METRORapid Silver Line: Houston's First BRT Corridor

Houston's first true bus rapid transit line runs five miles up Post Oak Boulevard through the Uptown district: dedicated bus-only lanes in the median, ten level-boarding stations and traffic signal priority at the intersections, with live vehicle tracking through METRO's public real-time feed. The corridor was built for $192.5 million by the Uptown Houston District together with TxDOT, the City of Houston and the regional planning council; METRO — the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County, a regional agency whose territory covers Houston, not a city department — only operates the service, as route 433. METRO's 2015 planning documents forecast 14,850 weekday riders by 2020. The line opened on 23 August 2020, straight into the pandemic, and has never come close: 231,000 boardings in fiscal 2021, 255,000 in 2022, 299,000 in 2023, and a weekday average that first passed 1,000 in January 2024 — under 7% of the forecast. In April 2024 METRO's board cut the frequency from a bus every 12 minutes to every 20, below the 15-minute headway the agency itself had identified as the federal rapid-transit standard; the Uptown district's own visitor page still advertises a bus every 10 minutes.