After four years of gains, Miami-Dade transit use declines

Written by Miami Today on April 16, 2025

Miami-Dade’s incoming transportation director will hop aboard just as a four-year growth in transit use has hit a substantial speed bump, with ridership declining year over year for the past four months.

That’s the first four-month stretch of continuous declines since February 2021, in the heart of Covid-19 fears, when businesses had shut down and many residents were working at home rather than commuting.

In the most recent data, transit use overall dipped half a percentage point last November, followed by 13.4% in December, 2.2% in January and 5.6% in February. Part of Stacy Miller’s job as she joins the county from the Florida Department of Transportation will be to reverse that new trend.

Paths to achieve that are already being followed. County commissioners this month approved major changes to the bus system, its largest transit carrier. In those changes, the county will spend an added $2 million to strengthen the bus network plus $9.4 million to initiate a 20-mile-long Bus Rapid Transit line in South Dade, all due to begin July 21.

The largest percentage decline in use among transit modes was a 7.7% drop in Metromover riders as the rubber-tire circulator network in the urban core undergoes upgrades that force periodic system shutdowns at off-peak hours, shortening the operating day.

But Metromover has the least use among the three major transit modes, boarding only 7.3 million people in the last fiscal year ended in September despite the fact that the system has run without fares for years. Still, that’s down substantially from nearly 8.9 million in fiscal 2019, the year before covid hit.

Handling about twice as many riders is Metrorail, which recorded 14 consecutive months of passenger gains until it dropped 1.1% in February.

Metrorail had 14.5 million boardings in the past fiscal year, though it had nearly 18.5 million in fiscal 2019, before covid.

Metrobus is the workhorse of county transit, carrying 62.3 million riders in the past fiscal year. But in the past four months the bus system had rider drops of 5.8% in November, 18.5% in December, 2.5% in January and 6.7% in February.

Buses had run fare-free for part of November and all of December 2023, when a long-awaited shift to a totally new bus network kicked off, and that fare-free period inflated passenger totals. The year-over-year declines in January and February, on the other hand, compared periods in both years when the regular fares were in use.

The decline in use in February wasn’t spread evenly – weekday use fell 1.5% from February 2024, while Saturday riders across the system fell 6.7%. On the other hand, Sunday boardings rose 9.6% year over year.

The bus system in particular is poised to increase passengers in July and beyond if changes approved this month kick in as scheduled. The new all-electric bus service between Dadeland and Florida City has long been hailed as the first improvement in county transportation under the so-called Smart Plan, which was initiated in 2016 with the aim of creating six rapid transit commuter legs in key areas.

With the all-electric bus trips come 14 new stations, all placed between the northbound and southbound bus paths. Service that preempts the right-of-way from auto traffic crossing busways is to run three hours weekday mornings northbound and three hours evenings southbound, speeding travel. At other hours buses will stop for crossing car traffic.