Why catch a bus when Miami-Dade will send a van to pick you up? A new perk for some

Driving to the Metrorail station? Miami-Dade might be sending a van to your neighborhood to pick you up and take you there.

The new GoConnect shuttle service is free for now, but only available in a few neighborhoods near two Metrorail stations in the Kendall area, Dadeland North and Dadeland South, and in the Cutler Bay area near the South Miami-Dade bus lanes known as the Transitway.

Riders hail it with an app or a phone call, and typically walk a block or two from their starting point to board a six-seat van. Then the van drops them off anywhere within a three-mile zone that includes grocery stores, transit stations and neighborhoods.

“We have people going to work, we have people going to the doctor,” said Linda Blanco, a manager of the Miami-Dade operation for Via, the New York-based company running the GoConnect service. “We have people taking their kids to school.”

Funded with state and federal transportation grants, the $4.6 million, three-year contract with Via is the latest effort by Miami-Dade to move beyond buses and trains to give residents alternatives to driving and make transit more appealing.

Should Miami-Dade just spend more on buses?

It’s a trend that some transit advocates see as diverting the county from making investments in transportation that would make the current system more helpful to daily commuters.

“They’re nothing when compared to what bus service can provide,” said Maria Cristina Chicuén, public affairs manager at Transit Alliance Miami, on the shuttle programs that have popped up in the last year. “We need to be very prudent about how we spend our limited transportation dollars.”

For the next three years, the GoConnect vans will run mostly on federal and transportation dollars, part of a pilot-program grant secured by the county’s Transportation Planning Organization, a countywide board made up of local elected office holders. But keeping it going eventually will require Miami-Dade tax dollars.

The service functions as a modified version of Uber and Lyft’s carpool service, where riders use an app to book rides in vehicles they will likely share with other passengers.

The GoConnect service uses company vans and hourly employees. It also utilizes “virtual bus stops,” meaning passengers typically must walk a few blocks to catch their ride. Then the van takes them to any destination within a three-mile zone, and the fare matches the $2.25 fee to board Metrorail or a county bus.

During an introductory period through March, the service is free. And it’s planned to remain free in Cutler Bay through city funding. For now, the six-seat vans are limited to three passengers as a COVID precaution.

Trying to crack the first-mile, last-mile problem

Alice Bravo, the county’s outgoing transit director, said the vans are designed to try to crack Miami-Dade’s “first-mile, last-mile” problem. That describes the challenge of a transit system with trains and bus routes that traverse the county but typically have stations and stops too far away for an easy walk to most homes and businesses.

Rather than paying for a circulator bus or trolley to run regularly to connect a neighborhood to a transit stop, Miami-Dade thinks it may be cheaper to pay Via to shuttle people where they want to go.

“Usually our bus routes are a mile apart,” said Bravo, who resigned Dec. 18 to take a job in the private sector. “For the people who live in those one-mile squares, it’s not necessarily conducive for them to walk to connect with a bus.”

Miami-Dade has already turned to Uber and Lyft to cover some overnight bus routes shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic as the transit agency cut offerings with weak demand. Cities have also turned to similar shuttle services run by Freebee, a company that dispatches electric carts to pick up residents who summon them from an app.

Peter Paunovic is an old hand at transit in the Cutler Bay area, and has memorized the stop times for various bus lines and circulator routes. He’s been a regular rider on GoConnect, and it typically picks him up about a block from his house.

On a recent Friday afternoon, Paunovic was preparing to hail a GoConnect ride to a nearby bakery for Cuban coffee, then summon a driver for the ride home. “It’s great. I don’t have to rush,” he said.

For Paunovic, who works as a teacher in the Hialeah area, the GoConnect service mostly fills in for transit options he finds lacking, such as bus routes with limited hours or scattered schedules. “The wait is usually about three minutes,” he said. “It’s on your schedule.”

The Transit Alliance wants Miami-Dade to spend more on its bus routes, and sees Freebee and GoConnect as diverting the county from its core mission of mass transit.

Azhar Chougle, director of the alliance, pointed to the agency’s “Drive Less. Live More.” slogan as reflecting the attention paid to would-be transit riders over people who use transit already and would benefit from improved service.

“They’re trying to convince someone with an Audi to jump on a Freebee,” Chougle said. “They’re not trying to make it easier for someone in Brownsville to hop on a bus and go downtown.”

The nonprofit advocacy group points to a Freebee contract in Palmetto Bay using a $225,000 grant from the Transportation Planning Organization. A recent analysis by Transit Alliance claimed the Freebee shuttle service cost significantly more per rider than Miami-Dade’s transit system spends per rider.

Freebee disputed the Transit Alliance analysis, saying its Palmetto Bay service cost about $11 per rider, compared to $7 per rider for the county’s transit system. The Transit Alliance later said its analysis was in error, but still contended the cost gap between the two transit options was too wide.

Since the Freebee service only launched in the middle of 2019, the company said it saw demand growing before the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020 and disrupted travel patterns countywide.

“It’s pretty unfair to even try to compare Miami Dade Transit’s cost per rider... with a brand new service that was only six months old,” Freebee partner Jason Spiegel said.

The Transit Alliance report said pricier, on-demand transit services like Freebee can make sense as a “lifeline” in areas with limited transit access, but the group noted on-demand shuttles are popping up in more affluent regions, such as Palmetto Bay, Doral and Pinecrest.

It urged Miami-Dade to shift the on-demand dollars to “large-scale transit improvements” that will bring more mobility options “to the many, not just the few.”

Nick Marano, village manager of Palmetto Bay, questioned why Transit Alliance would dismiss the municipality’s Freebee service, since it’s been a welcome option to move people toward more efficient, mass-transit options.

He said Freebee may not remain in the transit “toolkit” long term, but that it’s worth a test — especially because overall transit ridership has been decline.

“It’s clear to me that transit solutions need to embrace an all-of-the-above approach, and in that regard an on-demand option that gets residents quickly to Dadeland South Metrorail Station, via the Transitway, could be a viable option when commuting picks up again,” he said.

For now, the county’s GoConnect service only runs in two areas: the Dadeland area (loosely between Miller Drive and U.S. 1, flanked by the Palmetto Expressway to the west and an eastern corner into Pinecrest at Red Road) and an area around Cutler Bay (from Southwest 184th Street to Southwest 232nd St., east of the Transitway).

A third zone is planned in early 2021 around the Jackson Memorial hospital system’s main campus in Miami in an area known as the Civic Center. An expansion zone is also planned for the West Kendall area.

Bravo said the county wanted to roll out the on-demand service in areas where there’s both limited parking around transit hubs and high demand for those destinations. She pointed to a survey of parking permits in a Dadeland Metrorail garage that showed a number of drivers coming from just a mile or two away.

“It’s expensive to add structured parking. There’s a lot of density around there. We want to increase capacity,” she said. “It’s expensive to add structured parking,” so diverting someone from a commuter lot or garage to GoConnect can end up a cheaper way to increase use of the transit hub, she said.

“Everyone is interested in finding first-mile, last-mile solutions,” she said. “We’re trying to encourage transit use everywhere.”

How to ride in a GoConnect van

▪ 1. Download the GoConnect free app.

▪ 2. The app shows the two zones where people can be picked up and dropped off by a GoConnect van, which are currently fare-free.

▪ 3. The app will direct where to meet the van, which will likely be taking other passengers to their destinations as well.

▪ 4. Riders can also call 786-321-5842 to access GoConnect.

This article was updated to include Freebee’s response to the Transit Alliance’s analysis of the company’s service in Palmetto Bay, and to correct inaccurate information the Transit Alliance provided about the per-rider cost of Freebee in Palmetto Bay.

This story was originally published December 23, 2020 at 6:00 AM.