Houston Strategies

This week we have another great analytical guest post from Oscar Slotboom. Dallas DART's extensive and expensive light rail strategy is looking more and more like a total failure as suburban cities try to reduce their tax subsidy to DART.

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When I last reported on Metro ridership in April, ridership had reached a post-Covid high in February, down only 14.7% from the 12-month pre-Covid average. An upward bump in April pushed ridership to another post-Covid high at only 13.5% below the pre-Covid level. Summer months are usually low ridership months, and Hurricane Beryl caused Metro service outages during the week of July 9-12. July ridership was 22.3% below the pre-Covid average. However, in spite of the substantial service outages due to Beryl, July ridership was only slightly lower than June. So we can probably expect a strong rebound, especially since September and October are normally the highest ridership months.

In Dallas, June ridership (page 55) was 23% below the pre-Covid baseline. As the plot shows, ridership has been flat in the last 9 months, appearing to end the four-year trend of slow recovery. It's interesting to note that the image shown below mentions that on-demand services are included in the ridership data, but a version of this plot presented one month earlier (page 4) without any mention of on-demand services showed ridership down 28%. Multiple member cities of DART, including Plano, are attempting to reduce their tax subsidies to DART.

Nationally, public transit ridership is down 25% compared to pre-Covid levels and appears to be holding steady with little or no upward trend. Of course, there are wide variations in performance by city and Houston is above average.