Seemingly-scatterbrained versus hyper-focused

The wake of the Frank Wilson era at METRO was a time begging for answers, a time begging for new competence and an abiding desire for a renewed hope for tomorrow.  Upon taking office in April 2010, the Annise Parker METRO Board of Directors appointees led by new Board Chairman Gilbert Garcia with George Greanias as METRO's Interim and soon-to-be permanent President and Chief Executive Officer had more than a few parting gifts from Wilson to deal with.

The year 2010 was about cleaning up messes, damage-control, and (what a novel thing!) damage-repair.  2011 saw a revitalized METRO ready to look forward.

Enter METROVision, the agency's long-term mass-transit plan shared ca. 2011 in over thirty public meetings and designed to lay out METRO's wish-list for transit for the next few decades.  George talks more about this plan HERE.  In the wake of Greanias' departure in December 2012 and the fractious debate earlier that year over the renewal of the General Mobility Program, the METRO Board of Directors decided it was best to put the broad-looking METROVision on-hold for an indefinite period of time and focus on something far-more tangible and in direct spirit of what METRO hoped to be: the local bus system had not kept up with the times and needed to be re-worked from scratch.

METROVision was like one wanting to clean up his entire office and the entire office floor without his cleaning his own desk first.  METRO needed to focus on its trees first before going on to its forest.  Hence, System Re-imagining.

I look for METROVision to be scrapped permanently.  Certainly in the next two years as System Re-imagining is implemented (we hope) and as the agency takes a good and hard look at how it's faring, METRO will be, frankly, too busy to take that long-term look at where it wants to be, say, a half-century from now.  That will be for a future Board of Directors to do as the Parker-Garcia Board has less than two years before Houston's next Mayor, with their own agenda for whatever-it-may-be, takes office and presumably immediately puts in (with Houston City Council confirmation, of course) their own five appointees who will hopefully steer the Board in the same direction of competence, genuine empathy with the community, and good humor this Board has.

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And what would I want out of a long-term vision?  Well, in this process of System Re-imagining, I've learned just going out and haphazardly placing routes and rail hither and yon does not work.  We need a system that breathes.  We need a system that is flexible (the re-imagined bus grid gives us that).  We need a system that can evolve as the city and region evolves, reacting to and anticipating, hopefully, the demographic happenings to come.

What we don't need are light rail routes that turn out to be frequented more by tumbleweeds than people.  What we do need is a system that will work well with the perhaps-coming Houston-Dallas high-speed rail service.  We need a system that will play nicely with our airports.  We need a system that is safe.  We need a system that is intuitive and easy to figure out.

And to all of this, System Re-imagining is a really good start - indeed, the perfect beginning to the sort of system of mass-transit that will mitigate and make a real difference in the coming population-growth-traffic nightmare our region will inevitably become.