As Fort Bend County and the Greater Houston area continue to grow, the agency responsible for mobility funding in the region is predicting that travel options other than cars will be necessary to keep Houstonians moving.

Alan Clark, director of transportation planning for the Houston-Galveston Area Council, said the Greater Houston area’s major roadways experience heavy congestion for seven hours out of each day—three hours each morning and four hours each afternoon—and that will increase as the population grows. 

“It’s not like a teacup where you fill it until it runs over,” he said. “We’re at capacity now. Those peak times of heavy congestion will only get longer.”

To address the issue, the H-GAC has formed a task force that is charged with studying funding possibilities for alternative modes of transportation, along with identifying which areas around Houston where such alternative transportation modes might work best. Houston-area transportation officials have long considered Missouri City a possible destination for an extended commuter rail service to downtown. In December, Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County issued a call for proposals from developers soliciting a plan to develop a commuter line along Hwy. 90. Metro spokesperson Laura Whitley said such plans would not necessarily need to be a rail line.

Studying the need

H-GAC leaders gave the High Capacity Transit Task Force when it was formed a budget of $50,000 to fund studies related to its work. Clark said the money will be used to create models to predict future transit needs and also to fund surveys to identify the transportation needs of residents.

Clark listed commuter train lines and park-and-ride buses traveling in their own freeway lanes as examples of high-capacity transit.

Commute times in the Greater Houston area have increased in recent years, with Sugar Land commuters seeing their commutes increase by over 13 percent from 2005 to 2015, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Sugar Land commuters appear to be working much farther from home than they had been. The percentage of Sugar Land workers with a daily commute of 60 minutes or more jumped from 3.8 percent in 2005 to 10.9 percent in 2015, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

By comparison, the average commute time for the U.S. as a whole increased from 25.1 minutes in 2005 to 26.4 minutes in 2015. The average commute time for Missouri City residents dropped slightly in that time span, from 30.5 minutes to 30.4 minutes.

Formation of the task force comes on the heels of an announcement by Metro that it is assembling a regional transit plan for the Greater Houston area. Leaders of Metro, which operates bus and train lines in the city of Houston, announced in February their intention to study the possibility of extending one or more of its train lines out to the suburbs.

The idea of building a train line out to Missouri City stalled in 2012 as Metro focused on other projects. The plan at the time was to use the rail line along Hwy. 90 for passengers and to build a train station at the border of Harris and Fort Bend counties, according to a report published in the Houston Chronicle.

Increase in crashes

Commute times are not only affected by the distance a resident must travel and the number of vehicles on the road. Another factor that plays a role in commute times is accidents. Accidents cause traffic jams, which add to commute times, and the longer it takes for authorities to clear those accidents the longer those commutes become, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

According to USDOT, traffic incidents are responsible for 25 percent of congestion on U.S. roadways. In comparison, bottlenecks—too many cars trying to fill too little space on the road—account for 40 percent of all congestion, according to USDOT.

According to the Texas Department of Transportation, the vehicle crash rate increased 14 percent from 2015 to 2016. The additional accidents took more time to clear as well, according to Houston TranStar, which coordinates responses by state and local agencies that respond to incidents in the Greater Houston area. In 2016, it took authorities an average of 32.5 minutes to clear roadways after accidents, a 2 percent increase from 2015.

“Even when we have a car stalled, it causes a massive delay,” Clark said.

However, transportation experts believe that technology should ease congestion problems.

The rise of a transportation system that makes use of autonomous vehicles traveling “smart” roadways should reduce the amount of variation in commute times from one day to the next, said Tim Lomax, research fellow at Texas A&M University’s Transportation Institute.

“Autonomous vehicles will bring fewer crashes, and that will mean less delays,” Lomax said.

Local public transit options

Public transit options in Sugar Land and Missouri City include park and ride services, in which buses deliver commuters to set locations in Houston from Fort Bend County parking lots, and demand response services, in which residents can schedule shuttle bus rides around Fort Bend County.

Buses from the park and ride locations go to three places in Houston: the Galleria, the Texas Medical Center and Greenway Plaza. Paulette Shelton, the director of Fort Bend’s transportation program, said county officials plan to expand park and ride services in the coming years by adding a bus route that will take commuters to downtown Houston. There is no concrete date when service to downtown would start.

“That won’t happen until a couple of years,” she said.

In community surveys completed by the county in recent months, residents who do not use county transportation said it would take more destinations to entice them to ride, Shelton said. Meanwhile, respondents who already use the system said they would like to see expanded service hours and more frequent service, she said.

The three park and ride locations in Sugar Land and Missouri City have all seen yearly ridership increase from 2012 to 2016, with one location seeing ridership increase by over 30 percent, according to Fort Bend transportation officials and Houston-based Metro, which operates one of the locations.

Tenille Jones, Fort Bend County’s deputy director of transportation, said demand is high for the county’s shuttle bus service, which allows residents to schedule rides around the county.

Jones said the busiest time of day for the shuttle service is in the early mornings when residents need to get to their workplace. She said the county advises riders to schedule such early rides at least one month in advance. The service is open to residents of Fort Bend County. Trip fares are $1 per person each way.

“Every day, we have denials where we have to turn people down,” Jones said.

Whether more residents are able to book rides on Fort Bend’s service could depend on the findings of the H-GAC task force.

“This is not just buses traveling down a street, stopping at every stoplight,” Clark said. “A high-capacity vehicle is in its own lane or on its own tracks, and it must move high numbers of people.”