South Dade’s new Bus Rapid Transit adds pre-dawn trips

Written by Kelly Sanchez on November 19, 2025

Metro Express, Miami-Dade’s first Bus Rapid Transit system, in its first week garnered positive feedback from riders and helped identify areas for improvement, such as travel times, vehicle enforcement and signal coordination.

The service had about 4,700 daily passengers from Oct. 27 through Nov. 2, which is over 2,000 more than previous express routes, according to a report from the Department of Transportation and Public Works. The report states that a combined average of more than 8,900 riders boarded Metro Express and TransitWay Local each weekday. It also says that “feedback on the station and bus ride experience has been positive, despite some rider frustration with delays on initial morning trips.”

Their team has already addressed factors impacting travel times.

These measures include adding three early morning Metro Express trips at 4 a.m., 4:30 a.m. and 4:45 a.m. to meet high demand from early commuters, deploying five standby buses during morning and afternoon peak periods to reduce crowding and minimize delays, increasing on-site supervision and real-time headway management to stay on schedule, active enforcement by the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office to deter unauthorized vehicles and traffic infractions that impact safety and signal timing as well as ongoing field coordination to optimize the Transit Signal Priority and gate control systems.

The department continues its 60- to 90-day optimization phase to fine-tune the system, with adjustments being rolled out regularly. It says its priorities are improving operational efficiency, ensuring the service is reliable and informing and engaging riders and potential riders. Missed or delayed preemptions, gate sequencing adjustments and detector malfunctions are some of the issues corrected to date.

The new Metro Express stretches 20 miles from Florida City to Dadeland South. It’s designed to offer commuters an alternative to long drives and an improvement from the four local bus lines. The $300 million transitway was funded by $100 million each from the Federal Transit Administration, the Florida Department of Transportation and Miami-Dade County’s half-percent sales surtax for transportation.

The system is operated using 60 new fully electric articulated buses.