Houston City Council gives green light to Uber, Lyft (opens in new tab)

Seriously though, in the downtown portion of Houston there are only two directions people want to go in a hurry, northeast and southwest. Those roads have at least double the carrying capacity of the cross-roads and as such it absolutely makes sense to optimize the lights for them.

So what happens is that the "get me out of downtown" roads are very well timed and the cross-streets aren't but that's OK. Most people don't need the cross-streets and if they do, they're fairly lightly traveled because most people don't need them.

Also, as an aside, I knew someone in Houston who was in city government, and it's amazing how some of these dynamics work. Basically, this change was blocked by the yellow cab lobby for the last two years, and only for the price of about $5,000 of campaign contributions per city council seat. Local politics are insane.

My guess would be that the reason for this decision not being controversial is that the supply of taxis in Houston isn't strongly limited the way it is in NYC and SF (some Googling didn't turn up much evidence either for or against this hypothesis). Which of course, again, would mean that Uber/Lyft would be competing on a level playing field and not just be scooping up heaps of customers who hate the entrenched taxi firms with a vengeance.