Major Changes Ahead for Metro

Aug. 18, 2014
The Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County builds its relationship with the community while expanding its rail lines and redesigning its bus system from scratch.

Thomas Lambert, president and CEO of the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County, has been there since the beginning. Literally.  A Houston native, he went to Austin mid-year of his Junior year in high school and began his career in law enforcement and went to college. Upon graduating, he came back to Houston, started interviewing and found out about Metro.

Metro began in January of 1979 and Lambert was hired in October. “They were looking at creating a transit police program,” he said. “That had never been done in the state before. It had been done in other places in the country, but never in the state of Texas and that fascinated me.”

For 28-1/2 years Lambert served as Metro’s chief of police and then moved to chief administrative officer, executive vice president, interim president and CEO and then back in March of this year, to its president and CEO.

As a former police chief, he said he has always looked at transit like a neighborhood. A neighborhood  is safe if it is well maintained, people take great pride in it, people look out for each other and they make sure they have a voice in issues that impact it.  He explained, “I think we can take that lesson and apply that to a transit system because a transit system really belongs to the neighborhood. It belongs to the community and they take pride and ownership in it.”

He continued that it’s like the “broken windows” theory in crime prevention. “Any form of graffiti needs to be cleaned up immediately. How reliable your system is, how dependable your system is, how on time your system is has a direct relationship with how comfortable people feel in using your service and waiting for your service.”

Lambert said he’s been fortunate over the years in working at Metro to get involved in a lot of different things that have helped him gain a greater appreciation about what a transit agency is all about. “But as I tell everybody,” he said, “you don’t really know until you sit in the chair. Then you get a whole different perspective.

“I’ve been fortunate to work with a lot of good CEOs over the years that have given me the opportunity to learn a lot about what our transit service is and the benefit it brings to a community and the things we need to be focusing on to make sure it’s a quality product that we’re delivering out on the street.”

Community Support

A 1978 referendum provides funding for Metro from a one-cent sales tax within the service area, including the city of Houston, 14 smaller cities and much of unincorporated Harris County. A quarter of that goes to the partner governments for mobility projects, such as sidewalks, bike trails, streets, streetlights or bridges. A referendum in November 2012 continues that through 2035.

Metro is fortunate in that back in 1978 the citizens of the region voted for a dedicated 1-cent sales tax to support transit and mobility. Twenty-five percent of the one-cent sales tax goes to its partner jurisdictions. There was a referendum in November 2012 that continues it through 2035.

Over the years Metro has been involved in its share of controversies with headlines from the past like, “Federal Investigation Puts Light Rail Projects on Hold,”  “Metro Accused of Shredding Documents,” and “Mayor Calls for Metro Investigation.” When I ask Lambert how they move past that he stressed, “Like my grandfather used to tell me, your word is your bond.

“If you say you’re going to do something, you do it.” He continued, “At the same time, if you can’t do it, you ought to say you can’t do it.” He added, “That builds back trust in a relationship.”

The second thing he said is respecting people. “We’re a very diverse organization, we’re a very diverse community … the more people thinking about an issue, the more ideas you can get on how you can solve those issues and the better off your decision will be.”

The third part he said is that working at Metro has been good for his family, so he has a very strong bias to make sure what they’re doing is for the right agenda for the agency. “This agency has a fundamental role to provide an essential public service to this community and there are those that are transit dependent. If they don’t get a safe, clean, reliable, dependable, economical service to get to school, to church, to work, to visit family, they have a negative experience every day of their life.

“I respect everybody that’s ever been on the board or worked at this agency before,” Lambert added. “The one thing you learn is things are situational in nature. People are trying to do the right thing for their community, the right thing for the agency at that time. And they make decisions based upon the facts of their time.

He continued, “I’m not one who looks back to see how we can redirect the future. You learn from history, but you don’t linger on it. You try to go forward and you try to do the right thing for the future, making the best decisions, best choices … with the best information we’ve got.”

Reimagining the Bus System

The city of Houston is growing and its projected that there will be another million people in the city by 2030. For the region, another 3.6 million people by 2030. What Lambert keeps telling the staff, he said, was that they know exactly what they need to be doing in the next year. The largest of their projects are that they are bringing two new rail lines into operation , supporting the Galleria BRT project and rebuilding their bus system.

Route Reimagining is an opportunity to reshape Metro’s bus network. “You can go back and a lot of people will tell you if you look at the 1929 Houston electric streetcar system, you will basically see the bus network we’ve got today,” Lambert said.  “There really has not been a lot of change over the years.” He added, “We’ve kind of tweaked it over the years. We’ve added more branches to our routes and it’s gotten very confusing.”

The board asked the staff and consultants if they had a clean sheet of paper and they were going to re-do the entire network, what would you do? What would it look like?

“It basically says if you really want to get a better quality service for the people that are using our system today, it needs to be a seven-day-a –week frequency service. Not five-day-a-week,” said Lambert. He also said it needs to adapt to where they’ve seen employment growth and where people are living.

In May Metro rolled out the plan to the board and then began the community engagement. Lambert said they are going to hear from everybody they can to get feedback and by July/August, will go back to the board with the plan developed through feedback and they plan to implement it by June of 2015.

Vice President Planning Kurt Luhrsen said they started the process by looking at how the existing system works, its strengths and weaknesses, and a lot of performance metrics and comprehensive operational analyses.

“It was a very intensive 5-day core planning workshop with about a dozen people,” Luhrsen explained. It was about half staff, half consultants. They laid out large maps across tables, on walls and locked themselves in there for about a week. They would put plastic sheets over the maps and started drawing.

“Then the fun work starts,” he said. “How would you implement that? Twelve routes going to this transfer center built for four; what do you need?

“We had a lot of data at our disposal,” Luhrsen continued. “We’re very fortunate that we’re a data-rich organization. We have automatic passenger counters on all our buses and trains – 100 percent fleet equipped.”

He said they just call the IT department to dump the data they’re looking for and Init’s Mobile-APC processes the passenger counts.

What followed was sending people out in the field to see how to serve each of the particular facilities.

A stakeholder working group of about 100-125 people were involved in an all-day exercise letting them plan the system from scratch. Luhrsen said they were told they had 350 units of service to spend. If they wanted frequent routes every half mile, it would cost 8 units. They started in the densest corridor that needed a lot of service and as each table go to the point of using up all the resources, they were seeing they still hadn’t served one-third of the area.

“It gave them a better perspective of what we’re trying to do,” said Luhrsen. “Everyone gets so focused on what they want, with no constraints. Then you often got the focus lost in that.” This grounded the process, he said.

The next step is a multi-faceted approach, going out in the community to get feedback. They will use traditional evening/weekend workshops for the public, as well as staff going out to transit centers setting up a table and engaging customers.

The process has been very open, with live streaming and archives of planning, policy discussions and meetings, as well as an interactive map online.

The plan is to implement the service change in the summer as that’s when they see less ridership. “We almost have to turn a light switch on when we do it one day to the next day,” said Lambert.

The plan is designed to have a higher-frequency — 15-minutes or less per route — seven days a week. “The great thing about the new network is, 93 percent of where people are boarding today, they’ll board when we re-do the network,” explained Lambert.

When designing this plan, the board gave the assignment with some caveats. Lambert said, “We only have the operating funds we spend today. We have to operate the new network with those existing operating funds.

“We believe in the longer term it’s going to be a great opportunity and great improvement for our current riders, but it also gives a great opportunity for other people and choice riders that may want to use the service going forward.

“Ultimately,” Lambert said, “it needs to be a network that can serve as a foundation to grow from.”

He added, “It’s a very exciting time; we are not going to be bored doing anything around here the next year or so.”

Rail Expansion

When Metro’s first rail line — the Red Line — was built it was done with all local dollars because they wanted to get it done and to get it done quickly. “I think the theory was get something up and running that people could experience,” said Lambert. “And once you began to see people experience it, you saw a rush. This is the second highest utilized light rail line in the country behind Boston.”

The initial line, opened in 2004, was 7-1/2 miles. In 2003 there was a voter-approved referendum to build more lines and expand the bus network. In December of 2013, they opened the 5.3-mile Red Line extension that heads north.  In the fall of 2014 they will open the 6.6-mile Purple Line and the 3.3-mile Green Line.

Along Main Street and the Red Line, since 2004 there has been about $8 billion in development.  Looking out the Metro offices, within a couple blocks of the station there, there are two new residential complexes, a new hotel coming in and infill parking lots are being sold for more development. 

“I think that you’re seeing more an dmore people waking up this whole issue about making sure we’re building urban centers,” Lambert said. “where people can walk, they can bike, they can use transit, they can get to work, entertainment, choice decisions on where they want to live.”

When the first line opened, they had the H1 rail cars from Siemens. H2, the second series of cars, were a piggyback of Siemens cars from the Utah Transit Authority. H3 are CAF USA vehicles. Two are currently on the property undergoing testing. “We’re working with CAF to make sure we begin to see car delivery — we’re about six months behind from the original contract,” said Lambert. “What we made very clear is we want quality cars, not just a schedule.”

The Green Line, or the East End Line, is about 4 miles long, traveling from downtown to the Magnolia Park Transit Center. The Purple Line, Southeast Line, is a 6-mile line that connects downtown with Texas Southern University and the University of Houston.

Design lead for the Purple Line was Lockwood, Andrews & Newman Inc. and Vice President Philip Meaders said they are currently in the testing phase for it and mentioned one of the challenges encountered.

With any transit project, especially any in the urban core of a city, utilities are always a big issue. The Purple Line was a very busy utility corridor, both aerial and underground, and the challenge was in minimizing utility relocations and coming up with creative ways to avoid relocations.

Meaders talked about the importance of established relationships with the city utility departments and of subsurface investigation. “Once you have good data, you can design around them or design creative solutions.”

Community Partners

The Uptown District in Houston is an urban community in the heart of Houston. Lambert said the district came to Houston Metro as it needed to get employees to the area, as the greatest challenge facing the district is the lack of effective commuter transit service. There are approximately 80,000 employees that lack service options to the area. He said they’re coming forward and putting in about half of the funding to build a dedicated BRT corridor.

The Uptown Dedicated Bus Lanes Project would rebuild Post Oak Boulevard into a multi-modal boulevard, improving transit service in the area.

“We’re working in partnership with the Uptown District and the Texas Department of Transportation,” he explained.  There will be a BRT corridor between Metro’s north west transit center, which they will be expanding, and it will come over a possible elevated bus flyover ramp over the I-610 and feed into the BRT corridor along [something], down to a new transit center, the Bellaire/Uptown Transit Center.

The project is expected to begin construction in early 2015 and be completed in late 2016. The estimated cost of the project is $556 million over a 25-year period with funding coming from revenues generated from the incremental growth in property values within the Uptown Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone.

Houston Metro has a 29 park-and-ride commuter network and at some of them, there’s a three minute headway and it’s dedicated guideway going from the park-and-ride into a dedicated, barrier-separated HOV HOT land going into downtown.

Lambert explains it started out as HOV lanes for carpools, vanpools and buses and then there was an opportunity to look at non-peak time. It’s been an operation about a year now.

There is so much demand during the peak hours, single-occupancy vehicles aren’t permitted in the lanes because there is a commitment to the Federal Transit Administration to keep it free flowing at 50 mph at all times. “We’re using pricing to help us do that during the off-peak hours,” Lambert said.

In the high-occupancy vehicle lanes, carpools, vanpools and motorcyclists ride for free; people driving in single-occupancy vehicles have the option to pay a toll to use the lanes. Metro’s HOV lanes were enhanced to give SOVs the option to pay a toll to use the lanes: high-occupancy toll lanes. The tolls are based on the time of day and the congestion level of the corridor. With traffic monitoring systems, Metro ensures travel times don’t increase.

“The real issue is making sure that you’re managing violators on the lane,” Lambert explained. “You can’t tell how many people are in the car … it’s very difficult to enforce that in a high-speed environment.”

Currently it is static pricing but Lambert said as they get further down the road, they may get into dynamic pricing. He said it’s about learning how to take that HOV lane, allow SOVs to come in and that you’re pricing it adequately and maintain occupancy levels to insure the traffic flow is at adequate levels for the primary customer base, the people carpooling, vanpooling and using transit.

As an example, Metro started with a peak hour of just an hour and Lambert said they found people were coming in about 15 minutes prior to peak, causing a domino effect of congestion. “We went back to the board for flexibility in taking that peak window from an hour to an hour-and-a-half,” he explained. “Those are the kinds of things we’ve been learning as we go along.”

Houston TranStar consortium is a partnership between the Texas Department of Transportation, Harris County, the city of Houston and Metro and it is responsible for providing transportation management and emergency management services to the greater Houston region.

There are more than 700 freeway monitoring cameras, both on the freeway main lanes as well as the HOV/HOT lanes, Lambert said. If there are any incidents, the response to clear the roadway is faster and can get traffic back to normal quicker.

The coordinated center serves as a central location where all the players can meet to form decisions when it comes to things like hurricane evacuation, or any other circumstances that may arise.

Welcoming the Industry

“We’re excited; looking forward to everybody coming,” Lambert said of the American Public Transportation Association’s Annual Meeting and Expo coming to Houston in October of this year. “It will be a great opportunity to showcase the community of Houston and a great opportunity to showcase our system, so we’re looking forward to doing that.

“I hope they take away from the community that we’re a very good community to come visit; we’re a friendly town … it’s a great place to live, work and raise your family.

“I hope they see we’re an organization that has great pride in what we do, are very committed to what we’re all about and that we recognize the importance of what we bring to the community.”