METRO’s Red Line was closed for several hours Friday morning after a train struck and killed a bicyclist near the Hermann Park/Rice University station.
Jackie Gil, a spokeswoman with the transit authority, said the train struck the female bicyclist around 8:15 a.m. Emergency responders pronounced her dead about 15 minutes later.
“It appears the bicyclist was coming from the park, and looked one way but not the other,” Gil said, citing a preliminary report from METRO police.
Spokesman Jerome Gray said the bicyclist was struck in the southbound lane at Sunset and Fannin as the train pulled into the station.
The collision occurred while hundreds of thousands of tourists are visiting Houston during Super Bowl week, causing a sharp uptick in public transit ridership.
The Red Line, METRO’s longest and most traveled rail route, reopened at 10:30 a.m. Police have yet to identify the woman who was killed.
This article appears in Feb 2-8, 2017.
