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Fort Bend County, an area of over 800,000 residents, currently has absolutely abysmal public transportation. They have no connections to METRO transit centers or park and rides such as at Grand Parkway, Mission Bend, West Bellfort or Missouri City, no fixed route local service in the Sugar Land/Missouri City/Stafford area, nor in the rest of the county besides three unintelligibly convoluted, unusably infrequent "Fixed Deviation" routes in the Richmond/Rosenberg that only run on weekdays. The Park and Ride service leaves anything to be desired, with poor frequency, no midday or later evening service, a short departure window, very few actual park and rides, and services running to some random place in Greenway and the VA Hospital, not at all connecting with proper METRO services. Perhaps worst of all is their "Demand Response" service. Call them at least a day in advance from when you want to go, and you'll be sent to a call center in India to place a reservation for a bus, Which may or may not show up at your house at the scheduled time to take you to your destination, Which cannot be outside of a specific area, cannot be used to transfer to METRO, and can be no earlier than 8AM, No later than 5PM, Monday-Friday Only. Transit in Fort Bend in it's current form is unacceptable, and would not be adequate for a county of 8,000, let alone one a rapidly growing county of 800,000 in one of the largest metropolitan areas in America. As METRO focuses on expanding it's current transit network, Fort Bend desperately needs to focus on having some sort of usable transit at all, that is able to connect with METRO, otherwise, traffic will only continue to grow worse in Fort Bend County, and the entire Houston region as a result.

Since FLIXBUS has come into town with routes to San Antonio, New Orleans, etc... Thought I'd start a dedicated thread on FLIXBUS in Houston and routes that it currently has online, proposing, or planning to implement. FLIXBUS was a big part of my experience while in Europe. Great service, cheap, but at the same time its an excellent run company. There business model is like a JetBlue for airlines where they try to streamline business costs as much as possible in order to keep prices as low as possible. They also avoid owning any real estate or property with terminals to maintain flexibility. Here are available routes right now: Texas - Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, and San Antonio ($0.99 fare) Louisiana - Baton Rouge, New Orleans ($4.99 fare) Mississippi - Biloxi ($4.99 fare) In recent news, FLIXBUS is looking to start a route from Houston to Galveston. More in the article: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/transportation/2019/06/26/337548/officials-look-at-a-new-option-for-houston-to-galveston-bus-service/ I image this will also be a $0.99 fare. The Houston location hasn't been decided yet. Galveston location will be 25th Street near the Cruise Terminals and The Strand.

The goal of this thread is collect and house everyone's recommendations, tweaks, alternations, alternatives, etc... that they would like to see to Metro Next. The current draft which was exhibited this past summer is below: http://ridemetro.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=5&clip_id=1651 Metro's call for further input on the draft prior to an upcoming referendum in 2019: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/2018/11/23/312741/metro-moves-to-the-next-phase-in-developing-a-regional-transit-plan/ Whether planned or in response to the recent political shift (or both). The winds are changing and with that is a chance to broaden and enrich Metro's vision for their overall goals (2040 vision) and what could be achievable in the upcoming referendum (2019 referendum vision). I'm curious what the community here thinks is possible. This is without thinking about budgets or costs since we don't know what that could be. Assume for right now you can get what you want (within logical reason of course). What are your ideas or proposals? Light rail? regional rail? BRT? Links to HSR? Connections to Airports? Do you have an idea for an entire system and how it would work or do you just have idea for a small portion? Is this for the upcoming referendum or for what you want in Houston by 2040? Its open forum. Lets try to not stomp on any ideas. Later, if this is a successful thread we can have a thread where we get more critical. I'm partly doing this to get more engagement on this forum, tbh, lately its felt a bit stagnant (with the disappearance of the reaction buttons, etc...).

The draft plan has been released for public input! http://transitsystemreimagining.com/

HAIF transit enthusiasts, I bring to you this morning the most awesome thing ever! I give you the TRAVIC - Transit Visualization Client! http://tracker.geops.ch/ You can pretty much go to most cities and countries and just watch the movement of transit in a very slick visualization format. If it sees very slow thats because its actually working on realtime. The best way to really visualize it though is to speed it up x15 or x30. What is jarring is when you compare a city like New York, London, Paris, etc.... with transit in Houston and just how different and quite frankly dead it is. Whats even cooler is that its not just a fancy visual. You can click on any of the moving dots and it will show you the stops on the line itself and where it is heading.

Just wanted to ask people around Fort Bend County if you have ever rode on the Fort Bend Transit buses and what was your experience. Seems to me they are becoming more and more popular. There are already plans to put permanent park and ride facilities in Missouri City and Rosenberg. I think it's cool to have public transportation in Fort Bend. It's the second largest pop county in the area. The 2010 census for the county was at 585,375 and it's growing more every year, which is basically the size of Portland, Ore. We have to have alternative ways of getting around the area. The traffic, especially in Sugar Land is getting ridiculous What's your take on it. ?