Miami Having Wrong Debate over Bus vs. Rail

On July 19, Miami-Dade’s transportation planning organization will decide whether to spend $300 million on bus-rapid transit or $1.5 billion on rail. As noted by the Antiplanner a year ago, this continues a debate that has been going on for years.

It’s a stupid debate because buses can move far more people for far less money. It’s even stupider because the $300 million bus-rapid transit plan is also a waste of money as Miami can’t generate enough transit traffic to effectively use dedicated bus lanes. The heart of the debate has nothing to do with transportation and everything to do with politicians’ egos.

“People in the south understand that if they settle for a bus, they’ll never get a rail,” said one politician. “Nobody wants buses.” Let me give you a clue: nobody except contractors and politicians really wants rail either. More than 90 percent of Miami-Dade commuters drive to work and less than 6 percent take transit (less than 1 percent of which uses existing rail).

With numbers like that, the only reason why the average person would support rail is if they believed it would relieve congestion. Yet, if anything, it will make congestion worse, if for no other reason than it takes money away from projects that actually can relieve congestion.

Miami’s original Metrorail line was a white elephant when it was built and it is a white elephant today. Before it opened in 1988 after substantial cost overruns, it was projected to carry 239,000 weekday riders. In reality, despite minor expansions, it never carried more than 75,000 weekday riders, and by 2017 it was more than 10 percent below that.
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A major argument against either of these alternatives is how long it would take to complete them: if immediately approved, the bus project won’t open for four years and the rail project will take even longer. Since neither have federal funding, the actual time is likely to be even greater. If it relied on existing lanes, Miami-Dade Transit could start bus-rapid transit service in a few months, speeding service over existing buses by making fewer stops and using a pre-pay system. From the riders’ point of view, the important thing is to increase frequencies, not whether the vehicles have steel wheels or rubber tires.

Of course, the Antiplanner believes that, by 2022, driverless ride-hailing will be replacing most transit anyway, so spending on new transit infrastructure is foolish. At least bus-rapid transit lanes have the virtue that they can be opened to all cars when demand for transit has nearly disappeared, though engineers will probably figure out a way to make that cost another $300 million.

Even if you don’t agree that driverless ride-hailing will be available as soon as the industry promises, there is no doubt that Miami-Dade Transit ridership, both bus and rail, is already declining. Ridership has fallen in every year since 2012, dropping a total of 22 percent through 2017. The first four months of 2018 saw 12 percent fewer riders than the same months in 2017. This is not the time to be spending hundreds of millions, much less billions, of dollars on new transit infrastructure.