Ronald Reagan and our Humpty Dumpty county bus omelet

Seeking reelection 40 years ago and focusing on federal subsidies, President Ronald Reagan fired at Miami-Dade’s shaky Metrorail.

“In Miami,” he told voters, “the $1 billion subsidy helped Miami build a system that serves less than 10,000 daily riders. That comes to $10,000 a passenger. It would have been a lot cheaper to buy everyone a limousine.”

This week, county commissioners are being asked to fund another patch for our shaky bus system, which got a highly publicized remake less than a year ago.

Echoing the Reagan solution, the county is providing free limousine-equivalent trips to a growing number of daily riders who paid to use buses until the county removed their buses in a service upgrade.

You remember the Better Bus Network. Years in the planning, it began with fanfare in November by reorganizing the Metrobus network with the aim of providing more frequent buses on routes with the most use.

That in itself was smart. But short of money to fund the added trips, the plan eliminated service on routes with few riders. Since then, amidst outcries in virtually every one of the backwatered areas, the county has struggled to again serve people who were left out.

The problem is, now that the Humpty Dumpty routes have had a great fall, how can the county put them back together again without spending more than it saved by eliminating those routes to expand others with more riders?

This week, a county committee is being asked to help put part of the broken egg back together. Mayor Daniella Levine Cava is asking for $750,000 more to pay Uber through Dec. 18 to give rides on demand to people in areas where the county removed buses last November.

The mayor has already spent $250,000 for $25 Uber vouchers to use within 500 feet of a former bus route in six targeted zones. Users just hail an Uber by cellphone and follow the old bus route to where they want to go. They can go free on demand 16 hours a day, seven days a week.

“The program has been successful with over 60,000 rides since its inception in December 2023,” the mayor wrote to commissioners. It started slow, but more and more people hailed free Ubers – and overwhelmed the funding.

The equivalent of free limos in private comfort is far more successful than were the public buses, where riders paid fares and had to be at bus stops at scheduled times (even though the buses often weren’t). In fact, there are more free Uber riders than the buses ever carried.

Is anyone surprised? It’s a good thing the late Mr. Reagan wasn’t here to run for mayor this year.

At first glance, Mr. Reagan was right in 1984 about buying the limousines – until you realize that a limousine has multi-year lifetime. At eight years, the limousine cost must cover eight times as many Metrorail rides. Today, a limousine cost would have to cover 40 times as many rides for that first 10,000 riders – and today riders total 47,000 a day.

Metrorail was expensive, but its biggest cost was that it was never completed. Had Metrorail or comparable transit blanketed the county 40 years ago we wouldn’t face the transit mess we do today, because the rail system could take us anywhere.

The same is true of the buses. The Better Bus Network only works if it has the money to serve everyone, not just the nodes of largest ridership. And the mayor is unfairly handicapped because county couldn’t pay to complete the system. 

We’ll never know if money alone would have done it. You have to use it properly. But now that we’ve played Humpty Dumpty with our buses the mayor and her team are left with the unenviable task of unscrambling the egg.

So far Humpty Dumpty has been treated to quarterly unscramblings of the bus route network to try to get what we are left with to work. 

There’s also MetroConnect, a new system of on-demand transit to fill some of the gaps that the Better Bus Network left.

Then last month the mayor announced MetroLink, a new system of free vans running every 45 minutes over six routes that bus service abandoned. That system is geared to fill the gap left when the free Uber vouchers end this year.

Ever since the Better Bus Network left out large swaths of riders, the mayor’s team has been picking up the pieces and patching the egg together again. Admirable, but it’s still a broken egg.

Back in March commissioners called for detailed reports on Better Bus Network performance and cost. Commissioner Raquel Regalado asked correctly that the costs of patches be in the report. She also noted that the free Uber vouchers were being used beyond the bounds of the bus routes that they replaced.

The true cost remains a moving target as more patches appear. This month’s request for more Uber money notes that ride voucher caps have been lowered from $25 to $15 apiece, which has reduced the cheating. 

Last month the mayor noted that the MetroLink patch costs $2.7 million a year, more than the $1 million for the Uber patch it is replacing. The public does deserve a full accounting of the costs of filling in gaps rather than keeping the old bus service by paying more last November in the first place.

In the long run, the changes should work out well. Metrorail seen from 40 years out looks a lot better than buying everyone a limousine. The final system the mayor and her team can create is likely to look a lot better in 40 years than what they started with.

Meanwhile, we are spending untold millions putting Humpty Dumpty together again.