Government should be dealing in realities, not let’s pretend

Good news: The promised $5 million footbridge that was to serve professional soccer in Miami’s Freedom Park when play began this year is now funded by $20 million from Washington plus added millions from the county and is to be ready for the fourth season there in 2029.

Miami Mayor Eileen Higgins announced the federal aid Friday. As a county commissioner last year, she crusaded to speed building the footbridge to the privately owned stadium, the Freedom Park complex it sits in and the adjacent city government center that was just topped off.

That bridge one day will be a boon, but it illustrates two Miami realities: we build big projects first and only later provide infrastructure to serve them, and the infrastructure costs far exceed our plans.

We’re playing let’s pretend to win approvals. We know hidden public infrastructure costs are coming and that not everything will be ready to serve big projects, but we pretend everything will be just fine.

Even among just pedestrian bridges, the soccer bridge delay is only one example.

At the Aventura station that opened for Brightline in October 2022, for example, the footbridge to take rail users to the area’s major attraction, the Aventura Mall, is indeed there for all to see – but not to use.

It’s lain on the ground for years, with pledges that it would be erected for Christmas shopping each year.

Could this finally be the year?

For a footbridge linking the main Florida International University campus to Sweetwater across busy Southwest Eighth Street, planning began in 2009 as FIU eyed housing students in the city. After a fatal bridge collapse during construction in 2018, planning began again and completion is now due next year, vitally needed and many years late.

Excuses abound, some valid, for why vital infrastructure opens far after the projects it will serve. But it also costs more than promised, whether we plan in good faith or use a lowball figure to get a project started. Once underway, the public is on the hook and can’t back out of hidden higher costs.

A year ago this week, Miami Today’s front page headlined the big bridge gap: “Soccer stadium bridge will miss opening games.” We should have written “will miss opening years.”

It was Ms. Higgins at a July 2025 county Transportation Committee who highlighted the lack of the bridge to the stadium that was then rising.

“We have finally for the first time in county history bothered to build a stadium near transit, and so we need this bridge because otherwise you’re going to end up closing off 37th Avenue and 20th Street to get people from the train station over there,” she said.

“Obviously the soccer stadium will be open in advance of this bridge,” she said, “but it would be very nice that we do not end up with a tremendous traffic quagmire in what is a residential neighborhood in Grapeland by not having this bridge.”

At the time, less than a year before the first match, no spot had yet been chosen for the bridge, though the original plan was to begin matches in the stadium in 2025. “Over the last couple of months progress has gone from basically nothing to a lot,” Ms. Higgins said then.

Even minus the bridge, Tri-Rail is filling added trains to serve night soccer matches and is setting passenger records. But now, according to the City of Miami, those rail users “must navigate indirect routes along high-speed roads and difficult crossings, turning a short 0.3-mile trip into a journey that can take up to 20 minutes.” That’s what the footbridge is supposed to fix – as of 2029.

Don’t underplay the complexity of adding a bridge. It will cross property controlled by the county, Miami International Airport, the Greater Miami Expressway Agency, the City of Miami and the Florida Department of Transportation on its way from the Miami Intermodal Center to Miami Freedom Park.

Stepping through such hoops isn’t a walk in the park.

Nor are issues at the FIU and Aventura bridge sites simple. But the fact is, infrastructure is always promised as though it were simple, no sweat, so it always arrives years after the promised date, years after the need, and millions more costly.

Think of the fudge factor we used to talk about, an estimate deployed as a buffer to ensure feasibility, and sometimes a way to tweak the facts to fit a narrative.

We build a Miami Freedom Park, Soccer Stadium and new center for Miami city government that may someday become city hall, and we fudge on what else is needed, when it can be ready and its true cost. A $5 million pedestrian bridge vow is now well above $20 million with no construction started.

In announcing the $20 million grant last week, Ms. Higgins said “This project is about planning for the Miami we are becoming.”

True, but that planning is for three years after the new Miami Civic Center and the soccer stadium are already standing and the Miami Freedom Project is under construction.

When will we start citing the cost of infrastructure a project needs and true date of its use before we develop rather than after and quit fudging the realities of timing and funding?

Government should be dealing with reality, not let’s pretend.