During the pandemic, it’s easy to miss how Houston is changing. Post Oak Boulevard is once again lit up for the holidays, but the star is Metro’s Silver Line bus rapid transit (BRT) in Uptown. What is it like to use the Silver Line and does it represent the future? When I served on the Metro board from 2010-2018 and had a role in oversight of that line’s development but now I wanted to experience it as a rider.
The MetroRapid Silver Line bus rapid transit opened quietly in August. Now we have reliable transit next to the Galleria. Yes, Uptown has had transit for decades, but it was always mixed in with cars. Now we have a route that runs in its own dedicated lane. It’s among the least delay-prone ways to get somewhere.
The Silver Line offers a great transit experience. Right now on Post Oak Road, you can take a crosswalk to a platform in the middle of the street. Here, you buy a ticket or scan your Q card and wait under a canopy. When the bus arrives, you walk right from the platform onto the bus. There is space for wheelchair and bikes. You settle in with your fellow passengers — masked, as is required these days — and glide down dedicated lanes controlled with special traffic signals. Along the way or at the end of the line, you can exit and transfer to a local bus or continue using another mode of transit.
With the creation of the Silver Line, Post Oak Road, one of the city’s widest streets, has become a much more pleasant place to be. The stainless steel arches are still there, but everything below is different. The sidewalks have trees and pedestrian-scaled lights. The medians provide safe refuges for pedestrians crossing the street. The overall quality of landscaping and finishes is among the best in Houston. The specifications are forward-thinking — even the buses have doors on both sides, which makes it easier to build stations in a variety of configurations. Every platform uses level boarding, and this level matches the light rail lines, so in the not-too-distance future, BRT vehicles may pull up to the same station platforms as Red, Green or Purple Line trains, making for seamless transfers. Metro’s vision of BRT isn’t a compromise — it’s better than local bus service in almost every way.
Transit can make streets friendlier to pedestrians, but Post Oak Road’s reconstruction, funded by the Uptown Management District’s tax increment reinvestment zone dollars, was lavish. It included large budgets and required property acquisition on both sides of the street to maintain the same number of automobile lanes. This strategy wouldn’t be as successful where there isn’t the space or the money to do so.
The key to BRT is connections not a big budget. The Silver Line connects to 17 local bus routes. At its north end, the new Northwest Transit Center connects 13 local bus routes and park-and-rides on U.S. 290 and Interstate 10. The reconstruction has created one of Houston’s best transit centers. This project was one of the first trials of Metro’s new urban design program, and the design attention shows. The same can’t be said at the Silver Line’s south end, where the new Westpark/Lower Uptown Transit Center connects to park-and-ride buses on U.S. 59. It’s a new stacked arrangement for Houston, but it feels spartan. It’s obvious that the budget was spent on Post Oak Road.
Ongoing realization of MetroNext, the transit agency’s voter-approved plan, will bring more of these hubs, some improvements of existing transit centers and some new. If designed well, they can be pleasant places to wait for the next bus. But they can also be more: hubs for surrounding development, connections to greenways and walkable neighborhoods. But will they be places, or will they just be infrastructure?
The system is far from complete. There’s a glaring gap, 5 miles wide, between the Silver Line and the Red Line currently served by buses on Washington Avenue, Westheimer Street and Richmond Avenue that run frequently but lack the speed, reliability, and comfort of BRT.
That’s where the MetroNext Plan comes in. It will make these connections and others to downtown, Hobby, Greenspoint and IAH. These connections are the key to our future transit system. Together they’ll create a series of high-capacity spines that will connect the major activity centers to neighborhoods, local bus service and an upgraded version of the park and ride network.
Even in the midst of COVID, we can plan ahead. Transit, with its ability to move lots of people in a small space, is critical to Houston’s future. Getting these spines right — as rail or BRT — will be the key to creating an effective transit system. Good transit goes to the right places, connects to other transit and provides frequent fast and reliable service.
The future isn’t about the buses; the future is about where they get us.
Spieler is a vice president and director of planning at Huitt-Zollars, a senior lecturer at Rice University and the author of “ Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit” (Island Press, 2018). As a member of the Metro board from 2010 to 2018, he was involved in making the decision to build the Uptown line and he participated in early discussions of MetroNext. This opinion originally appeared on Cite, a publication of the Rice Design Alliance, the public programs and outreach arm of Rice Architecture.
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December 11, 2020 at 04:00PM
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Opinion: Houston’s silver spine — connections not budget make new bus line a model for future - Houston Chronicle
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