For all of the faults of transit in Houston, a new study of major cities finds Houston outshines many of its peers in terms of providing access to those who need it most. Researchers, however, also showed it could do much better.

“Houston is one of the real success stories,” said Joe Chestnut, primary researcher and lead author of the report released Wednesday by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy.

In Indicators for Sustainable Mobility, Chestnut and others conclude U.S. cities, particularly those in the Sun Belt, fail to connect the people most inclined to use transit with the frequent service they can rely on to access jobs.

“The thing with Houston’s rapid transit that it seems to do poorly on, and this is true of a lot of cities, is there is a decent amount of jobs close to rapid transit,” Chestnut said. “… The people just can’t easily get to it from where they live.”

The challenge is one of both access to decent bus and train service and land use, he said.

“Without alternatives, middle-class wage earners become increasingly dependent on their cars, spending more and more time stuck in traffic, and less wealthy communities simply lose access to the city.”

The findings mirror long-established criticisms of Houston-area transit service, some of which led Metropolitan Transit Authority to redesign its bus system in 2015. Ridership has stagnated since, but most transit experts believe the city is better served to connect bus and train riders with jobs.

According to the report, 48 percent of residents within Houston – the study compares cities, not metro areas or Metro’s sprawling service area that includes most of Harris County – live near frequent transit. That is higher than Los Angeles, and roughly double the percentages in Atlanta and Denver. Dallas and San Antonio only have 11 percent and 9 percent, respectively, of residents covered by frequent transit.

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For purposes of the study, frequent transit is service that comes at least every 12 minutes hourly from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., within a 10-minute walk or bike ride.

Where Houston falls back to its peers on the list is people who can access rapid transit, defined as rail or bus rapid transit that makes trips more quickly and does not get bogged down as much in traffic. Only 2 percent of Houston residents live within reach of frequent transit.

The result of a rapid system that serves job centers but not the places where people live is many workers – notably those in low-skill jobs – have lengthy commutes to work. When researchers assessed access to low-skill jobs, those that require less than a high school diploma, only 7 percent in Houston could be reached by most workers within an hour via walking, biking or transit.

That limits where low-skilled workers can live, or subjects them to commutes double that of most drivers.

Houston’s struggle to connect people and jobs isn’t new; it is something transit officials have faced as the city and region boomed and busted. Places like Gulfton, where developers built apartments once aimed at luring young oil industry workers and people looking for modest homes, is now the most transit dependent area in the region. People commute from Gulfton to jobs all over the area.

An estimated 984,000 people live in areas with a high transit need, according to LINK Houston, a local advocacy group that has called for more equitable transportation investment to improve travel for low-income residents. That is just below one-quarter of all the people living in Metro’s service area, even though it is 8 percent of the land area of where transit operates.

“Those are the areas where we are most concerned we need adequate transit provided,” said Oni Blair, executive director of LINK, of the high concentration of transit-ready riders.

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For years – and to some extent, still – transit meant a trip downtown and then back out to somewhere else for many riders. So far, Metro’s limited light rail lines all run mostly within Loop 610 and mostly benefit neighborhoods along Harrisburg and Scott, as well as Midtown, the Near Northside and Museum District.

Metro is talking about the next round of rapid transit, though it will be a big task. Plans, set for approval in the next six months, call for $7.5 billion in new projects ranging from extended light rail to bus rapid transit.

Metro also is proposing investment not in expensive systems, but simply more buses and drivers. Increasing the frequency of service without special lines can achieve many of the same results, Chestnut said, in places such as Houston.

“That can really be a key to success that is a lot more realistic than covering the cities in subways,” he said.

It also is what Metro can achieve in the early stages of its plan, said Jonathan Brooks, director of policy and planning for LINK.

“Many of the local bus elements are easier earlier in the process,” Brooks said. “From there, you get a sense of where things can go.”

Dug Begley writes about transportation for the Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter at @DugBegley and Facebook at @PoppedClutchCity. Send him tips at dug.begley@chron.com