Miami-Dade mayor scraps monorail plan. Now pushing for Metromover extension to beach

Miami-Dade County will scrap the proposed $1.3 billion plan for a monorail line to Miami Beach and invite companies to bid on a Metromover extension over Biscayne Bay, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava announced Wednesday.

Levine Cava said the monorail project was too costly for Miami-Dade and that the transit system would be better off letting riders board a Metromover car downtown and ride to South Beach without having to transfer to a different train.

“We are officially shifting gears,” Levine Cava said at a press conference. “And we’ll start working to expand the Metromover system. It will be an easy, familiar, one-seat ride from Government Center all the way to South Beach.”

A Metromover extension was estimated to cost roughly the same as a monorail line in a county-funded 2019 study, so it’s not clear why the new transit plan over the MacArthur Causeway is more feasible than the one Levine Cava inherited when she took office in 2020. Eulois Cleckley, Levine Cava’s transit director, said extending the existing system would let Miami-Dade avoid the added costs that come with the launch of a four-mile monorail line, but the administration released no financial figures.

READ MORE: A pricey trip to the beach: Monorail costs to Miami-Dade nearly double to $117M a year

In switching to a Metromover extension, Levine Cava is endorsing the transit option a county study has already said would attract more riders than monorail. Extending Metromover is also popular with transit advocates who criticized the monorail proposal as needlessly requiring riders to switch trains.

“I’m super excited. The monorail really never made sense,” said Matthew Gultanoff, director of Better Streets Miami Beach, which advocates for better pedestrian and transit options. “I’m hoping this would be the last stop in this journey.”

This takes Genting out of the equation

Before Wednesday, the Levine Cava administration was in talks with the monorail group to build a new transit station on the Genting-owned waterfront property that once housed the Miami Herald. The new monorail line would start there, and be housed in a depot with a Metromover station and bus terminals.

The new plan scraps that idea, with Metromover lines to South Beach running from Government Center as well as from the Omni station, near the former Herald site and home to a popular bus terminal that was going to move to the monorail complex. Riders on Metromover could board at Government Center or Omni and arrive in South Beach. If built, the plan would complete the “Baylink” transit route between Miami and Miami Beach that’s been on Miami-Dade’s transportation wish list since the 1980s.

In a statement, the main financial backer in the monorail partnership, Meridiam, said it was looking to the future.

“As long-term partners to Miami-Dade, the Florida Department of Transportation and other local stakeholders, Meridiam remains committed to supporting regional transit goals and looks forward to future opportunities to do just so,” the Paris-based company, which also led the Miami Port Tunnel project, said in a statement.

Barring intervention from county commissioners, Levine Cava’s announcement would be the end of a monorail push that started on a cruise ship in Hong Kong in early 2018.

That’s when then-Mayor Carlos Gimenez met with Genting CEO Lim Kok Thay about the company’s interest in pursuing a transit line connecting South Beach and the Miami land where it hoped to build a casino. Genting and partners submitted a proposal to Gimenez in 2019 to build the monorail line for about $400 million.

When Miami-Dade invited formal bids for transit options on the Beach corridor four months later, only Genting and partners responded, this time with a $655 million monorail plan. Commissioners, including Levine Cava, who was running for mayor at the time, approved the monorail proposal in the final weeks of the Gimenez administration in October 2020.

That agreement only obligated Miami-Dade to pay the monorail partnership $14 million as the private-sector engineers drew up the plans and studies needed to build an elevated transit line over the MacArthur, one of the busiest bus routes in Miami-Dade.

The total costs soared in the two years since Miami-Dade commissioners approved the interim agreement, up from $655 million to more than $1 billion.

Complications are resolved over time

While transit advocates urged Levine Cava to kill the monorail agreement in favor of extending Miami-Dade’s existing Metromover system to Miami Beach, the administration stuck with the talks.

In the fall of 2021, the Miami-Dade board that oversees the county’s half-penny sales tax considered a resolution urging commissioners to drop the monorail plan in favor of Metromover. Commissioner Eileen Higgins, chair of the board’s transportation committee, and Cleckley both spoke against the measure, calling monorail the best option for Miami-Dade.

Higgins called Metromover too slow for the four-mile trek between Miami and Miami Beach. “Do you really want to poke along going slower than traffic?” Higgins asked members of the Citizens Independent Transportation Trust. “Or do you want to use technology that gets you across at 40 or 50 mph?”

At that meeting, Cleckley said switching to Metromover would still require riders to transfer to a different train because the existing system wouldn’t mesh with the new vehicles Miami-Dade would buy for a beach extension. “You will always have to get off one to get on the other, regardless,” he said on Oct. 28, 2021.

Both Cleckley and Higgins said Wednesday they’re now ready to endorse Metromover as the better option than monorail, with a new route design and improved technology fixing the shortcomings they warned about a year ago. Transfers won’t be required, they said, and Metromover will provide the same level of service over the MacArthur as monorail would.

“We are going to give our residents and our transit riders what they want,” Higgins said.

In a memo to commissioners, Levine Cava said her administration will soon launch an invitation for companies to bid on a Metromover extension.

“This will facilitate an accelerated delivery with project design commencing in 2024, construction beginning in 2025, and operations anticipated by 2029,” the memo said. Commissioners would need to approve any changes in the county’s transit plans.

Potential for greater daily ridership

In the 2019 study by Parsons, consultants estimated building a monorail system would cost about $670 million, while extending Metromover from the Miami waterfront to South Beach would cost about $630 million. While the monorail estimates didn’t prove reliable once Genting delivered its pricing proposals, the forecasts showed construction costs roughly on par for both systems. The Parsons study also found a Metromover extension would be the most popular option with riders, generating about 13,000 trips a day over 10,000 for monorail.

Higgins said the interim agreement with the monorail group produced drawings and studies that should let Miami-Dade switch to the Metromover option. “This project is not all that behind,” she said. “This probably only puts us six months behind.”

One of the main opponents of the monorail deal was Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber, an anti-casino advocate who fought the idea of Genting owning a piece of Miami-Dade’s transit system. He endorsed the switch to Metromover.

“I’m glad the county is turning the page to a more convenient and common-sense transit option,” he said.

This story was originally published November 2, 2022 at 10:51 AM.