What, no options to $99.90 a trip transit? Hey, taxi! Uber!

Commissioners tried hard last week to dissect a no-bid contract renewal for on-demand van rides from home to rail or bus. They cut contract length in half to 18 months and its total to under $18 million. But what they didn’t do is probe the taxpayers’ cost per rider.

With understatement, Commissioner Raquel Regalado promised Miami-Dade’s transportation committee that the cost per user for the first-mile last-mile service would be “very eye-opening.”

Committee members said they couldn’t get per-rider costs for the trips, which are branded GO Connect. But the mayor’s numbers sent to commissioners are a good yardstick – good as a basis for judgment, but frightening in what they reveal.

By Miami Today’s calculations of the mayor’s data, if GO Connect gets as much total use in the next 18 months as it got in all of the past 31 months combined, in the new contract each ride will still cost taxpayers $99.90 – that’s one way, not round trip, which would total $199.80.
Bear in mind that GO Connect’s 19 on-demand minivans simply go from riders’ homes to the public transit that in turn gets them to work at an added public cost.

If GO Connect carries as many riders in the future as it did in March, which was its best month, the new contract would still cost $80.82 per ride – that’s $161.64 per day for a ride to and from transit going to a job.

The new contract would double GO Connect zones, which now are Cutler Bay, Dadeland/South Miami, West Kendall and Civic Center. If it also doubled the best month’s use – a big assumption, since transit gains use slowly – a round trip from home to other transit and then back then would cost taxpayers $80.82.

Further, the contract of almost $1 million a month for 18 months begins with a tiny user group. The report from Mayor Daniella Levine Cava says that throughout its existence serving the four zones, only 2,300 total individuals in 31 months ever boarded GO Connect. That’s pitiful.

Take that further: if all 2,300 people who ever rode the minivans still use them every day, taxpayers will be paying $421 a rider per month, or $5,032 per year, to bring them GO Connect. If only half of those who ever rode are steady riders, we’d be paying more than $10,000 a year for each of them – surely much more apiece, because March’s total record 11,983 rides equals just 300 people who commute to and from work daily using GO Connect.

There’s no way Miami-Dade County should be paying $1 million a month to make sure that 300 people get to and from a job. We could lease a very good car for each of them for a quarter of that cost. Think about it.

To be fair, all mass transit in the US loses money. We collectively subsidize the way people get around, just as we subsidize people by building roads. That’s a necessary function of government.

But we have to be smart in subsidizing mobility. And $1 million a month to move 300 people to and from other transit that will then take them to work just isn’t smart.

County transit’s operating cost per rider keeps rising, partly due to inflation but mostly because the trains and buses carry fewer riders each year. It cost the county $5.35 per transit trip in 2016 and $6.16 in 2017, rising to $6.94 in 2019, $9.68 in 2020 and $11.06 in 2021. Taxpayers subsidize every ride: fares are $2.75 (Metromover is free).

But GO Connect at $99.90 taxpayer cost per ride has been off the charts, and the fare is only $2.25 (Cutler Bay rides free). That’s a great bargain for riders but should be a deal-breaker for taxpayers.

That’s why Commissioner Regalado, who also chairs Tri-Rail’s governing board, showed good sense in urging that the county look very hard very quickly at new ways to handle first-mile last-mile service.

“At Tri-Rail what we’re negotiating is a $5 coupon that gives you that first and last mile and then people pay the difference,” she said.
She also pointed out correctly that in the rapidly changing short-haul transit market, Uber and Lyft and other options including ride-sharing can work at a fraction of the cost.

“I think GO Connect served its purpose when we were first trying this out,” she said, “but I don’t think this contract is indicative of the options that we have and I think we have to deep dive a little bit better and provide more options that are fiscally more responsible and cover more people.”

The committee cut this contract’s length in half last week and got the OK of the New York vendor in about five seconds. That shows it went from being a huge goldmine for the vendor to a smaller goldmine.

Before the full commission acts on the contract, the county must examine more options, and fast. The mayor’s memo seeking the contract said there was no way to get offers from other vendors and get them on the job in less than three years. The commission committee cut that time in half.

How much more can costs be cut before the full commission acts? And how willing would an Uber or Lyft or some other vendor be to fill that first-mile last-mile gap at less than $99.90 a ride?

Or, just hail a taxi at county expense. How difficult can looking at that option be?