Al Jazeera America: Houston's Ambitious Bus Revamp

[urbanactivist]

In Houston, the the wheels on the bus go (almost) all through the town

By Ashley Cleek
Al Jazeera America

HOUSTON — On Saturday night hundreds of transit workers criss-crossed Houston ripping off plastic bags that had covered new bus signs at 10,450 stops.

Houston has done something that few cities undertake. On Sunday morning, millions awoke to a completely reinvented bus system.

At the downtown transit center, touch screen bus maps oriented riders to the new route. In the early morning, several passengers lined up at kiosks to find out how to get around on the redesigned system. A Metro staff member noticed a map of the old system still hanging in a glass case, unhooked it and rolled it up. All morning excited volunteers, staff and board members walked around giving directions and calling in small tweaks to the new bus system that has been two years in the making.

Houston has ballooned into the fourth-largest city in the U.S. (and the most ethnically diverse city in the country), with a bus system mapped in the 1970s. The population has almost doubled, but the bus map had stayed roughly the same. Like many U.S. cities, Houston no longer has one traditional city center but is made up of several densely populated urban hubs, and an increasing number of people live and work where the bus lines did not reach. Instead of changing the system piece by piece, Houston decided to reimagine the entire network from scratch. It's an unprecedented change, and cities across the country are watching Houston to see what happens.

Metro had been losing riders for more than a decade, explained Christof Spieler, a Metro board member who championed the new system. Since 1999, the number of bus riders has reportedly decreased by 20 percent. He had taken the bus for years and knew “it didn't get people where they needed to go.”

So, when Spieler joined the board in 2010, he encouraged Metro's leadership to make a bold admission.

“We said, ‘Our system is broken This is a bad system; we want to fix it.’ That's almost the first step to solving something, is actually recognizing that you have a problem.”

The board hired Jarrett Walker, a public transit consultant and author of “Human Transit” a popular book and blog about transit around the world and tasked him with arranging a new transit network from scratch.

Houston's old bus system, like many across the U.S., assumed that many of Metro's more than 220,000 average daily riders (PDF) were traveling to downtown Houston. But in the more than three decades the bus had been operating, new satellite suburbs and commercial centers had mushrooms to the south and west of downtown and grown into new urban centers.

“The Houston conversation, like many of transit projects, began with a conversation I call the ridership-coverage tradeoff,” Walker said. “Fundamentally, if you redesign the transit network for max ridership, it would always shrink in terms of the area that it covers, so that it could run higher frequency.”

With no additional funding, Houston had to choose where to run frequent service and where to cut bus lines.

Houston's new system is a grid, north and south and east to west, and many routes connect for the first time neighborhoods that have long had poor or no bus service. According to Metro, 61 percent of the routes will run faster after the redesign. More than one-fourth of the 78 routes will run every 15 minutes, seven days a week, so that someone could go to a stop without having to look at a schedule and trust that a bus would come soon. The goal, Tom Jasien, Deputy CEO of Metro said, is to increase ridership by 20 percent in two years, when the board will evaluate whether the new system has worked.

L. Wayne Ashley, who writes the Texas Leftist blog, praised Metro for frequent service between neighborhoods, like Montrose and the Heights, that have a growing population and previously had no bus line linking them. On his blog, Ashley recounted that now his trip home from church on Sunday was cut from 45 minutes to 10.

But he wondered if the new system will attract new riders at the expense of old riders. “You are putting service in a lot of parts of town that are optional — you hope they use it but they may not,” Ashley said. “But you are taking service from areas where bus is not optional.”

[esquire]

This is really quite an impressively ambitious plan by Houston. Any further word on how it's working out?

In most southern US cities I've visited, I've definitely gotten the impression that they are just going through the motions when it comes to bus transit. Sexy rail transit projects get public attention and political capital, but buses are mostly forgotten and perceived as transportation for the indigent and working poor.

It's good to see the bus network get this kind of a push. Kudos to Houston.

[electricron]

Originally Posted by esquire

This is really quite an impressively ambitious plan by Houston. Any further word on how it's working out?

They changed the service less than two weeks ago, it is a little early to judge the results of the changes. As with any change, some like it and some don't. Most existing riders are confused, they all are learning new bus routes and their new numbers. New riders are lost because the old riders are too. It'll be months before everyone who uses the bus service learns all the new routes.