Surface level vs. Elevated transportation

I couldn't agree with you more. That's been my point for a long time. We need to expand metrorail instead of starting a Bus rapid transit or CSX rail system. Elevated rail and underground rail (HEAVY RAIL) are a lot more substantial and are what we need to be looking to build here in South Florida. I try to ride metrorail and metromover as much as possible, but I would not ride buses or light rail. Most people whom transit is trying to attract feel this way as well.

Streetcar is not necessary at all. We need to expand metrorail and maybe expand metromover omni loop into midtown, but the streetcar is somewhat of a waste IMO. It would still be good because it would cover the areas not covered by existing metrorail/metromover, and the Coral Gables Trolley has been extremely successful already. Plus, it would not detract from the possibility of getting more metrorail expansion, since it would be financed totally by the City of Miami, without any county, state, or federal funds like metrorail.

Remember, there's one more option besides elevated/aerial that (with the possible exception of Palmetto Station) has been largely ignored by MDTA: at grade, or depressed to some degree in a trench, ducking below streets it crosses (or splitting the difference, with the train going down a few feet and the cars going up a few feet).

Example, from Washington Metro's yellow line south of Reagan Airport:


The advantage of going down & under instead of up & over is the reduced clearance needed. If the tracks go over a road, they have to be high enough to allow even the tallest street-legal 18-wheeler to pass below. In contrast, a box tunnel below a road only needs to be as tall as the trains that will pass through. And if you run most of the track at ground level, need 12 feet of vertical clearance, and dip the trains by 10 feet to go under a road that goes 5 feet higher at the point, you can do it in less than 100 feet if you're willing to subject the riders to the same slopes and G-forces they'd experience in a car on a freeway (10-12% grade).

There's also the at grade transit with its own dedicated lane option (i.e. the Green Line in Boston running in the medians).

On the down side it requires very wide streets with wide medians to work. Biscayne Blvd. downtown is probably the only street down here that is wide enough.

The problem is, running alongside or down the center of a major road (even within a dedicated lane) screws up parking, left turns, right turns, or some permutation of the three. Just look at the grief and hell caused by the South Dade Busway, especially at the Falls. Whomever came up with the nutty idea of NOT having an overpass there for the buses should just be taken out behind Government Center and unceremoniously shot for condemning millions of South Dade commuters to decades of worsened gridlock hell. :cheers:

There are two exceptions I might make:

1. A rail line that runs alongside existing railroad tracks and crosses a road with 4 or fewer lanes, if and only if there are no important roads running parallel and adjacent to the tracks. If there IS a road running alongside the tracks, ask yourself: could they cul-de-sac that road so it no longer crosses the major road without seriously causing a major problem? If the answer is "yes", it's probably OK to go ahead with the grade crossing. If the answer is "no", the transit crossing should almost certainly be grade-separated. NW 12th Street/Perimeter Road at the CSX and FEC crossings is a prime example... it's a 2-lane road, and a 30 second red light every 5-10 minutes won't kill anyone. SW 8th Street where CSX and FEC cross (near SW 69th Ave and SW 71 Ave) is a questionable example (I'm not totally comfortable with a grade crossing at SW 8th Street, because it's a fairly major road with lots of traffic). Pretty much the entire FEC corridor next to Biscayne Blvd or W. Dixie Highway is an example of where it would almost certainly NOT be acceptable... there's just too much traffic on Biscayne (including cars turning right), and too much traffic on West Dixie -- itself too close to the tracks for comfort.

2. Transit line runs alongside freeway and crosses road with 4 or fewer lanes that does NOT have an interchange with the freeway there, nor any adjacent parallel roads with people turning right to screw things up. Richmond Drive/SW168 Street at the Turnpike is an example. The place where CSX crosses 87th Avenue, and SR874 goes over 87th avenue, would be a good example as well. A 30-second red light so the train can cross every 3-10 minutes won't seriously cause any real problems there.

Except for the tiny detail that discretionary transit riders (the ones you really want to attract, since they represent one fewer car to gridlock the roads at rush hour) almost universally snub BRT. In almost every case, the overwhelming majority of people who use BRT are people who would have taken a regular bus anyway, because they're poor and have no good alternative. In a way, BRT is the least cost-effective transit mode of all, because it means middle-class taxpayers are ultimately spending lots of money to give nicer buses to poor people (who, by definition, consume more government services than they contribute in taxes), that they themselves would never willingly ride with any regularity.

It's like buying clothes.

• A $10 shirt you never wear is a complete waste of money, because the per-use cost of something never used is 'infinity'
• A $25 shirt you wear once is pointless extravagance, because $25 divided by 1 = $25.
• A $100 shirt you wear once a week for 2 years is a great value, because it ends up costing only $1 per wearing.

$500 of Joe Taxpayer's PTP taxes spent on building the world's greatest BRT network is effectively burned and wasted as far as he's concerned, because he'll never use it, and SR-836 will have just as many drivers competing with him for space as it did before. On the other hand, $500 of Joe Taxpayer's PTP taxes spent on a heavy rail line that enables 100k-250k south/west Dade residents to get downtown in 30 minutes without driving along the Turnpike and 836 is an incredible value, because if he lives near a station he might personally use it, and if he doesn't, he'll at least get to indirectly benefit and enjoy visibly-reduced gridlock on 836.

As for BRT being temporary, well, in almost every case, it's NEVER cost-effective to upgrade BRT to rail, even if density eventually DOES increase to levels that would have justified it originally. Just ask Ottawa, whose planners have conceded that BRT was a shortsighted mistake, but the marginal benefit of replacing it with rail isn't justified by the marginal cost of doing so because they've already spent so much money on the BRT infrastructure already in place, and that they're better off spending the money to build new rail lines to other areas not served by BRT instead.

In the Dade County context, we'd generally get more "bang per buck" by leaving the Busway as is (with a few new overpasses for it at roads like 136th Street and 152nd Street to mitigate its impact on adjacent traffic), and building a new metrorail line along the Turnpike with express trains that haul ass downtown, than we would from trying to replace the busway with Metrorail all the way to Cutler Ridge or beyond. I might, however, wiggle a bit for an extension to the Falls since there's literally no good way to drive from Pinecrest to the Turnpike thanks to the road disaster around 136th Street that Dade County allowed to happen in the 1960s & 1970s instead of establishing a proper arterial corridor straight west like they should have... but I'd honestly put that Metrorail extension near the end of the 'importance' list, after E-W, Coral Way to Cutler Ridge along the Turnpike, and South Beach... probably lower than even the North corridor in raw taxpayer value.

Not really. An entirely elevated line consists of miles and miles of concrete bridges. A surface line that ducks under roads it crosses only gets expensive for the road crossing itself. Even if the construction costs are comparable, the long-term "once in a generation" maintenance costs are lower for a mostly ground-level track with a few box tunnels than they are for fully-elevated concrete structures.

In my opinion, the value of light rail is that it CAN cross streets at grade if they have little traffic to begin with, or the rail line is a rarely-used spur. The fact that they can do it doesn't mean they should do it routinely or indiscriminately.

(which is to try to achieve the same thing with considerably less cost).

Click to expand...

But that's just it... they won't achieve the same thing. It's a fact, demonstrated over and over again across America, that most discretionary riders who'll tolerate rail won't put up with a bus, no matter how hard the authorities try to make it look like a faux trolley. And rail vehicles intermixed with heavy traffic on major roads are gridlock-causing at best, and lethally dangerous at worst.

You're right spellbound, but I think with the addition of the MIC extension, and the growing number of people who work downtown with the coming new office buildings, we will see ridership numbers with Metrorail about the same as MARTA. Remember also in a few years Miami will have more people going downtown than Atlanta, we have a lot more buildings downtown than them, it's just that a lot of them are under construction right now. Once they are inhabitable, we will have a lot of people living and working downtown, who will be taking metrorail/metromover into the downtown area. Also with the airport link, most Miami residents who live anywhere close to a station will take the metrorail to the airport......especially all the people who live in downtown and the City of Miami itself.......
......maybe MARTA has much higher numbers right now but with Miami's growing downtown and the addition of the airport line, I see metrorail catching up with MARTA. And even if Atlanta is growing more than any other city overall (the metro area), Miami's downtown is growing more than any other city in the U.S. in terms of population and # of skyscrapers. Soon we will have a lot more people living and working downtown than Atlanta......we already do on the living side, but soon we also will beat them on the working side.

I tend to think Atlanta will continue to have a significantly larger number of downtown office workers because of the unusually large number of major corporate centers there. Coca-Cola, CNN, Home Depot, countless other Fortune 500 companies, etc. If anything, the pace of business relocation to Atlanta has increased even more in recent years because of its location and business climate. Probably only New York and Chicago have a bigger corporate presence.

Miami has a lot of regional corporate offices (particularly their Latin American divisions) but it isn't considered a particularly big corporate center by national standards. I once worked a bit in corporate marketing down there (for the Heat) and it was a struggle---moreso than in many other markets.

The significant amount of residential construction in Miami will help, no question, but there's two factors to consider in regards to Metrorail specifically. First is how much they will actually use it. Assuming many of them will be working in the CBD, Metrorail will be of limited use to them aside from an aiport link. For longer trips (to the very few places of interest Metrorail serves) they'll most likely be using cars---just as the overwhelming majority of South Floridians do, for better or worse.

Additionally, there's a very real question of how many of these units will actually be occupied and whether it'll be a year-round residence for many. It's no secret that many units are being held by speculators that wished to flip them and are now in a state of limbo because the market has grown flaccid, and it's also known that many units were bought as a second home...meaning they may sit unoccupied for significant parts of the year, particularly in the summer months. Whatever happens, it can only have a positive impact on Metrorail but I don't think it will be as dramatic as some may think.

On a side note, I've gotta say that as much as I want to see ANY Metrorail expansion I'm agreeing more and more with those on this board (and elsewhere) that pushing the North extension over the E/W line was a colossal mistake. I just don't see that extension providing any big boost in ridership realistically. The E/W line made a lot more sense to making the overall system more productive.

I mean, much as I like the idea of a stop at Dolphin Stadium we're talking about a station that will serve a useful purpose (even with events other than football) maybe 20-25 times a year, at best. That leaves about 340 days every year when it basically just sits there barely used. Not good. And the rest of the line doesn't seem to have much more promise than the original did. Why will a station in Opa-Locka be any less forlorn and void of passengers than those further south on 27th Avenue, y'know?

I dunno...IF the E/W line should ever become reality, the entire system would start to make some sense, but they really messed up not going for that one before the North line. Because of the difficulty in getting federal money, this really could wind up being an "either one or the other" situation when all is said and done---rather than getting both---but there's no going back now.

I tend to think it's just because doing it that way was "easier" from a land acquisition and right-of-way standpoint, but that's not necessarily good planning.