I can’t believe we have to deal with this shit.
Just not so fast anymore
Newly obtained emails show that Houston’s decision to remove signal priority for downtown MetroRail trains may have been fueled by politics, and that city officials made the change despite internal concerns about reliability and the lack of safety considerations.
In a Sept. 18 exchange, Metro’s Chief Signals Engineer Fred Mills told a colleague that the change “was a political decision, not a technical decision.” Another Metro official, Director of Safety Mohammed Boukhriss, replied that he wished the agency had conducted “at least a basic evaluation” before the change took effect on Sept. 20.
“To the best of my knowledge, the impacts to service and safety were not a consideration,” Mills replied.
The emails, obtained by the Houston Chronicle through a public records request, also show that city staff and consultants had been developing the plan for months alongside Metro and outside the public eye. A December 2024 presentation shared by a Houston Public Works engineer with Metro outlined a “Downtown and Midtown Traffic Signals Retiming Project,” led by the city and consultant HDR, that aimed to improve traffic flow for vehicles through 394 intersections.
Internal documents and emails also show that the Red Line wasn’t originally part of the city’s retiming plan. A December 2024 feedback memo from Metro to Houston Public Works lists the Red Line as “not affected by coordination in Downtown/Midtown,” while the Green and Purple lines were. The Red Line’s inclusion appears to have come later in 2025, although the exact date is unclear.
Removing signal priority has frustrated riders who say the change increased their commute times and made one of the city’s few reliable transit options less dependable. Riders began noticing slower trains in September, leading to confusion about who was responsible, while public officials offered little explanation.
In a statement to the Chronicle, Metro said the agency “does not make decisions based on politics.
[…]
Weeks before the signal changes took effect, city consultants were already rewriting downtown stoplight patterns to make trains wait longer at intersections, the emails show.
In a July 9 email, a traffic engineer working for the city told Metro staff that new 60-second signal plans were being tested and that preemption — the system that automatically turns lights green for trains — would be turned off. The engineer said the old settings would be saved “as a backup in case the city plans to reactivate the preemption in future.”
However, Mills warned that removing preemption would be far more complicated than the city expected and could disrupt how trains operate downtown.
“The Main Street timing files are built specifically around preemption,” Mills wrote. “I expect significant rework … will be needed to make operations work without preemption for northbound and southbound trains.”
Internal testing data obtained by the Chronicle shows the city’s signal changes have slowed trains more than their early projections suggested.
At the time, consultants said the impact on riders would be minimal — about a minute longer between UH Downtown and Wheeler Station. But two months later, updated testing showed travel times had jumped from roughly 13 minutes to more than 21 minutes once the new signals were in place.
Those predictions were made just days before the change went into effect on Sept. 20, when riders began noticing the Red Line train stopping at multiple red lights downtown.
See here for the background. Between this and the rainbow crosswalk debacle, it sure has been a banner month for Metro. It’s the lack of any communication about this that really galls me. It’s one part cowardice and one part contempt for the people who ride Metro to get where they need to go. I will remind you, if you are a car-only person, everyone who is taking transit into downtown or the Medical Center or wherever else is someone who is not competing with you for a parking space. This Mayor, for his own stupid reasons, does not like these people and is working to make their lives worse. As if we didn’t already have enough of that coming from Austin and DC.
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This entry was posted in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles and tagged downtown, Elizabeth Brock, Houston, I-45, John Whitmire, light rail, Main Street line, Metro, traffic, TxDOT. Bookmark the permalink.
From DC through Austin to Harris County and Houston, we’re getting what we voted for (especially those who chose not to vote). If we’ve now figured out we don’t like what we’re getting, we should VOTE for something else.
“In a statement to the Chronicle, Metro said the agency “does not make decisions based on politics.“”
Perhaps this is technically true. They make decisions based on orders from politicians based on politics.