Gone But Not Forgotten: Houston’s World-Class Experiment in Public Transit

Houston by all means has traits of a world-class city. Our cuisine is on Michelin’s radar, we are one of the most diverse cities in the United States, and the region is still growing. But we’re still behind other world-class cities on transit. Our public transportation system lacks the fleet to service a region with over two million people and a landmass roughly three times the size of Chicago. 

Despite the remarkable changes in 2015 to our bus system, Houston’s overwhelming freeways and wide stroads encourage, if not mandate, people to get around by car. This auto-dependent system is financially unsustainable for the city and deadly for the brave Houstonians who traverse their city by anything but a car. 

Before we get much further, full disclosure: I was not born in Houston. I’m actually from McAllen, Texas, and spent a few years in San Antonio before moving to the Houston area — I lived in a suburb before moving within city limits. Despite being a foreigner, Houston took me in and I feel like an adopted Houstonian, which is a shared experience for so many other adopted Houstonians, too. That's why I’m writing about this place that I fight for every day.

As much as I love the Bayou City, though, we're dramatically behind our world-class peers, and now there’s research to prove it. Transportation for America released their “World-Class American Transit” report showing the level of investment American cities need to catch up to even the most basic global communities. World-class cities like London, Barcelona, Hong-Kong, Montreal, and Rio de Janeiro average about 133 transit vehicles per 100,000 residents. The average in the United States is a middling 27. Houston is an unfortunate exemplar of this trend with an average of 16 vehicles per 100,000 residents.

To get to “world-class American transit,” American cities need to spend big on buses and trains. Not as much as we are projected to spend on highways, but it’s still a lot. A world-class Houston, for instance, would need 5,012 vehicles comprising 4,733 buses and 278 train cars. That’s roughly a 435% increase in our fleet size (current as of 2023 per Transportation for America). 

While this may read like another browbeating of Americans for not investing in public transportation, it’s not — thanks to METRO’s incredible experiment for the World Cup. 

For one month during the World Cup, the City of Houston (a host city in the incredible Canada-U.S.-Mexico contest) improved its public transit. Frequency and service for Houston’s public transit pre-World Cup depended on routes for the most part, with most of our transit running less frequently in the evening (roughly past 8:00 p.m.). The bus system, for example, has high-frequency (15-minute interval), medium-frequency (15–30-minute interval), or low-frequency (30–60-minute interval) routes. Our light rail Red Line (which includes the stadium that hosted the World Cup games) ran six-minute intervals but only until early evening, and the other Green and Purple Lines normally ran 18-minute intervals.  

With the World Cup upgrades, we saw an incredible experiment. Approximately 10 bus routes serving downtown and other popular areas received frequency and service upgrades, including late-night bus service. The park-and-ride system connecting Houston’s suburbs to its urban core ran every 30 minutes, seven days a week, until midnight. And our light rail lines saw frequency upgrades (with the Red Line running every six minutes and the Green and Purple Lines running every 12 minutes), added capacity with more train cars, and late-night service. 

This summer gave Houstonians a glimpse into a Strong Towns vision for public transit. There’s plenty of research on the benefits of world-class transit, like housing affordability, infrastructure cost savings, and more tax dollars from connected communities. While this research may entice advocates to demand bigger and better transportation, Strong Towns rejects this “build it and they will come” approach; that thinking gave us massive highways and killer stroads. Instead, transit is a wealth accelerator that connects productive communities to one another and scales to the level of productivity. We can’t afford high-speed rail in Houston, so let’s just make our buses run faster and get people from great neighborhoods like Montrose and East Downtown to one another. 

I’ll be the first to admit that I normally don’t ride public transportation in Houston. I drive to most of my events, not because I choose to, but because Houston’s highways and stroads give me no other option. When the World Cup came to Houston, however, I got to experience world-class Houston transit and loved it. I’ve been to Japan, Chicago, and other areas with high-frequency and reliable transit and I always wanted that for Houston. In one month, I took the bus more often, used the light rail to go see friends, and even joined in on an all-night transit crawl, which was only possible because of the World Cup upgrades. 

Houston connected existing, productive communities to one another using a system that's already in place rather than a top-down grand scheme. We took our 2015 reimagined network and boosted frequency and service hours. Ferrying international tourists and residents didn’t require another reimagining of the system; we just upgraded frequency and extended service hours. While we created two new routes just for the World Cup, the majority of improvements just added barbecued meat to a good set of bones. 

And the best part? We kind of just…did it. The city planned these service upgrades, for sure, but they didn’t drag this out like most transportation projects. Which is why Houston’s experimental approach deserves praise: it’s another example of Strong Towns principles in action. Cities often spend years planning transit improvements by debating projections, calculating costs, determining routes, etc., and there’s still a chance the entire project fails. Rather than deliberate, Houston simply tested out better transit.

Now that the World Cup tournament is over, Houston’s public transportation system goes back to normal. But should it? If Houstonians enjoyed getting a taste of world-class transit, then the city should start a conversation on how to keep these changes for the long term. If there were complaints, then study them and learn for the next time Houston wants to improve its public transportation. That’s the best part of the Houstonian experiment: we have the flexibility to go back to the drawing board if there’s problems and iterate to the next level of intensity if the experiment worked.

Houston lived up to its world-class potential this summer. In my humble opinion, the experiment was a success. Now let’s get to work on the next level of investment in our transportation system. That starts with keeping the World Cup service upgrades.