County struggles to make bus rapid transit run as promised

Miami-Dade went hunting for gold with its new 20-mile bus rapid transit line that opened last October. Even transit insiders aren’t sure whether what they’ve found is merely fool’s gold.

When all-electric buses were planned from Dadeland to Florida City, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava pledged the system would win a gold rating for quality, which in transit is like a Super Bowl victory. In fact, the service opened with a gold rating for its planning, and we salute that.

But planning is one thing, operating is another. It’s the difference between making a game plan for football and executing it on the field to actually win the game. So far, our team hasn’t scored – and some fans have stopped cheering.

Transit operators say the system is adding riders fast, but no figures back up that claim. The transit department hasn’t unveiled ridership figures for anything going anywhere at all since last December.
Detailed performance figures that the department put on line monthly for more than a decade have vanished, replaced by a note that “Individuals interested in reviewing these reports can request access through the county’s public records process.” Miami Today tried that process and was informed after 10 days that no such records exist.

But we doubt that nobody’s really counting, because the Citizens’ Independent Transportation Trust last week saw totals in a slide show and seemed impressed. Why not impress the public too?

Without those figures, reports are not from the county but from South Dade residents and officials. As we wrote this month, Homestead Mayor Steven Losner is pleading that the county halt Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) until it can figure out how to unsnarl painful traffic jams that the system is creating.

“The BRT has created traffic chaos in all South Dade,” Mayor Losner told the Miami-Dade Transportation Planning Organization this month. “The synchronization is not synchronized. It gets worked on. It becomes non-synchronized.”

Transit operators do respond to those traffic delays, which have also drawn complaints from county commissioners.

It’s those cross-street traffic delays that transit officials say are now the chief concern, not the gold standard that was everyone’s focus three years ago when the electric bus system was being planned.

The county has put the Super Bowl-style gold recognition on the sidelines as it tries to figure out how to optimize service on a bus line that preempts traffic on 47 cross streets along its 20-mile run. That’s the blocking and tackling that’s needed to win the game of speeding transportation everywhere in South Dade, not just on the bus transitway but on the roadways too.

“We’re focusing on making sure that we clear issues that are affecting” all communities along the route, German Arenes, assistant director of transit operations, told the transportation trust last week. “That is our priority right now, to make sure that we can actually move people from A to B through that optimization process. Once we get there, absolutely we can look into that option [to seek the gold designation] as well.”

While the gold standard is an afterthought today, that wasn’t the case three years ago as the transportation trust aired concerns about whether the transportation department was covering up about the planned bus rapid transit.

“I don’t know, maybe this gold standard issue is something that the department doesn’t want to discuss now because it’s not going to be gold standard,” Oscar Braynon, then the trust chairman, told members. “It’s like the kid who wants to hide what he doesn’t want his parents to see. Does the commission know that we’re not doing a gold standard? Does the mayor know that we’re not doing a gold standard?”

Qualifying for gold BRT – the highest of four categories of BRT service – is complex, to say the least. The standard set by the Institute for Transportation Development and Policy (ITDP) has five main categories for design, with 32 metrics totaling 100 points, and an operational deductions category that has 13 metrics totaling 77 points. Together, these form the corridor’s score. Both design and operations, the independent institute says, are critical to creating high-quality BRT. 

The five basic ingredients are a dedicated right-of-way, busway alignment, off-board fare collection, intersection treatments, and platform-level boarding. The South Dade BRT system seems to check all those boxes nicely.

But there’s a lot more in the run for the gold – service planning; stations and buses; and communication, access and integration, each with multiple categories.

Finally come a raft of possible deductions based on the operations of the system, places where pitfalls lurk for Miami-Dade’s system. Those are for poorly maintained infrastructure, overcrowding, low commercial speeds, lack of enforcement of right-of-way, significant gap between bus and platform, long signal cycles, bus bunching and reliability, buses running parallel to the BRT corridor, low peak frequency, low off-peak frequency, low peak passengers, pedestrians and cyclist fatalities along the corridor, and permitting unsafe bicycle use.

The fact that Miami-Dade’s BRT shares its two routes on the transitway with three other routes that stop more frequently and aren’t high speed, coupled with the lack of true rapid transit at all times but rush hours and then only in one direction during those times, might cause vital rating reductions.

The transportation trust reiterated its lingering concerns about the gold standard last week.

After noting that the system has been running almost seven months, trust member Robert Wolfarth told Mr. Arenes “I think that there’s a window to apply with the ITDP for the gold standard. I just wanted to make sure that was still on the radar with [transit operators] to make sure that we are following through with that commitment.”

While the trust had repeatedly been told that the county would apply to have gold standard secret shoppers rate the bus system after six months, Mr. Arenes made clear that “they say to run at least six months” to apply but there’s no deadline to apply – and any application will be made only after the county has actually made the system work for auto traffic as well as the buses.

“What we are doing right now is basically getting to optimize so we get it to perfect” as the county tries to get “to that sweet spot…. What we’re going right now is making sure that everything works well and we’re observing the behavior and learning.”

“So, is this going to be a priority for our county to work toward the gold standard, and what is your estimate of how long that might take?” trust member Peggy Bell asked Mr. Arenes.

She got no answer, just that the county is focused only on trying to make a very complex process work on the field of commuting the way it worked in the locker room of planning.

Don’t buy your gold standard Super Bowl tickets yet.