FYI Miami: August 24, 2023

Bellow are some of the FYIs in this week’s edition. The entire content of this week’s FYIs and Insider sections is available by subscription only. To subscribe click here.

TRANSIT’S ANNUAL GAINS: Miami-Dade County’s transit system is rolling up impressive gains in numbers of riders year over year in every transit mode – buses, Metrorail, Metromover and paratransit. In the first nine months of this fiscal year through June, monthly gains year over year have ranged from 35% up to 48%. Gains, however, are spottier when compared with 2019, the last year before the pandemic: in only three of the past nine months have total county transit riders exceeded numbers in the corresponding month four years earlier. One of those was June, up 5.6% from June 2019, according to the latest report by the Miami-Dade Department of Transportation and Public Works. For all of fiscal year 2022, the ridership gain was 9.5% for the system.

GAINS AREN’T EQUAL: While Miami-Dade’s transit system registered a total monthly ridership gain of 37.6% in June compared to June 2022, the annual gains were unequal across the system. Metrobus ridership, which for years had been falling monthly and annually, registered by far the strongest gain, with a 48.3% increase to 4.54 million riders. Metromover, which serves only the Downtown and Brickell areas and charges no fares, registered a 32.5% gain to 632,423 passengers. Metrorail, however, had only a 9.4% increase in the month to 1.06 million passengers, and the on-demand STS paratransit had a 9.6% gain to 119,527 riders.

BUS SYSTEM SHINES: Although all other forms of Miami-Dade County transit are trying to regain their total ridership figures from before Covid-19 struck, the county’s bus system is running far ahead of rider totals from four years earlier. In June, for example, the bus system had 4.54 million fares, up 18.9% from 3.82 million in June 2019. This comes after the county’s buses had been steadily bleeding riders for more than a decade and just ahead of the county’s announced plans to completely revamp bus routes and frequencies to better serve and hopefully add passengers, a process that has just begun and is about to pick up speed in autumn.

LONG WAYS TO GO: As the county’s fare-charging bus system is rolling up impressive gains in passengers over pre-covid levels, the totally free Metromover and fare-charging Metrorail continue to run far behind their ridership levels of corresponding months of 2019. Metrorail was down 21.6% in June from the number of riders it carried in June 2019, off from 1.36 million to 1.06 million, a 300,000-rider decline. In each of the past nine months, Metrorail use has been down more than 20% from the corresponding month of 2019. Metromover had been down more than 24% in each of those months until June, when the loss was trimmed to 9.8%.