The Citizens’ Independent Transportation Trust is searching for ways to provide more transit to the areas of North Miami-Dade that have been waiting decades for a promised Metrorail line that is still at least a dozen years from opening.
The trust, which administers tax funds that would help build the North Corridor rail line, scheduled the hunt for alternate transit in the interim after a question last month from member Kenneth Kilpatrick, who cited inequity by leaving that part of the county with few benefits from transit tax receipts. Other members quickly echoed his concerns.
“What can we put together to begin to mitigate this area, this large patch of UMSA [the county’s Unincorporated Municipal Services Area] that’s not receiving anything?” Mr. Kilpatrick asked. “Something is better than nothing – trolleys, something in the unincorporated area … if we’re not going to get the Metrorail that we’ve been promised.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” said trust Chairman Robert Wolfarth. “When this was voted on 22 and a half years ago there were a lot of promises made, especially to people out in the West Kendall area, getting transportation out that way. We had promises that were made in South Dade getting rail out that way [where a bus rapid transit system is supposed to open this summer instead], getting rail to the Beach.”
“For me personally, the North Corridor is just a no-brainer because you have community buy-in, which is so important,” Mr. Wolfarth continued. “You don’t have community buy-in everywhere in the county.”
Commuter rapid transit linking downtown Miami and Miami Beach has been stalled in part because Beach city officials and residents have battled county plans to bring Metromover-like vehicles there via an elevated guideway above the MacArthur Causeway.
Mr. Wolfarth suggested meeting to discuss Mr. Kilpatrick’s concerns about service to the North Corridor areas but noted “what I don’t want to do is derail the North Corridor. We want to have as much funds as we can possibly have go into that corridor, and I know it’s taking forever. It seems like when we made a little bit of progress it seems to go backwards again.”
The cost of long-awaited North Corridor commuter rail to Hard Rock Stadium rose again, its use was put off again, and it no longer will have a station promised on Miami Dade College’s North Campus, the trust learned late last year. Furthermore, every earlier study of the system is being repeated. So now rail completion is estimated for 2037.
A May 2024 capital cost estimate for the 10-mile elevated Metrorail extension with eight stations and seven park-and-ride sites was $1.9 billion. By December the cost was up to $2.2 billion and the trust was told it would rise again.
The latest cost figure is likely to be revealed this month in a presentation to the trust from the county’s Department of Transportation and Public Works. That presentation is to come soon after the trust meets this month on stopgap opportunities for the North Corridor.
The citizens’ trust oversees county transportation sales tax receipts, which together with the Federal Transit Administration and the state are to fund the North Corridor rail line.
Steps to build the North Corridor were frozen after the county in 2022 pulled the plug on a call for public-private rail partners. That detour to private developers and then back again left state studies dormant from May 2020 to November 2022.
The areas in the North Corridor are “not getting those PTP funds [from county transit taxes] because they’re not municipalities,” Mr. Wolfarth said. “It’s one thing to be OK with it if you think you’re getting the mass transit coming to there,” he said to Mr. Kilpatrick, “but you just mentioned a few decades before it’s going to come to realization, and even that is speculation.” “When the decision was made to elevate rail for North Dade,” said trust member Peggy Bell, “I don’t think many of us anticipated the vast amount of years that we’d have to wait for that.”
Said Mr. Wolfarth, “I think the conversation is what we can do in the interim to get the community some kind of equitable relief.”
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