Jul. 19—University of Houston students are expected to push Houston Metro to revisit a rapid bus line that would connect many suburban students to their campus when they speak out at a City Council meeting Tuesday.
Transit officials announced last month that they were shelving the University Corridor, citing financial strains and a squeeze on other services had the project moved forward. Advocates — UH students among them — have worried what the delay means for the plan's long-term viability, even though Metro executives said their decision is not an abandonment of what voters approved.
The line is intended to run from the Tidwell Transit Center south along Lockwood to the University of Houston and Texas Southern University, then west mostly along Wheeler, Richmond and Westpark to the Westchase Park and Ride. Some students had celebrated the promised corridor for how it might increase access to higher education, leading UH's Student Government Association to formally ask Metro to start up the project again.
"The commuter students at UH are the heart of UH," said Savannah Bivens, a student representative who co-authored a resolution urging transit officials to reconsider. "We were so hopeful for this."
University of Houston officials were not as sold on the plan as some students seemed to be, however.
In response to questions about the corridor, UH directed the Houston Chronicle to a letter that university Chancellor Renu Khator sent to Houston Metro after the board concurred on the pause in June. Khator drew Metro's attention to a list of concerns she sent them in 2022 — among them, that having both rail and mass transit surrounding campus would significantly impact traffic and mobility, especially during big events, and that it would effectively cut off UH from major highways and thoroughfares.
Metro and UH formed a working group to solve those issues, but no formal resolution was reached, the president said.
"Our concerns detailed in this letter remain," Khator wrote in the latest communication. "As a major stakeholder in this discussion, we hope decisionmakers will consider the concerns detailed in the letter as we work with you and others in considering the University Line and other projects in a joint effort to create a multi-modal transportation system that serves all of our community."
UH enrolls more than 46,000 students — 83% of whom live off-campus — and employs 3,200 faculty. Many of the off-campus students live in Houston's surburbs and drive to campus daily, a trend that earned UH a nickname that Khator has tried to shake: "Cougar High."
TSU has 8,500 students, 77% of whom live off-campus, according to school data. The university also employs around 1,400 faculty and staff.
"Texas Southern University was happy to participate in the planning process as a community partner for the University Corridor, along with other universities," officials said in a university statement. "TSU always welcomes opportunities to provide access to our campus for our students and visitors. We look forward to working with METRO on next steps."
The University Corridor was once the backbone of the region's long-term transit plan but could now be delayed by years. Voters signed off in 2019, setting in motion the route where buses would travel in their own lanes, separated from vehicular traffic. Most of the cost, estimated at $2.2 billion, was planned to come from federal funds, with Metro providing the rest from its share of the region's 1-cent sales tax for transportation.
Metro officials said in June, when they decided to shelve the project, that the cost would tie up too much of the agency's capital program.
"We have a responsibility to make sure our decisions are financially sound," Metro Chairperson Elizabeth Brock said. "Without the numbers working, we cannot move forward."
Officials spent $72 million over three years getting the planned project ready for construction. How much of that work can be revived when and if the project proceeds again would depend on whether Metro would go forward with that design or seek changes to the route or other parts of the project.
In the interim, Metro could advance aspects of the long-range plan. And officials are pursuing other planned projects that were meant to link with the university corridor, including an Inner Katy bus rapid transit.
Benjamin Rizk, former UH Student Government Association president, said he believes many students who commute from Katy would have benefited from the line.
He commuted before moving closer to campus, and he knows students who spend more than an hour in the car each day. Those hours are valuable, Rizk said, and those who are able to take public transportation can at least do homework during that time. (Metro's purple line, a light rail option, runs from downtown through UH.) Bivens said that on-campus students like herself can also struggle not having reliable transportation to take them off campus.
And a rapid bus route would seemingly help in fulfilling Khator's goals to make UH a more residential campus, to increase graduation rates and become a top 50 public university, Rizk said.
Reliable public transit has long been connected to access to higher education and success within the system. Kate Elengold, assistant professor of law at the University of North Carolina School of Law, said she found in a 2019 survey that reliable transportation rose to the top when she asked Americans what their primary barriers were in their decisions to stop out of college.
The problem was present for respondents the board, but especially for Latinos, Elengold said.
"Transportation was kind of a thread that was holding a lot of different things together for students who were all living full and complex lives," she said. "When transportation failed on any of these axes, it resulted in students dropping out."
Still, many universities might hesitate to bolster public transportation around their campuses, Elengold said.
"There's a push and pull about access versus affordability versus cost versus culture," she said. "A lot of universities are trying to do a lot of things that may be in tension with one another."
Dug Bugley contributed to this article.
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