Miami-Dade has a new transit director. He doesn’t think you need a car in downtown Miami

Miami-Dade’s new transit director commutes to his Miami office on the Metromover each morning, and he thinks the city has a better transit system than most people realize.

“I was surprised this existed,” Eulois (pronounced YOU-liss) Cleckley said as he walked down the stairs from the Museum Park station for Metromover, a free county-run wheeled train that runs on elevated tracks throughout Miami.

“There should be no reason why you should be moving around downtown, Brickell, through Omni, by the use of your car,” he said. “Between the bus system, and the Metromover system, you have probably one of the better transit mobility options in cities I’ve seen.”

Transit boosterism is a core job description for any transportation director, but Cleckley brings with him some personal commuting patterns that help his case.

As the public works and transportation director in Denver since 2018, he often rode his bike to public meetings and spent part of his tenure in the Mile High City without a car.

Not car-free, but a Metromover commute

Cleckley, 43, said his car-free life ended well before he accepted the job as Transportation and Public Works director from Mayor Daniella Levine Cava in May. When Denver lost its car-share service and briefly saw its bike-share program fizzle too, Cleckley said bikes, buses and trains weren’t enough to get him around without an automobile.

“I could still get around, but it became a cost burden,” he said. “My Uber bill got astronomically high.”

He has a car in Miami, in part because Cleckley said his parents finally live within driving distance and he’s planning short visits to South Carolina to see them.

His $273,000-a-year position overseeing Florida’s largest transit system (and a Top 20 system nationally) is largely a first for Cleckley. Aside from some circulator buses the city runs, Denver’s transit system is under the control of an independent agency.

Cleckley’s portfolio as Denver’s transportation director mostly put him in charge of roads, sidewalks, storm-water drains and construction projects. Before that, he held transportation jobs in Houston and Washington, D.C.

In Denver, a bus-lane champion

Still, Cleckley was the point person for Denver’s role in expanding transit. That included a charter amendment transforming the city’s public works department into Denver’s first transportation department in 2020.

He also helped manage the politics when the city was choosing between road space for cars or buses. Cleckley presided over the creation of bus lanes on Denver roads for the transit authority’s buses.

“In Denver, we removed travel lanes. And survived. It’s always a challenge when you do that,” he said. “You have to figure out a way to communicate the change. Nobody likes change.”

Cleckley will face his own transit headwinds in Miami-Dade as he assumes the role of Levine Cava’s point person on transportation legislation.

She inherited negotiations for a proposed privately operated monorail system championed by the prior mayor, Carlos Gimenez, and expected to cost more than $600 million to develop. There’s also a $265 million plan for rapid-transit bus lanes on the 836 that’s a priority for Levine Cava’s top ally on the commission, Eileen Higgins.

He’s also arriving as Miami-Dade gets closer than ever to an actual rapid-transit bus line. Construction is underway on a $463 million upgrade to the South Dade busway, including new cooled platforms with curb-level boarding, pre-payment and other rail-like amenities.

His first legislative challenge will be the Better Bus Project, a three-year effort to boost ridership on the county’s bus system by increasing frequency on popular routes while shifting resources away from less popular stops.

Can Cleckley score a win on Better Bus Project?

Levine Cava wants to spend about $20 million a year extra on bus service to reduce some of the cuts required under the revenue-neutral strategy imposed by the Gimenez administration, and the plan (now called the Better Bus Network) is slated for a commission vote this fall.

That could see Cleckley having to wade into fights over unfamiliar geography for an administrator whose first day in the office was last month.

“He’s behind the curve on the Better Bus Project,” said Jeffrey Mitchell, president of the Transportation Workers Union Local 291, the union that represents the county’s transit employees. “There are some things we’re trying to get them to change.”

Mitchell was the top public critic of Gimenez’s transit director, Alice Bravo, who announced her resignation less than two months after Levine Cava’s November election.

The union chief said he’s been pleased with Cleckley’s approach so far — “He’s willing to listen” —but said he would have preferred Levine Cava promote an existing transit administrator to the top spot. “The people there are really having to give him a crash course on the department, which puts him behind the eight ball a little bit,” Mitchell said.

Grace Perdomo, executive director of Transit Alliance Miami, the advocacy group that launched the Better Bus effort in 2018, said she first met Cleckley in a Levine Cava conference room over the summer.

“When we first met him, he was looking at neighborhoods. He said he did not want to rely on a car in Miami,” Perdomo said. She said Cleckley also touted organizations like Transit Alliance Miami —a group that has criticized the county’s transit system in multiple public campaigns — as key to transit’s success.

“He shared the importance of advocacy groups. He gets that. Denver has a very strong advocacy base,” Perdomo said. “He was very interested to understand what kinds of initiatives and campaigns we had led.”

Cleckley said he sees the plan as a reflection of what the public wants.

“What’s interesting about Miami-Dade’s Better Bus Network is it’s one that’s been led by the people, and by strong advocates that have kind of challenged the county to move forward,” Cleckley said. “We basically built the plan around what people told us. What the people said is they wanted more frequency, and they wanted the service to go where the people were.”

Cleckley said he’s in the process of riding transit to learn about the new system he’s overseeing.

He would be riding his bike around Miami, too, but that’s been held up in a delayed moving delivery. “When I was in Denver, I would bike all over the place. I would bike to the grocery store,” he said.

Asked if he would feel safe on a two-wheel grocery run in downtown Miami, Cleckley paused.

“That depends,” he said. “That’s one thing we’re going to be looking at more. ... In Denver, there’s probably now close to 500 miles of bike lanes. Here, there are 180 miles of bike lanes. ... We’re partnering with our local jurisdictions here to figure out ways we can build out what we call bike-mobility or bike-lane network. And create infrastructure to make it safe for people to be able to ride.“

Cleckley on Miami-Dade buses: ‘A good experience for me’

He said he will continue his habit from Denver of being a pedestrian and biking watchdog as the department head overseeing roads.

Cleckley said his 20-minute morning walk from the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. Metromover station to the transit department’s Overtown headquarters highlighted the hazard that construction sites can be for people trying to walk or bike. In Denver, he said, similar problems typically resulted from the city not enforcing rules requiring more clearance for bikers and walkers.

On his bus rides, Cleckley said he’s been impressed by the status of the fleet, which has gone from one of the oldest in the country to having hundreds of new vehicles powered by compressed-natural gas.

“Basically, our bus fleet is essentially new,” he said. “It’s clean and it’s modern. It’s been a good experience for me.”

Miami-Dade buses are late about 25% of the time, according to department statistics, and Cleckley said the system needs to be reliable to expand ridership.

“The biggest thing I want to see us do is try to adhere to the schedule,” he said. “For most people — me included — I want to know if I show up, the bus is going to be on time. You want to be able to plan your life around it.”

This story was originally published September 13, 2021 at 1:04 PM.