A better bus system for Miami-Dade? A $27M plan brings quicker arrivals, some cuts

Miami-Dade County’s transit department plans to cut wait times in half for many of its most popular bus routes by eliminating hundreds of stops and dozens of routes in the biggest change to bus service in decades — if the trade-offs can win enough support from county commissioners.

Launched in 2018, the route redesign known as the Better Bus Network is scheduled for a final vote Tuesday to implement the most significant reworking of the county’s bus routes since 1986.

With ridership in decline since well before the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020, Miami-Dade’s bus system has increasingly fallen out of favor with passengers who complain of unreliable schedules, inconvenient waits and trips simply taking too long.

Shorter waits for some, dropped bus stops for others

To boost ridership, the Better Bus proposal diverts more buses to popular routes to reduce wait times, expands the distance between bus stops to keep the buses moving faster and streamlines routes to make navigating the system easier. The plan also cuts dozens of routes, eliminates hundreds of bus stops and requires more walking for riders to reach the system.

Backers of the plan say Miami-Dade needs to offer quicker bus rides to popular destinations and across long distances to reverse a ridership slide that saw boardings down by 1.6 million between 2014 and 2019, the last full year before the pandemic. That amounted to a 32% decline in five years, accompanied by more service cuts to adjust to declining fares.

“What doesn’t work are bus routes that arrive every hour. What doesn’t work are buses that meander around the city,” said Derrick Holmes, a campaign coordinator for Transit Alliance Miami, the non-profit advocacy group that managed the Better Bus effort with county funding. “What does work is fast, reliable transit arriving throughout the day... We’re talking about weekends as well.”

The new system would cost $27 million more a year, and mean quicker travel times for riders along popular routes, with buses arriving about every 10 or 15 minutes throughout the day and not just during peak periods in the morning and afternoons.

What will the Better Bus Network mean?

The No. 11 Bus running between Florida International University’s Modesto A. Maidique campus and downtown Miami is the third most popular route in Miami-Dade, with about 6,300 riders on an average day. Outside of rush hour, buses now arrive at Route 11 stops every 20 to 40 minutes, but buses would run every 10 minutes under the proposed redesign.

In Aventura, the No. 3 Bus slows down at night, with arrivals about once every 30 minutes on the way to downtown Miami. That would switch to a bus every 15 minutes throughout the day under the plan for the No. 3, also a Top 10 bus route.

In the Goulds area, the No. 52 bus to the Dadeland South Metrorail station arrives about every 45 minutes outside of rush hour. That wait would drop by about a third under the Better Bus plan, shifting the off-peak frequency to 30 minutes, the same as the peak frequency.

For Morris Gamble, 57, waiting for the bus is a way of life. The employment counselor from Miami was sitting inside a bus shelter on Northwest 79th Avenue on a recent weekday morning.

He was waiting for the No. 11 bus outside the Mall of the Americas for a trip back to the No. 27 line, where he planned to catch the second of three buses needed to get him back to where he lives in the Brownsville neighborhood. Gamble had come here for some shopping.

“It took me about an hour to get here,” he said, pulling out his phone to show the sparse schedule for his final bus of the day, the 32. “This is the bus that takes me home. It’s a long wait for that bus.”

The Better Bus plan means gains and losses for Gamble. The route that causes him to wait the longest, the 32, won’t change its weekday arrival schedule but will see more buses on the weekend — from one an hour on Sundays to two an hour.

His overall trip should get quicker on most days, since the east-west route that will start his return trip, the No. 11 Bus, would hit its stops twice as often under the revised system.

But there’s a catch: the plan eliminates the northern detour to service stops outside the Mall of Americas, requiring a quarter mile walk to the mall from Flagler Avenue or waiting for one of the other routes that currently runs along 79th Avenue, including the 7 and the 87.

The network would eliminate about 30% of the county’s 8,000 bus stops while increasing the average distance between stops from about three blocks apart to five blocks.

About 30 of the nearly 100 existing bus routes would also be eliminated under the plan, while some existing routes would expand and eight new routes would be added to cover some of the affected stops.

Bus No. 254, a low-demand circulator running through the Brownsville neighborhood, would halt service once the Better Bus plan is fully implemented in 2022.

The route is listed as one of the least used in Miami-Dade, with about 30 boardings a day, but it also services an area where 40% of the households live in poverty, compared to 15% countywide, according to Census statistics.

Also on the chopping block: Route 238, a circulator linking Miami International Airport with Dolphin Mall, two popular destinations served by multiple bus routes. The No. 238 attracts only about 270 riders a day, placing it 63rd on the ranking of the most traveled of the county’s 94 routes.

Some routes would be condensed to eliminate overlap with other bus options. Rather than continue north on the county’s busway lanes, one of the busiest bus routes in Miami-Dade, the Coral Reef Max line would mostly stick to stops on Southwest 152nd Street. It would also shift from being Route 252 to Route 152 in the new route map and lose some of its evening hours.

Miami-Dade’s transit agency released a list of last-minute changes Monday ahead of Tuesday’s scheduled final vote on the plan, with multiple cut routes and partial routes added back into the planned redesign.

Detractors, including the president of the county’s transit union, see the reductions as cutting too deep into a bus system that’s the sole means of transportation for many.

“Changes still need to happen,” Jeffery Mitchell, president of the Transportation Workers Union Chapter Local 291. “You can’t just cut 30 routes and say, ‘It’s a better network.’”

Before Monday’s changes, the new system would have ended all county service in Miami Beach south of Fifth Street — a move the city’s housing agency said would be a disaster for low-income seniors living in the area.

Kionne McGhee, a commissioner representing South Miami-Dade, objected to reduced arrivals for the 35 route as part of a beefing up of service for other routes serving the Southland Mall area. Mitchell warned of too many bus riders being cut off in the northern part of Miami-Dade, including in the area around the Northside Metrorail Station.

On Monday afternoon, Commissioner Eileen Higgins, sponsor of the Better Bus legislation, held a public meeting to explain the revised resolution that includes the latest bus redesign.

Changes include extending the No. 14 Bus into Miami Beach’s “South of Fifth” neighborhood, restoring the existing frequency of the 35 and reversing the plan to cut the No. 21 bus, which runs from the Northside Metrorail Station to downtown.

The concessions, intended to build support for the plan on the 13-seat commission, brought a spike in the Better Bus Network’s price, too. The 2022 adopted budget, which went into effect Oct. 1, has $20 million extra for the enhancements tied to the plan.

While the legislation up for a vote Tuesday has the $20 million price tag, Higgins said in a memo the new route system’s cost would rise to about $27 million extra when including the changes announced Monday.

The full cost won’t kick in during the 2022 budget year, since the new routes and elimination of bus stops involve months of promotion and rider education.

That will likely leave the 2023 budget to bear the brunt of the new costs if the Better Bus plan gets implemented. In all, the Better Bus Network would account for about 9% of the bus system’s current $286 million budget.

For now, Miami-Dade’s transit agency is flush with COVID relief dollars from Washington, with nearly $600 million allocated to Miami-Dade’s public transportation system in 2020 and 2021.

When the Better Bus project launched in 2018 under then-Mayor Carlos Gimenez, the county required the ultimate plan to not add any financial strain to the existing transit budget.

That requirement changed in the 2022 budget proposal by Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, in office since November. Higgins argued Monday that Miami-Dade should make better bus service a budget priority.

“We have hundreds of thousands of people who take it, and many of them are transit-dependent,” she said. “If we can figure out how to start saving 30 minutes or 40 minutes out of their day, it’s money well spent.”

This story was originally published October 4, 2021 at 7:11 PM.