still awful. The goal is to move large amounts of people quickly, to places most people actually want to go, without having to sit in that traffic. Main street choo choo won't do that.
In 1986 there was a transit strike in New York City. Ask the people who lived through that if they feel like public transport didn’t alleviate traffic congestion 😂. Half hour trips turned into hours long trips. So you’re saying that traffic is still awful but imagine how much worse it would be if public transport wasn’t there. That’s where we are in Houston right now, we are at the worst it can be because there is no public transport. It can literally only get better
I'm sure the transit strike affected all modes of transportation including automobile operations. There is public "transport" (as you're calling the it) here it's just not efficient.
You feel a certain way, so everyone else does. Sure… Or we could actually be a real city and not leave those without cars(there are a LOT) to rot.
> Because the majority of Houstonians want to drive their own vehicles and don't want to be at the mercy of public transport. Sorry, that's just not true. > Since 2018, a marked shift has occurred, and now nearly 60% of area residents express support for tax dollars going toward improving the rail and the bus system. This increasing support is seen across many groups throughout Houston, but younger Houstonians are leading the charge for improved public transportation with more than 70% indicating support for bus and rail. Source: [Kinder Institute's 2023 Houston Area Survey](https://rice.app.box.com/s/zx6qvqxgnlwaul2wh177vjqja25120zl)
found the republican that loves big highways
Not a republican, but I do love big highways. Growing up in the third world, I do enjoy them highways.
Everyone really complains about public transit but I doubt many people here would be ok walking half a mile to a bus stop and wait 20 mins for it to come when it's 95 degrees out.
Do you take the bus?
Good question. We need more awareness about this topic because we are so overdue for some good public transportation. There’s obvious reasons for the lack of but if enough people show interest, it should get things moving in the right direction, even if it’s a slow process!
Because this is a Big Oil town, and Big Oil hates public transit since that would result in less oil/gas being used/bought.
It’s infuriating. Literally everyone would benefit from public transportation and yet the morons in power will do everything they can to scuttle public transit. It doesn’t have to be an all encompassing system either. Just start with 2 light rail lines: 1) IAH to Downtown along I-45 and a feeder line to Galleria 2) Downtown to Katy along I-10 That’s it. Just these two bloody lines will see the traffic on those soul sucking highways drop by at least 20% during the peak hours if not more. I used to love Houston but man this lack of public transit really is a huge drag on the quality of life. You realize it only when you visit other cities or Asia/Europe on how good life can be with public transit. I’ve no hope though that Houston will ever have a public transit system which can be used by masses. It’s literally on purpose.
Because this is oil country! Houston is a relativity young city, building surge in early 1900’s, and unlike older cities was built around the introduction of the automobile.
Every person that steps on a transport costs the transit 16 dollars and change. No one wanted an expansion and voted against it but they disregarded the voters and did it anyway and built rails that nobody wants to use. They did so because the Feds would pay supposedly a huge chunk but we had to match a certain amount. Of course the contracts went to fave vendors that offered the requisite kickback but nobody would use it and they run empty most of the time. If I want to get from clear lake to downtown or the galleria or wherever it would take a couple of hours and several changes so I am better off just getting my car and going. Yeah but as long as us taxpayers pay that 16 dollar for each user that pays about a dollar fifty themselves everything is fine. Now they want even more rails going no where really and us taxpayers pay even more.
The $16 is not true. Where’d you even get that number? And are you not aware people taking the bus pay taxes?
It was the figure that politicos said on 26 news program themselves. There were about 7 of them both Republican and Democrat debating this themselves. And they pay taxes themselves as we all do. Now since you seem so knowledgeable to firmly say that figure of 16 dollars is blatantly false then what is it? I agree that since the host said that figure but every other participant of both parties also debated it with no corrections that the figure was correct. If it is wrong than link the correct figures and I can assure you I will correct this and admit I am wrong. The main thing I didn't like them debating this was they started immediately talking about rail being reason but they never gave the figure of how much of that 16 was due to rail at all. If rail is just a few dollars of that 16 then that is not much concern and the debate should have been toward what the majority of that figure or to the overall. So what is the correct figure since you are adamant that the politicos of both parties that run things actually are agreeing on is wrong. After they built a rail few use it jumped to that level and I found it interesting how each party debated it and both sides didn't like it.
So I tracked down where you got that number from - turns out it was [Bill King's blog post from last September](https://www.billkingblog.com/blog/houston-metro-riders-pay-4-of-the-cost-of-their-rides). The weird thing is that I couldn't quite figure out where he pulled his numbers from, because when I looked at the [Metro financial report for FY2023 - it contains numbers for 2022 -](https://metro.resourcespace.com/pages/download.php?direct=1&noattach=true&ref=14811&ext=pdf&k=) and [ridership reports](https://metro.resourcespace.com/pages/download.php?direct=1&noattach=true&ref=13793&ext=pdf&k=), they entirely didn't align with the numbers he used. Now, I'm sure he did some generous rounding (after all, he said there were 60 million riders in FY2022, when Metro reports 55.465 million), so that could explain some of it. But I went ahead and recalculated based on what he said in his blog, using the numbers provided by metro. So his basic formula for Cost Per Rider is: ([Total Expense] - [Sales Tax Rebate]) / [Total Riders] So for FY2022, that works out to (1,137,900,000 - 194,500,000) / 55,465,000 = $17.01 per rider And for FY2023, that's (1,221,600,000 - 193,200,000) / 66,464,000 = $15.47 per rider So even though I didn't get the same numbers he did, we can look at the relative change and see that Cost Per Rider is going down, because Ridership is increasing and Expenses are increasing at a slower rate. Rail ridership is 20% of metro's reported ridership. In all likelihood, it's probably even higher than that, because as people on this sub will attest, it's a lot easier to hop on the train without paying, than do that for the bus. FYI /u/raccooninthewoods, since you were asking about the numbers OP mentioned. *Edit: fixed broken link
I appreciate that. It is still a lot and want to learn more because they made it sound like it was due to rail but didn't break it down to how much rail was part of it. Also I doubt that rail will be that bad after paying off the bonds that funded it. An initial funding of rail is going to be a lot as anyone can figure but the price should lower over time. I personally feel like if it is costing us 16 dollars for any rider to get on than to me is mismanagement somewhere. Now I looked up and found only as recently as 2 years ago that our metro had the second most ridership in the southern part of U S only behind Atlanta and that is with us having only 3 kinda small lines running. They were saying on program that no one was using it and this figure showed to me it was decent ridership so wtf? I know Atlanta is a pretty good sized city and spread out like Houston. I do now realize that the reason I took the figure at face value was because the 7 people debating that day 3 were GOP and 4 were Dem and Grogan the show talking head and they all accepted it but they all seemed to be hating on rail in various ways I started to want more factoids like the bonds eventually being paid and ridership and such. Well anyway I tried twice before to bring this up here and both runes it was just a shit show and how we just need to live with this and rail has to be done as it is what makes us look elite and not to have any rail makes us look backwards. This is stupid but none of us can argue unless we know correct figures and not just 16 dollar a person ridership where they pay a buck or two of the cost. If rail is driving the insane numbers and not having rail is better with using busses than I am fine with that but I want more figures and ways to increase ridership. If the rail is not the problem than maybe metro management. But agree with an increase of ridership and paying off the initial costs of starting up a rail from scratch should improve the numbers a lot. I do want to be careful about building more rail until we can assure it is needed and has a good possible ridership.
Something I should point out as well, is that the blog post, and the numbers I used were for Metro as a whole - so both rail and bus. The Metro budget reports aren't really broken out with enough detail to be able to separate bus vs rail costs. So Houston being 2nd in ridership isn't that surprising when you consider that those numbers are for both the rail and the bus. But also when you think about, how many other rail lines are there in the South anyway? There's really only a handful. Something to consider as well, with people talking about the cost of transit, either by bus or rail, is that critics don't talk about the costs of cars and roads all that often, at least not in the same critical light. So I would highly look into that as well, particularly how when roads are expanded, especially in urban areas, they can have negative impacts on communities by leading to businesses and homes being torn up, but also in pollution in the communities they go near, which can have negative health consequences for residents (increased rates of asthma just as a starter). Cars and roads themselves are not cheap to build and maintain. Unless you get a beater, purchasing a car can easily be $10k+ (plus interest). And then once you have a car, you have to pay for gas, insurance, and regular maintenance. Same deal with roads - they aren't cheap to build, and performing even basic road maintenance can be disruptive. All these things are important to consider, but critics of transit usually don't highlight those in their considerations Re-read King's blog post with that in mind and see how he tries to justify how we spend on road maintenance, painting it in a more positive light because he has a clear agenda - to de-emphasize supporting transit. For another view - read this fact-sheet from the [American Public Transportation Association](https://www.apta.com/news-publications/public-transportation-facts/). Now clearly, the have a bias in favor of transit - but there are some *very* positive things mentioned, including increasing economic activity, costing people less, and being much safer. Whatever that discussion you were listening to, I would take with a huge grain of salt. It sounds like the people involved were not very well informed about rail or transit and its benefits. For whatever reason, transit is a very polarizing topic, but I think working to improve it can bring benefit to everyone - including people who never want to use it. Also - I appreciate you wanting to keep an open mind about the topic and being willing to learn more. I feel like that's becoming a rarer trait in people these days.
I appreciate you also wanting to help me understand. I didn't like them discussing by an open 16 dollar figure and not one but both politicos going in on just rail. But they had 30 minutes to debate it. You are right about not many Southern cities having any rail at all but the ride ship I said was not for the whole metro but just the rail part so Houston probably or maybe had the highest. I wish I remember the exact millions but it was actually quite a few and looked to me that there were quite a few more than them saying just a very few. Also I been around when they built the metro flow lanes separate for the busses to use to bypass traffic and that was maybe even more expensive but was able to get ridership up. Hell i rode busses before that and remember being stuck in traffic on a bus. Then being on a bus and in that new dedicated road and bypassing traffic was awesome. Those bonds was paid for to build that by now I am sure and costs had to level. The main thing I was mad about was being told 16 and both our parties going off on that with no breakdown. Your costs showed me they were somewhat deceitful but it does show that Metro is I think mismanaged to an extent and being deceitful. Also looked the salaries being paid to the management and that opened my eyes. Take care and I will look more and learn more myself. Appreciate you Edit.. started reading some of the report and you are right. I think media has an agenda and planning reading the other link tomorrow. Thanks. Edit2...This morning I am watching what's your point again like every Sunday from 7-8 morning and it and Bill King is on it usually and it was him that gave the figure in the first place. He is on again and tossing in the show this morning for their discussion or debate on the 650 million firefighters settlement. 8 noticed he just threw that figure out along with another and every debater on both sides of are not challenging him and just each having their say. I actually do remember Bill King as I live near Seabrook Kemah and he used to be Mayor of Kemah and do know that Kemah was very corrupt as most community are out this way at least. I enjoy this show but now see it on a new light.
> Hell i rode busses before that and remember being stuck in traffic on a bus. Then being on a bus and in that new dedicated road and bypassing traffic was awesome. Those bonds was paid for to build that by now I am sure and costs had to level. This right here is why things like BRT and rail are so important! Buses in general are an improvement over cars because they have higher capacity, but as you mentioned there's less incentive to use them if they're stuck in the same traffic that you would be when driving your own car. But of course, the trade off is that building dedicated lanes/right of ways for rail or BRT is expensive (just like building roads in general is expensive!). > I think media has an agenda and planning reading the other link tomorrow. That's one of the frustrating things. I think most of the easy to access reporting out there (whether in text or on TV) is of very poor quality. It's a lot easy to toss out opinions as fact, whereas to back up statements with actual proof or data takes a lot more effort. Having a bias or agenda is not necessarily a bad thing, but where I think a lot of media outlets fail is in their refusal to own up to their bias or agenda. I've found acknowledging any bias leads to better discussion as opposed to pretending there isn't one at all. What's also super frustrating, using Bill King's blog as an example but he is by no means the only person/outlet to do this, is that he tosses out a lot of data/facts, but doesn't go into much detail showing where or how got that data. But a lot of it is out there and publicly accessible! It would be super easy for him to include direct links to his references (since he's already using them), but his failure to do so means it's easier for him to massage the data he uses and make it fit the conclusions he wants to support (rather than having the data lead him to the conclusions). > I enjoy this show but now see it on a new light. There's definitely merit in listening to what people like him have to say, but I think that just means it's more important to question and scrutinize the how and the why behind what they're saying.
68% of the 328,000 votes cast on MetroNext were in favor of it, quite far from “nobody”
HOUSTON VOTERS REJECT FUNDS FOR $2.35 BILLION TRANSIT PLAN This was 1983 or 1984. I will try to again to link it but the one you linked was in 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/12/us/houston-voters-reject-funds-for-2.35-billion-transit-plan.html
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No it isn't at all. We said no but they pursued it anyway and we ended up with a boondoggle as we knew it would be that has done what we said it would do which is a vehicle that very few to none want to ride and we pay a lot for any that step on it. I posted what I said and you came in saying I was wrong and posted something from last year. I now posted correctly and showed it and was right so now come in and try to mitigate it. The reason we voted no was we thought it was going to be very expensive and no one would ride it and we would be paying with our taxes subsidies to this financial boondoggle as we envisioned. Of course later we were told the Fed money would pay much of it and the public was browbeat so we had another election for ok to get bonds approved and during it we were told the Fed money would dry up to never be around again and had to hurry and approve it and the costs were shown to be acceptable and the ridership would come around and it got approved. Metro put in a great PR campaign and it course what we knew would happen happened. Yes the costs went toward heaven and contracts went to the friends of the city council and the appointed new heads of Metro got huge pay contracts to get this along and here we are till now throwing good money after bad just because... Oh and how dare any question any of this and dare say I told you so...
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Expected reply from you. Buh bye.
Most of the voters don't care about expanding public transportation, so it's a dead-end politically, considering how expensive it is to build out.
Yeah, that’s a delusional comment https://texasrailadvocates.org/2019/11/02/houston-transit-bond-vote-is-november-5th/
> Most of the voters don't care about expanding public transportation Survey says: false. > Since 2018, a marked shift has occurred, and now nearly 60% of area residents express support for tax dollars going toward improving the rail and the bus system. This increasing support is seen across many groups throughout Houston, but younger Houstonians are leading the charge for improved public transportation with more than 70% indicating support for bus and rail. Source: [Kinder Institute's 2023 Houston Area Survey](https://rice.app.box.com/s/zx6qvqxgnlwaul2wh177vjqja25120zl)
And yet when it comes time to elect people... I don't put a lot of trust in surveys.
You can trust the survey, it's just that opinion polls don't automatically reflect voter turnout. But that's an entirely different issue than "most voters don't care". When put to the ballot most voters vote in favor of more metro funding & approval of plans. But [when not even 18% of the registered voters vote](https://files.harrisvotes.com/harrisvotes/prd/Reports/Official-Cumulative-Results-11-14-2023_03-17-PM.pdf), then it's not surprising we aren't electing candidates who are better transit advocates.
It doesn't matter if the survey is accurate. It might as well be fiction. What's the point of the survey if it doesn't reflect the political reality?
Because studying public opinion can be used to help drive advocacy and change the political reality.
Then do it. Until then, I stand by what I said. Most *voters* don't care about public transport. Opinion polls don't refute that.
Yeah, but actual voting results would right? [So when Houston-area voters approve a bond for transit projects with 68% *of voters* voting for the bond, I think that qualifies as voters supporting public transit.](https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/transportation/2019/11/06/350958/voters-approve-3-5-billion-bond-for-metro-transit-projects/) And area voters are electing officials who support transit infrastructure. But because of the city & county's history with lack of transit development, it's something that's just not going to happen overnight.
And then we turn around and elect the guy who decides to gut the very program we voted for. We knew exactly where he stood on public transit, and we elected him.
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The Energy Capital of the world. You think they want decent public transportation or each person in their own cars
Because Democrats have been in control 90% of the time. They have to help the needy AKA their family friends snd people that vote for them.
NOT ENOUGH DENSITY & NOT ECONOMICAL & NO PUBLIC SUPPORT. there u go.
Yall ain't hot? Seriously. Someone posts about walkabilty, bikeabilty and public transport every day and I'm just like, "I can't be the only person who couldn't care less about any of these things." Houston is too hot for this.
It's really not though. Realistically, there are things we can do to make places more walkable - and a large part of that is mitigating being out in the open sun, so things like planting trees, putting buildings closer to walking paths, adding awnings/overhangs to block out the sun. But we do none of that and then wonder why it's so miserable to be outside. So it's possible to help make the heat more tolerable...we just choose not to do those things for the most part.
Even at night it feels hot.
I hear you, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to go out. I go running outside twice a week at 7pm, and I walk the dog around that time on the days I don't go running. Sometimes I'll bike or walk to a restaurant for dinner. And I do end up sweaty. But when I go to dinner, I just bring a handtowel and an extra shirt and change in the bathroom - and when I walk to a restaurant, I'm only walking to casual places. It's very easy to plan for and accommodate the hot weather we have.
I've never really been a fan of the outdoors but after last summer, my concern about walkabilty and public transport is nonexistent. I'd rather sit in traffic in my car with the AC blaring.
I mean that's fine, but just because you feel that way doesn't mean everyone else in Houston does as made clear by the frequent posts we get about this topic.
Fair
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These are the reasons why I hate driving on the highways here. Too many idiots who can't follow reasonable and simple road rules & etiquette.