Houston's Metropolitan Transit Authority (METRO) is taking steps to remove the high-visibility safety stripes from its trains, a move that has residents and riders talking. The elimination of red and blue striping marks a significant shift from the 2017 METRO board mandate, originally instituted to make trains more noticeable and reduce accidents involving pedestrians, cyclists, and cars. According to Click2Houston, METRO's Safety Department analyzed data and found the stripes to not effectively contribute to safety.
The METRO trains, soon to be uniformly gray, raise questions among commuters used to the previous safety feature. Elizabeth Gonzalez Brock, METRO Board Chair, mentioned, “Customer and community safety is a top priority at METRO. We are working to increase our police department’s presence along the transit system, provide better lighting and remove wraps from our buses and trains. This will enable our officers to better monitor what is going on inside of the vehicles. It is our obligation to provide our customers with safer, cleaner and more accessible transit options, and we take that responsibility very seriously,” in a statement obtained by Click2Houston.
In tandem with the decal removal, Houston METRO is seemingly stripping back on more than just paint. Promotional wraps that often cover train windows are also being removed, purportedly to allow a clearer view for transit police monitoring activities inside the vehicles.
While keen observers might note an aesthetic rollback to the pre-2017 gray, this decision has also removed strips that did not cover any windows and were separate from the full wraps associated with advertising. METRO spokesperson Douglas Delony explained to Axios, "The authority is continually exploring initiatives aimed at reducing accidents." Moreover, collision data indicate an oscillating trend, with the numbers decreasing in 2020 but rising again in recent years.
Despite previous board decisions to install the safety stripes, the current board was not involved in the decision to have them removed. The financial implications of this project have not been disclosed, but Delony mentioned that both in-house and contracted services might be utilized for the task.
