The Austin City Council appointed District 9 Council Member Zohaib Qadri, who represents UT and West Campus, to the Capital Metro Board of Directors on Wednesday.
Qadri, who serves as vice chair of the Austin City Council’s Mobility Committee, joins an eight-member board tasked with overseeing CapMetro’s operations across Central Texas. This includes managing the agency’s $427 million operating budget, approving new initiatives and providing oversight for the Capitol bus service — the 2,500 bus stops and rail services from East Austin to near Boultinghouse Mountain.
“Austin’s future depends on reliable, accessible, and sustainable transit,” Qadri said on X, formally known as Twitter. “I’m ready to get to work to improve service for all.”
While the board does not handle day-to-day operations, its influence over the agency’s direction is substantial, said Cheyenne Conyer, the CapMetro chief of staff. The board approves contracts and fare changes and conducts public hearings.
“Through their approval of the budget, the (CapMetro Board of Directors) are allocating resources to things that they agree are the … initiatives that we are going to do,” Conyer said. “While they may not be day-to-day dictating exactly where a certain stop is or is not placed, they are approving the policy guidance that staff then interprets to make those decisions.”
Qadri’s appointment comes during CapMetro’s modernization efforts, including a shift in its trip planning app and its fare system beginning Feb. 13. The agency will move from an upfront payment model to a pay-as-you-go system through the Umo app, where riders pay-per-trip up to a set monthly cap.
Conyer said the changes, approved by the Board of Directors in January, are part of a broader effort to modernize the agency’s technology.
“We are updating our customer technologies, our app, the platform and the technology on the buses that interact with customers when they scan their pass to make it easier for our customers to pay their fare and understand our system,” Conyer said.
CapMetro also faces significant challenges, such as returning to pre-pandemic ridership levels, said Jake Wegmann, an associate professor in UT’s School of Architecture.
“Like all transit agencies in the country, the pandemic just walloped CapMetro,” Wegmann said. “Ridership still has not recovered to what it was before the pandemic, and that’s because of a massive simultaneous behavior change that happened across the city.”
Wegmann said the agency faces several more challenges, including lawsuits from the state attorney general over large projects like Project Connect, potential funding cuts from federal policies under the Trump administration and the balancing of different strategy interests within the transit government.
As a member of the board, Qadri will have input on the direction the agency takes to address CapMetro issues.
“I would encourage people to just reflect a little bit on how difficult it is to try to keep all these different mandates that CapMetro is trying to fulfill,” Wegmann said. “It’s not an easy thing to do.”
