Best Place to People Watch: METRORail Red Line
The best way to spy on folks is while they’re in transit, we say. You’re literally watching them on a journey, navigating the moment while surrounded by other humans. How’s that for a metaphor for life? They’re all headed somewhere and the promise of the next destination is an exciting prospect for avid people-watchers to ponder.
METRORail’s Red Line is one-stop (okay, technically 25 stops) shopping for momentarily peering into the lives of fellow Houstonians and visitors to the city as more than 50,000 passengers employ it daily.
Operating for nearly 20 years now, the 13-mile Red Line runs through the heart of the city and a single ride on the train can be fascinating. It’s had its wild one-offs (anyone recall the gonzo Houston band Clockpole doing an unauthorized pop-up concert on the train?) but its ordinary moments can also be extraordinarily inspirational.
On a recent trip, we spotted a fellow solving the day’s Wordle. At the Memorial Hermann Hospital station, the medical professionals entering the train all wore face masks still. Soccer fans with British accents and others speaking Spanish chatted excitedly about a match at NRG Stadium that night where practically no one would wear a mask. A young man in a Lanier Parking work shirt showed some old school manners by offering a standing woman his seat. She graciously declined. When he exited, another man nabbed the seat, which he then offered to a different woman who boarded later. She too declined.
People laughed, smiled, sighed, closed their eyes for a moment’s rest, hopped on, jumped off. In the center of the car was one sharply-dressed woman who stood, holding a rail with one hand and rapt by the book in her other, Colleen Hoover’s novel It Ends With Us. In a space surrounded by folks from diverse backgrounds and cultures, literally and figuratively going different places, she read from a book with the line, “Just because we didn’t end up on the same wave, doesn’t mean we aren’t still a part of the same ocean.”
Northline Transit Center to Fannin South Transit Center
713-635-4000
ridemetro.org
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2022.
