Trim our transit wish list to match our transit pocketbooks

Desperately needed rapid mass transit is being delayed in every bit of what was once proudly hailed as Miami-Dade’s Smart Plan. As we inch forward slowly trying to add transit corridors, the costs of all of them are rising far faster and we fall farther behind.

So while government organizations and agencies strive in good faith to work together to advance mobility, in fact it’s immobility that is gaining.

It’s great to dream big, but as an outside observer, it’s more apparent than ever that we can’t provide all the transit that every part of the county needs – certainly not now, and perhaps not in this century.

We need to markedly lower expectations and triage our transportation wishes to match our wallets. Let’s concentrate time and money on what we can do now with the resources we have, rather than planning and re-planning projects where money or right-of-way won’t be available for decades.

That can be hard to swallow. Some people won’t be served as they should be – in fact, most of us won’t be. But if we keep looking for steak dinners with thin wallets, everybody is going to starve. Let’s at least cook what we can now using what we have available.

We downscaled aspirations in South Dade, where we added rapid transit buses quickly on an existing busway instead of elevated rail that was far preferable if we had unlimited money and limitless construction time. Though we settled for second or third best, buses are rolling with passengers who left automobiles and are moving faster than they would have on US 1. It’s a gain.

But as the Citizens’ Independent Transportation Trust last week listened to reports on other rapid transit wishes for the county, it was painfully clear that all of them are lagging as the true costs of providing new transit shoot up fast.

As a result, the agencies planning those new transit corridors are trying to value engineer – that is, they’re trying to make do with less. That will leave us with less than we wanted to achieve. And as that downscaling is going on, more studies are needed, the clock keeps ticking, and costs of adding land and infrastructure keep rising while economic support drifts away.

In the case of what used to be called Baylink, which is transit between downtown Miami and Miami Beach, the Department of Transportation and Public Works is now looking at the project’s feasibility and value engineering “and to see what the next steps are going to be for that corridor,” the department’s Maria Perdomo told the trust.

“$2 billion has to be secured for the Beach Corridor to happen,” responded trust member Meg Daly. “I just wonder, how does that happen and what’s our tipping point – like, if we can’t make these things happen, how do we move?”

“We want to value engineer the project as it is today to try to reduce those costs,” answered transportation director Stacy Miller. “But we do know as we’ve progressed all of these projects, the costs have increased exponentially on many of them.”

The county commission and the Transportation Planning Organization (TPO), Ms. Miller said, “want more in-depth conversations on how to fund these projects and what projects will move forward in what manner. That is not for us, necessarily; we just provide information. But we know that there will be forthcoming conversations at a deeper level regarding the corridors, the prospects for each corridor, and how to fund them.”

“We have to go from existential to real,” Ms. Daly warned. “A $2 billion project – I’m not questioning the cost of it. I’m questioning the reality of the problem that we have here.”

That harsh reality must be faced. It’s politically fraught, because commissioners are parochial and stress what their district voters most want. But the fact is that not everybody is going to get first or second choice in added transportation.

Perhaps the best way to look at it – and to sell reduced expectations to weary residents – is that moving more people faster anywhere, with fewer of us on roadways, makes this county more livable for all of us.
While that’s not as good as rapid transit to your neighborhood, it’s better than what we’d all otherwise have – but still a tough sell. Elected officials will scream but are surely aware that economic resources for this county will be decreasing in years ahead even as needs are increasing.

Ms. Miller agreed with Ms. Daly’s call for reality, “which is why in the instance of the East-West Corridor the TPO asked us to go back and reevaluate. There might be other potential needs for us to go back and reevaluate other corridors. The same can be said of Flagler…

“But as we all know, we were going down a certain path with Flagler. That ultimately was not a solution that was viable for the Florida Department of Transportation, and they’re pivoting at the TPO’s request to evaluate other options.”

These vital reflections should not just evaluate other options for all the corridors but pinpoint which single corridor should receive near-total focus and funding so that at least one besides the South Dade busway can advance rapidly from conception to full plans to funding to reality.

None of the aims on the rapid transportation wish list for this county is either wrong or frivolous. We can easily make the case for each and every one. I’m all in on that.

But as a four-century-old Scottish proverb says, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”

If wishes were rapid transit, the whole county would be served.

It’s high time to get off the wish list and return to transit reality. Tally the potential funds available and see if we can get one more iron horse – or its modern transit equivalent – somewhere in this county as fast as we can, because rising costs are draining our pocketbooks the longer we do nothing but wish.