The Great Train Wreck

In 2002, sensing that all great modern cities have great urban rail systems, the citizens of Miami-Dade County approved a ballot question calling for one. (They also sensed their grand weariness of traffic jams and two-hour public bus excursions to travel 15 miles.) Thus was born the People’s Transportation Plan, or PTP, which involved a new half-cent sales tax to fund, among other things, “rapid transit lines to West Dade, Kendall, Florida City, Miami Beach, and North Dade.” Specifically, the plan proposed to expand Metrorail from a solitary 22-mile line into a nine or ten-line system with 90 miles of track.

Seven years later, the county has spent about $1 billion of PTP sales tax money, virtually none of it directly on Metrorail expansion. About $70 million was used to pay interest on bonds that are to help fund new rail lines. Most of the rest went to operate and maintain the single Metrorail line, buy new buses, and slightly expand bus service, according to a memo county manager George Burgess sent to commissioners in May. Some of it also disappeared into roadways.

Construction crews broke ground on May 1 for a 2.4- mile Metrorail link to Miami International Airport. Had county leaders chosen to spend that $1 billion differently, that link might have been finished three years ago rather than three years from now, a full decade after the people of Miami-Dade ratified the PTP. At that rate (2.4 miles per decade) the 90-mile Metrorail system that voters approved in 2002 will be completed in approximately 270 years.

Of course, Burgess, Mayor Carlos Alvarez and county commissioners could decide to put Metrorail expansion on a faster track. But as global warming makes world-class rail systems ever more imperative, all we hear from Miami-Dade County Hall is a lot of backtracking. Commissioner Carlos Gimenez, once kind of a visionary regarding transit, has been leading a curiously retrograde effort to repeal the PTP tax, rather than lead a charge to channel it into Metrorail expansion in accordance with the 2002 ballot language. The gist of his argument seems to be that because he and his commission colleagues have spent the PTP tax on anything but Metrorail expansion they should eliminate one of the only sources of Metrorail funding.

Burgess, while trying to preserve the tax, seems inclined to send the people’s 2002 Metrorail mandate on a one-way track to oblivion. In his memo to commissioners, Burgess said it was “totally and completely unrealistic” to believe the PTP tax could ever have funded the rapid transit lines proposed in the 2002 ballot language.

“There is simply not enough funding at the federal level to fund the transit corridor needs of our nation’s cities,” he wrote. “Our community does not yet have the densities and congestion levels to ensure we are highly graded for receipt of federal funding.” And: “Each transit corridor takes 8 to 10 years to complete and the federal government rarely funds more than one corridor at a time for any one jurisdiction.”

Daunting words indeed. The new 2.4-mile link alone is expected to cost about $526 million. At that rate, the remaining 65 miles would run $14 billion.

Burgess says the drafters of the PTP wrongly assumed state and federal governments would cover three-fourths of rapid transit outlays. But what if President Obama, with all his talk about “smart transportation,” proved them right? Then Miami-Dade’s share would be $3.5 billion. In times like these, though, county leaders couldn’t possibly find such local revenue no matter how important they deemed a countywide rail system was for the planet.

But wait. In late 2007 they found a way to raise $3 billion in local tax money for construction of a new ballpark for the Florida Marlins, a truck tunnel at the Port of Miami, a downtown Miami trolley system, a bucolic campus for art and science museums at Bicentennial Park, and debt relief for the county-owned performing arts center.

We have our priorities.