Juan Mendoza needs the bus to be on time.

For six years, he has relied on the 85 Antoine/Washington line to get to his job as a cook at a Midtown restaurant.

He estimates he can reliably count on the bus to get him to work on time maybe once a week, usually on a Friday. Some days, he says, his wait in the sweltering heat, like on this sultry August morning, can stretch to more than half an hour.

“I put a couple of complaints in, but, I mean, nothing really happened,” Mendoza says.

The 85 Antoine/Washington is one of the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s busiest bus routes. It also is one of the transit agency’s least punctual, arriving and departing on schedule only 67 percent of the time, according to a Houston Landing analysis.

Metro’s on-time performance goal for its local bus system is 74 percent, up from 71 percent last year. The agency tracks and reports that number monthly.

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According to Metro’s standards, a local bus is considered “on time” if it leaves within a six-minute window that starts 59 seconds before its scheduled departure. 

Experts say the gold standard for on-time performance for local bus routes should be 85 to 90 percent.

Michael Walk, a researcher at Texas A&M University’s Transportation Institute, said that while that number is difficult to attain due to the vagaries of traffic and other issues, on-time performance goals still should be above 75 percent. 

“Once you get below 75 percent, it definitely falls into what I think … from a customer standpoint, is very difficult to stomach,” Walk said.

From last October through this past July, Metro’s bus system averaged above that 75 percent target in four out of 10 months.

The Houston Landing analyzed Metro’s 2023 on-time performance across 74 local bus routes.

The agency’s median on-time performance was below 75 percent on 27 routes, a little more than one-third of the routes examined, according to the Landing’s calculations. The remaining 47 routes met or exceeded 75 percent, with 13 reaching the 85-to-90 percent gold standard.

Mendoza’s 85 Antoine/Washington line ranked last among those analyzed by the Landing.

Metro in the middle

Across the transit industry, however, Metro’s numbers may not be viewed negatively.

“No one in the industry would necessarily balk at a 70 percent on-time performance number,” says James Pizzurro, a software engineer who tracks performance data for transit systems in the Washington, D.C. and Baltimore area through ARIES for Transit, and has studied systems across the country, including Austin and San Antonio. “You’ve got to acknowledge, you know, that 70 percent is a problem. If that isn’t acknowledged, then it’s not going to get fixed.”

There is no national standard for on-time performance in the public transit industry, not in how the metric is tracked nor what expectations should be. According to Walk, different agencies have different technological capabilities, so it may not even be possible to track every system across a single standard.

Still, Metro’s on-time performance falls about in the middle nationally based on a  2018 study by TransitCenter.

“It makes perfect sense to me that 70, 80 percent would be the target,” says Peter Eccles, LINK Houston’s director of policy and planning. “Is that acceptable to the user? Absolutely not. I don’t think that we should tolerate this.”

Metro board Chair Elizabeth Gonzalez Brock does not disagree, pointing to on-time performance as an area in need of  improvement. 

“That needs to be a top priority,” she says. “It’s not going to be a quick, easy fix.”

That said, Kurt Luhrsen, Metro’s vice president of bus operations, says on-time performance is not one of the main complaints the agency hears from users, though he concedes it has become more frequent since the COVID-19 pandemic. He attributes the uptick to less frequent service on some routes.

“Performance becomes really critical when the bus is running every 60 minutes, when it’s running every 30 minutes even,” Luhrsen says. “It sounds funny, you want to improve people’s on-time performance, you focus on the busiest routes and you impact the most people. But the biggest negative impact is not on the busiest routes, it’s on the less busy routes that are running every 60 minutes.”

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That more closely aligns with the experience of Rose Gardner.

For three years, Gardner has taken the 49 Chimney Rock/S. Post Oak and 85 Antoine/Washington lines to get to her job as a daycare worker. In that time, she says, she can count three times she has been late to work.

Just don’t ask her how long her commute is. 

“Oh, we’re not going to talk about that,” Gardner says with a chuckle. She has to be at the bus stop by 6:40 a.m. to make it to her job on time by 9 a.m. In a single day, she typically spends four to five hours commuting to and from southwest Houston and the daycare she works at on Antoine.

“I’m adapting to it,” she says. “I get a chance to do my meditation, my makeup, play my game. You know, relax my mind to get ready, prepared for my day.”

Gardner says that while the 85 is rarely late picking her up from the Northwest Transit Center, it can get caught in traffic. For those situations, she has a back-up plan: her sister will pick her up in her car and make sure she gets to work on time.

Solutions

“Most bus service in the U.S. today, operating in a mixed right-of-way is a big piece of why reliability isn’t as high as we would like it to be,” Walk says. “There are strategies that can be implemented, however they are very limited in sort of what they can accomplish.”

Metro's immediate strategy for improving its on-time performance revolves around the purchase of new buses, plans to expand service, and a focus on signal priority.

Walk and Eccles say other improvements, such as dedicated bus lanes, would have a larger impact.

“These stats right here are not something that Metro can just manage their way out of,” Eccles says. “They’re going to take some deliberate intervention.”

Luhrsen concedes such investments would have a sizable impact on on-time performance, but notes that it would take a lot of time and money.

“If we had signal priority and dedicated lanes and new equipment, and we did everything and spent lots of money, the top end is probably 90-ish (percent),” he says.

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As part of its fiscal 2024 budget proposal, the agency is focusing on the customer experience with what it calls MetroNow.

That includes the replacement of its aging vehicle fleet and investing in a fourth BOOST corridor. BOOST corridors are high-ridership, frequent bus routes where Metro is investing in sidewalks and accessibility, bus shelters, and traffic signals.

“You haven’t bought buses for four years, so that’s why we’re at where we are now,” Luhrsen says.

While not a quick fix, Metro officials say replenishing the bus fleet is the fastest way to make an impact on on-time performance as it should cut down on the number of mechanical breakdowns and lead to faster transit connections.

The agency has failed to reach its goals around limiting mechanical failures for local buses every month since last October.

Metro Interim President and CEO Tom Jasien says he does not see any investment in dedicated bus lanes or infrastructural improvements coming any time soon, while Luhrsen says having reliable buses will be the greatest factor in improving on-time performance.

“It’s sort of a necessary but not sufficient condition, right?,” Walk says. “Like, I need reliable vehicles. But to really go to the next level in terms of on-time performance, then the limiting factor usually comes down to the infrastructure and where the vehicles are operating.”

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