What’s cooking in rapid transit Smart Plan? Nobody knows

Ask people to list Miami’s biggest issues and they’ll rank mobility near the top. Then ask them the status of the plan that was sold to us nine years ago to add rapid transit. They won’t have a clue.

Maybe that’s because the people who are supposed to make that so-called Smart Plan reality don’t know either.

The Miami-Dade Transportation Planning Organization’s governing board, who are all local elected officials, looked like they were trying to grasp a handful of Jello last week as they asked what our rapid transit plans actually are and where the funds can come from to make them work.

“What are we spending on and how real are these projects?” board member and county Commissioner Raquel Regalado asked.

It was rhetorical. She knew she wasn’t going to get an answer because none of the other board members – the folks who sign off on all county transportation plans – knew either. 

The big picture wasn’t on the agenda as the board tackled 14 issues that included adding and deleting projects from the county’s long-range transportation plan through 2050 and the more immediate work through 2030. The board got more than 500 pages of documents to plow through, but none answered the big question: what are we actually doing about the rapid transit we have been taxing ourselves to build since 2002?

The person who raised the question was Anthony Rodriguez, chairman of both the planning organization and the county commission, who among elected officials should be best positioned to know those mobility plans. But he didn’t.

Mr. Rodriguez was absent. He delegated Vice Chairman Eric Diaz-Padron, mayor of West Miami, to ask the board to direct Mr. Rodriguez and the organization’s Fiscal Priorities Committee to meet to get a report on the cost of the Smart Program (as it’s renamed) and funding scenarios to make it happen.

Immediately, county Commissioner Juan Carlos Bermudez asked to broaden the pipeline.

“I want everybody to get the information,” he said. “The problem that I’ve seen in the past … is the rest of us don’t get all the information. And I don’t think it’s easy for the rest of us … to make decisions if they’re not aware.”

That’s pretty clear: how do leaders decide what to do if they don’t know what’s on the drawing board, its cost, or where the money will come from?

For nine years the public has been told that we’ll get six new rapid transit corridors. Thankfully, the easiest one was put on line in October with rapid transit buses running on a route Henry Flagler created for his Florida East Coast Railway more than a century ago. 

Buses on an existing path upgraded for faster trips was a simple start. Now rapid transit gets tough, acquiring routes and railways or Metrorail or whatever – I say “whatever” because on most of the planned corridors even those decisions are Jello today.

There’s no debate: we need rapid transit, the sooner the better. But as Mr. Rodriguez and Ms. Regalado asked, give us current facts now that federal and state money to add transit is melting away.

Ms. Regalado suggested that Aileen Bouclé, executive director of the Transportation Planning Organization, and Stacy Miller, director of the county’s Department of Transportation and Public Works, meet on the issue rather than seek a report from the Fiscal Priorities Committee.

“The problem with leaving this to a committee,” said Ms. Regalado, “is we don’t want to get in yet another situation where we’re picking winners and losers on the Smart Plan, which is why the Smart Plan hasn’t worked.”

The winners and losers are born as elected officials decide where and when routes are timetabled – who gets rapid transit now and who’s frozen out. That 20-year battle has left us with no transit winners other than the South Dade buses. Nobody wants the other guy to go first, so nobody goes first in the Smart Plan.

“Some of us have put a pin in different parts of it that are in our district, one, because we don’t agree with the modality, or two, because we understand that the funding could be better spent somewhere else,” Ms. Regalado said.

Her aim was to learn the possible paths to get rapid transit to run rapidly.

“I think we need another report like we need a bullet in the head,” she said. “I think it’s really about what our options are.” 

County commissioners have been looking at the issue forever.

“On our side we’ve been talking about a complete reset of the Smart Plan anyway, so it’s not like we haven’t all brought up this issue of that we need to deal with the Smart Plan at some point because of the lack of funding,” Ms. Regalado said. 

In fact, it will be “at some point” because the planning organization punted until next meeting, when Chairman Rodriguez is to be present.

And until the organization and the county commission deal with the hard questions of how much money is actually available to add rapid transit and which, if any, of the routes that money can fund, the Smart Plan looks pretty stupid, because the people at the controls don’t know what’s going on.