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.
Coincidentally, the smartphone app you can use to hail a cab in Houston (and other markets, I think) has renamed itself from TaxiMagic to Curb, and the branding and UI seem a lot more modern and frankly Uber-like.
http://www.civilbeat.com/2014/08/state-to-uberx-and-lyft-no-...
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.
I realize why they do it, and it is optimizing for the majority use case, but damn is it annoying when you want to go the other way...
Edit: The base fare is $1.90 and $0.19/min, $1.48/mi - minimum $5.70. Compare to NYC where it's $3 base fare, $0.40/min and $2.15/mi with an $8 minimum. That's quite a difference.
For folks in the loop, having easy transportation to/from bars, for instance, makes Uber pretty attractive.
[0] http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_99....
I prefer living in the north where they do not have such monstrosities. But I currently live in Beijing, so I have to deal with the "fulu" all the time.
BUT because the oil companies are moving their operations west (BP and others) and north (Exxon) people are also migrating those directions.
You would think this would mean that real-estate prices in the donut between the loop and the beltway would be pushed downward but it's not happening. The population seems to be growing faster than the "city" expands so prices are going up everywhere.
Shell and BP have both built huge new campuses in West Houston. BP even claims to have built the world's largest commercial research supercomputer in their Westlake campus.