Metro CEO Lambert to retire

I wish him well.

After 44 years, Tom Lambert is hopping off the Metro bus.

Lambert, president and CEO of Metropolitan Transit Authority, is retiring at the end of the year after leading Texas’ largest transit system for 11 years.

“We have a lot of things we are working on that we are going to get done by the end of the year,” he said.

Lambert, who turns 70 in May, said his decision to step back was “the right time personally and professionally.”

His departure comes as the agency accelerates work on its long-range transit plan, approved by voters in 2019. The plan includes adding bus rapid transit along Interstate 10 west of downtown within Loop 610 and a lengthy rapid line that will go from northeast Houston to near the University of Houston and then along Westpark to western Harris County.

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Lambert, who began at Metro as a security investigator in 1979, became the agency’s first police chief in 1982, serving in that role until 2010. After less than three years as executive vice president, he became interim CEO in January 2013, when previous transit agency head George Greanias resigned. He was made the permanent replacement about a year later, following a national search, after initially saying he was interested only in the top job temporarily.

During Lambert’s tenure as CEO, Metro added roughly 15 miles of new light railredesigned its bus system and opened the region’s first bus rapid transit line along Post Oak in Uptown.

Despite the additional services, however, transit use has not fully rebounded after cratering during the COVID pandemic, and the Silver Line rapid transit continues to perform below initial expectations.

Lambert said it was daily performance over projects that he wanted as his legacy.

‘I think the users and the broader community will say this agency has been responsive,” he said, noting Metro’s role in major events such as Super Bowl LI and two Astros victory parades as well as responding to disasters such as the COVID pandemic and Hurricane Harvey flooding.

“These employees fully supported this community and quite frankly brought the system up faster than anybody thought possible,” Lambert said.

I tend to think that the Metro Board is about planning and vision, while the CEO is more about execution of those plans and visions, though there will be some overlap. As such, I don’t put too much of COVID’s effect on ridership on the CEO, but whoever succeeds Lambert will certainly need to have input in how to reposition the agency now that this is where we are. Given how much Metro was able to accomplish over the past decade, the new person will have a solid foundation on which to build. I’ve met Tom Lambert a couple of times, and from where I sit I think he’s done a very good job. His successor, whose timeline for hiring is not yet set, will have a tough act to follow.

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