Planners study linking Metromover to rail headed north

Written by Miami Today on July 16, 2025

Miami-Dade transportation officials are looking at how an outlying leg of a planned $1 billion transit line from downtown Miami to Miami Beach using Metromover vehicles can link to planned railway transit that would run 85 miles from downtown to Palm Beach County.

That outlying area is the Miami Extension of the planned Baylink that would run from the Metromover School Board Station at 50 NE 15th St. north almost to Interstate 195, Maria Perdomo of the county transportation department told the Citizens’ Independent Transportation Trust.

The aim is to integrate Metromover transit and railway transportation.

The county plans to evaluate potential stations and locations, she said, “to see where the highest ridership is – and most importantly, how it connects to the Northeast Corridor [planned railway line] and how can we get riders to basically be able to use the Northeast if they have to get into the ’mover” and how to increase ridership on the corridor.

The planned transit line between Miami and Miami Beach has been a 40-year wish that in today’s planning configuration has three segments. The main segment, “what some of us call the trunkline,” Ms. Perdomo said, is planned to run from the Metromover stop at the Pérez Art Museum Miami at 1191 Biscayne Blvd. and cross Biscayne Bay along the MacArthur Causeway to Fifth Street and Washington Avenue in Miami Beach.

That cross-bay segment falls under the influence of the Florida Department of Transportation, she said, because “it is a state corridor,” and the county is working with the state on that.

The third segment of the Miami Beach corridor is bus transportation from the Beach end of the Metromover along Washington Avenue to the Miami Beach Convention Center, which would run on a city street.

Thus, the planning for a link from a railway to a Metromover to buses.

The aim is to begin moving forward on the new commuter transit by year’s end, Gabriella Serrado, chief of infrastructure planning for the county transportation department, told the trust in May. The trust would approve the local share of costs for the transit from receipts of a half-percent sales tax reserved for new transportation.

Meanwhile, the county administration has been talking quietly about replacing the entire Metromover system, which now serves only downtown Miami. “We are looking at options,” Chief Operating Officer Jimmy Morales told the county commission’s Appropriations Committee in May. “It could even be a rubber-tire option. We’ve gotten some proposals.”