Silver: a precious metal that's a scrap metal in transit lines

[Tory]

After a bit of a break here at Houston Strategies, another excellent guest post from Oscar Slotboom. If this email has any formatting issues, you can find the post here.

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The price of silver metal is up substantially in the last year (even after a recent 32% drop from its peak), recently trading at around $78 per ounce. Silver has the best conductivity of any metal, a little better than copper, and increased industrial use in electrical products has contributed to the price increase.

In the world of public transit, we have Metro's Silver Line bus rapid transit here in Houston and the newly opened DART Silver Line suburban light rail in the North Dallas suburbs which provides service to DFW International Airport, the world's fourth busiest airport by passengers. (Houston Bush is #47.) The DART opening is a good time to review the value of Silver Lines.

Houston's Silver Line, not so precious

The low ridership of the Silver Line has been well-reported, less than 10% of projected according to this March 2024 Channel 2 report. In April 2024 the Chronicle reported on a service frequency reduction, saying "the large buses provide about 1,000 trips on a typical workday, not the 8,000 or more once projected."

Ridership became even worse in 2025, with an average of 545 daily boardings, a low of 434 average daily boardings in March and a peak of 849 boardings in September. The only good news about the Silver Line is that its $192.5 million cost was low by transit standards.

The DART Silver Line

The DART Silver line is a $2.1 billion, 26-mile non-electrified light rail across the North Dallas suburbs, starting in Plano in the east then crossing through multiple cities to its west terminus at DFW airport. It opened on October 25, 2025.

As with all DART light rail, it is built to higher standards than Houston MetroRail, having a dedicated right-of-way and grade separations at major intersections. To its credit, its per-mile cost of $81 million is far below the average cost of light rail in the United States, which is around $400 million per mile, and one-tenth of the shocking $839 million per mile for the $8.23 billion, 9.8-mile Austin light rail system, which will be on streets like Houston MetroRail. The DART Silver Line also offers fast service compared to most light rail, requiring 54 minutes to cover 26 miles, an average speed of 29 miles per hour. Houston MetroRail Red line is 14 miles per hour end-to-end.

It's too early to make any conclusions about the ridership of the DART Silver Line, but the initial data is ominous. On February 18 the Dallas Morning news reported that "The Silver Line’s ridership for December 2025 was nearly 1,600 people per weekday, according to [DART vice president] Xu, and the agency expects to see 10,000 riders use the line every day by 2040." Of course we know that ridership projections are typically hugely inflated to qualify for federal money. DART's Silver Line is off to a slow start with 1600 boardings, but it was December, a slow month for ridership.

For comparison, here are some Houston Metro bus line ridership numbers for December

82 Westheimer
13,095
4 Beechnut
7641
2 and 402 Bellaire
6797
46 Gessner
6467
25 Richmond
6268
54 Scott
5924

Light Rail to Bush Airport?

As a side note, Mayor Whitmire touted a Bush airport light rail connection in the recent state of the city presentation. In 2018 Houston Metro board member (2010-2018) Christof Spieler wrote an article about the problems with airport connections, stating "Many rail planners have discovered that the numbers don’t seem to justify such a connection; employment centers generate many more riders, and bringing a rail line into an airport is often complicated and expensive. But the public sold on airport connections; someone who takes the train to the airport every few months has as many votes as someone who rides to work every day." Also, 14-mile-per-hour light rail will take a very long time to reach Bush airport. The shortest possible route from the Red Line Northline station to the Bush terminals is around 15 miles, which would cost $6 billion dollars at $400 million per mile.

Since the DART Silver Line has service to the world's fourth busiest airport, station ridership data (when it becomes available) will be helpful to assess the benefits of airport service. I will provide an update in the future.

(Tory: as I've said in the past to frame the issue, when people bring up rail to the airport, I ask how many times a year they fly vs. commute to work?...)