I appreciate that we got even this much, but there are still many questions about this service.
After more than one year and $1 million of Metro funding, the shuttles – operated via Evolve Houston – have delivered fewer than 100,000 trips. Still, Metro has committed another $4.1 million to keep the Community Connector program moving and to potentially expand its usage, as more people use the service to move about the city.
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To make a firm assessment of a pilot’s success, Metro usually gathers much more information, such as riders per hour and its cost per passenger. Staff already collects the information for its other microtransit program, curb2curb, which operates in low-service areas where connections to other transit are critical but there isn’t enough demand for fixed routes.
“It’s difficult to evaluate the success of the Community Connector program without more specific goals and metrics,” said Peter Eccles, director of policy and planning at the advocacy group LINK Houston.
The information that has been collected on Evolve shows a system that is gaining riders, but still trailing most forms of transit in the area. Evolve’s best route – its downtown zone – carried nearly 5,300 passengers in October. Only three of Metro’s 67 conventional bus routes carried fewer passengers, and those limited routes operate for limited hours and essentially operate to connect people in low-density neighborhoods with more robust transit.
Though heavily promoted by Metro via its website, the Evolve shuttles are not operated by the transit agency, or even Evolve – the city-and-CenterPoint sponsored coalition aimed at boosting electric vehicle use in the region. Evolve Houston contracts with RYDE, a company that supplies the vehicles and drivers, which then contracts with another company, Ride Circuit, for the software that lets riders hail the shuttles.
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Complications aside, drivers said the service is gaining popularity with many residents. In the Heights and Third Ward, drivers said elderly residents in particular have leaned on the rides for doctor’s appointments, grocery trips and other errands.
Data collected by Evolve shows the shuttles have lured loyal riders, albeit slowly and with seasonal swings.
From Oct. 1, 2024 to Oct. 31, 2025, they provided 96,945 rides, according to monthly ridership compiled by Metro and provided by Evolve. Nearly three-quarters of that use during the 13 months has come from the downtown and Third Ward zones, where the system has been successful at tapping into both visitors avoiding car use and transit-dependent Houstonians trying to connect to local destinations.
Evolve Houston executive director Casey Brown said the nonprofit has received “a lot of requests for more cars, more hours, more zones and many of them come with a five star rating. So it’s really cool to see that there’s so many people that we’re impacting their lives.”
Use in Second Ward, the Heights and the Near Northside started small, and has grown incrementally. From June, when the Northside route debuted, the three zones grew from a combined 1,919 riders to 6,025 in October.
Most of that is from Near Northside, with the Heights being the smallest. There’s a chart in the story (gift link), so take a look at those monthly totals. The Heights has only been above a thousand riders in a month since September – the last two months shown are September and October – which very much fits my impression of the service.
While users tout the benefits of a free ride and officials say they are providing a crucial transportation service, Evolve’s shuttles are an infinitesimal share of Houston’s transit network. The shuttles accounted for slightly more than 0.2% of trips in the region during October. Combined, the Evolve partnership delivered nearly 14,530 trips across the five zones in October. In the same month, Metro reported 6.97 million one-way trips.
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As Metro studies and spends money deciding “how to operate and incorporate” Evolve, per Brock, it has a successful system of microtransit that is outperforming the shuttles. All five of the curb2curb routes – including the Sunnyside line that started in January – carried more riders in October than all of the Evolve routes. In the case of the Missouri City, Hiram Clarke and Acres Homes routes, each had 10,000 or more trips during the month, while Evolve routes ranged between 1,300 and 5,300 trips.
There are some comparative limitations to the two types of door-to-door service. Curb2curb charges for rides – though the actual cost of the trip is much higher – while Evolve is entirely subsidized.
Curb2curb operates longer into the evening, uses gasoline-powered minivans and is capable of accommodating wheelchair users. Evolve has more limited hours, operates via open-air electric shuttles and cannot accommodate wheelchair users and others who might have issues getting in and out of the shuttle.
Also confounding the comparison is Metro’s lack of detailed information. On every route in the Metro system, including the curb2curb services, planners report detailed information, including the number of riders per mile driven on the route and the passengers per each hour the route is in service. Those two figures, passengers per mile and passengers per hour, are the basis for testing whether a route works.
“Unlike curb2curb, performance data is not included in Metro’s monthly ridership reports, making apples-to-apples comparisons impossible,” Eccles said.
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Shuttle use has limits, as national examinations have shown. When it duplicates other options, it can be harmful. Downtown, for example, is the most transit-rich area of Houston, crisscrossed by buses and trains more than 20 hours of the day. Door-to-door trips are not as vital when a bus is two blocks away, and seniors and the disabled can call MetroLift.
“Microtransit is a coherent strategy for providing coverage, not ridership,” said Jarrett Walker, a nationally recognized transit expert who helped Metro redesign its bus service in 2016. “It has a role when an agency has decided to provide coverage for non-ridership reasons, such as social need or political geography.”
Those flexible systems, Walker argues, run afoul when they become competitors to more efficient bus routes. As a result, use of the system becomes complicated, because in many ways microtransit is intended for very few people, to meet a specific need that a fixed bus route cannot, or cannot without potentially wasting fuel, money and staff time.
“When we design it, we are careful not to let it become more attractive than fixed routes,” Walker said. “The extreme inefficiency of ridership means that ridership is the worst thing that can happen to it: Ridership just means more vehicles must be added, exploding costs.”
See here for the previous update. LINK Houston’s Eccles also noted that Metro had proposed five new curb2curb zones in the 2019 METRONext referendum, of which only two of those have been implemented so far. Just what I needed, another illustration of how Mayor Whitmire and his Metro board members have nullified the 2019 referendum. The bottom line here is that I’d be a lot less unhappy about all this if Metro were delivering on that promise from 2019 and working towards building the kind of robust and comprehensive transit system our city and its region needs. I’m sure this microtransit system has value, I just don’t trust this board to properly evaluate it.
We need to know the cost per ride to determine efficacy of the program?
For example – let’ say is twas $25/ride; would it better to give folks Uber vouchers if that was cheaper?
If one of these things was sitting at the curb at the end of the block and I could just hop on, it would be tempting. However, just about everywhere I’d be likely to go within the boundaries of the very limited Heights service area is at most a 15 to 20 minute walk… but it’s still of limited use for those of us who tend to run those errands on the weekend, in the evening, or when going to or from work. If they could go across 45 to get to the Red Line and didn’t shut down at 5 (7 on Friday) it might have some actual appeal.
Otherwise, it looks like an intentionally half baked solution by a stuck in 1973 Metro board just so they can say “see – it doesn’t work.”