Both Red- and Purple-Line connections to Hobby Airport made METRO’s latest shortlist of proposed projects around town. They’re indicated above by the blue segment which runs east from the Red Line’s current terminus at Fannin South and past a proposed spur that’d reach up to the Purple Line’s last stop at Palm Center Transit Center. Together with all the proposed bus route upgrades colored orange, they’d cost the agency about $3 billion to build.
That price tag is on the high end of what METRO expects to have in its budget for projects over the next 2 decades: somewhere between $1 billion and $2.8 billion, according to the Chronicle‘s Dug Begley. Planning for the worst case, the agency also released a plan B — which eschews all airport rail connections in the name of frugality:
 Hobby Airport... "Pin It")
After 4 hours of classroom training near Hobby Airport in “the first Professional Helicopter Hog Hunting Safety Course in the nation that is specific to hunters who would be hiring a helicopter service to hunt feral hogs,” reporter Sonia Smith goes out on her first aerial wild hog shoot, AR-15 in hand — near Knox City, with the same helicopter pilot who took Ted Nugent on a 30-plus pig run back in March. A new law effective September 1 allows sport hunters to rent helicopter gunner seats for hog or coyote kills, but the rush has already begun. 
