Thank prime. But what took them so long?
Just not so fast anymore
Metro officials restored signal priority Wednesday to the Red Line light rail in downtown Houston following weeks of pushback from riders who complained about the sluggish pace of the route.
“These adjustments are part of our broader effort to improve mobility for everyone who shares the roads,” said Metro Board Chair Elizabeth Gonzalez Brock in a statement released Wednesday. “Our transportation network is designed for multi-modal use, and finding the right balance takes careful testing, coordination, and ongoing adjustment.”
Metro and the city initiated adjustments to the traffic signals at intersections along Main Street in September. Metro officials told residents the goal was to improve traffic coordination and flow of all transit options in Houston — vehicles, buses and pedestrians, not just light rail.
When signal preemption was removed on the Red Line, riders said that travel times doubled as the train kept stopping at red lights. Some complained to Metro board members at a public meeting, saying the problem disrupted a popular light rail route used by thousands of commuters.
Transit advocates presented a petition with over 650 signatures to the board members, demanding that Metro officials fully restore signal preemption on the Red Line.
Metro officials said they had been collaborating with the city’s traffic engineers and the Public Works Department on the changes. In October, officials said they had reduced the number of extra stops.
See here and here for the background. If Metro and/or the city had ever bothered to explain what exactly the goal was here and how long we’d have to put up with their screwing around, that would have at least made this all somewhat understandable. But it was all done in secret – we still have no idea what they had in mind, and they still haven’t even bothered to say what they believe they accomplished in all this – and so we’re all left with inchoate rage and too many questions. I’m glad enough people yelled at Metro to force them to knock it off. It’s just, again, what were we even doing here. You can see a copy of Metro’s press release here, not that it will tell you anything useful.
UPDATE: The Chron editorial board is spitting fire. A few choice excerpts:
If only Mayor John Whitmire, his Public Works team and the Metro leadership he appointed had listened to experts on their own staff before deliberately breaking the backbone of our transit system, we could have avoided this entire mess.
[…]
We don’t fully understand how a mayor who says his first priority is public safety wouldn’t bother to consult his own safety expert.
Bus and train lovers often pick on the Texas Department of Transportation for their billion-dollar highway boondogles that never solve our traffic nightmares. But at least TxDOT tells the public what it is doing, often years in advance. At least we know about lane closures before they ruin our commutes. At least TxDOT provides justifications to the public without journalists having to file public information requests.
Whitmire, on the other hand, keeps taxpayers in the dark about what he’s doing with our tax dollars.
[…]
The mayor and Metro never gave a clear reason for the signal changes in the first place beyond wanting to “improve mobility for all users,” and now we don’t know why they backed down. Presumably, commute times for drivers didn’t improve much, if at all, and clearly not enough to outweigh the pushback.
[…]
Fortunately, Metro staff saved the old settings and the traffic signal mistake was easily reversed. The same can’t be said of cancelation or alteration of million-dollar projects along Westheimer, Montrose, Telephone and other roads that were designed with community input to accommodate people driving, rolling and walking. All too often, the mayor acts like Houston’s infrastructure is his personal fiefdom rather than a public amenity. You could be forgiven for thinking Whitmire has been treating President Trump’s East Wing demolition as a political model.
I hope someone reads this to Mayor Whitmire and that he feels grumpy about it all day.
We’re getting what we voted for. Some of us saw this coming. If we now realize we don’t like what we’re getting, we can always vote for something different next time.