East-West Corridor Metrorail Extension (Miami, Hialeah: sales, 2011, how much)

[illini84]

Does anyone know when the East-West Corridor Metrorail Extension is projected to be finished? It's set to service the airport, FIU, and some other places of interest. It's about time...haven't heard a date (or year) yet though.

[miamiblue]

Is this really happening?? Anyone have a link to more info? This is a project that should have been done years and years ago .

[compelled to reply]

I know this would be impossible to do because of the soil but...I would LOVE to see a subway in Miami Beach and have a link underwater to downtown Miami, Coconut Grove, then go under U.S.1, stop in places like Aventura, Sunny Isles,Hallandale, Hollywood, downtown FTL/airport, and have connections all the way up to Boca Raton...in my dreams!

I don't see any reason they couldn't develop elevated rail though...I could just picture the main station running through all of the high rises in Aventura...not to mention actually seeing pedestrian traffic around Miami.

[MiamiRob]

the East-West corridor is many years away since the county hasn't even bought the land necessary to construct it. This is from January 14th:

Miami-Dade Transit to hold contractor meeting for Metrorail extension
Later this month, Miami-Dade Transit (MDT) will host an informational meeting for contractors and subcontractors on the first phase of the Orange Line Metrorail extension project.

Agency officials will provide information on and present the upcoming construction contract procurement for the Orange Line – Phase 1: Miami Intermodal Center/Earlington Heights Connector, which will run 2.4 miles from the existing Earlington Heights Metrorail station to the Miami Intermodal Center (MIC), adjacent to Miami International Airport. MDT plans to advertise construction bids the first week of March. Construction on the $290 million project is scheduled to begin in late 2008 and conclude in late 2011.

Under Phase 2, the North Corridor Metrorail Extension, MDT will build a 9.5-mile extension to the Broward County Line. Phase 3, the East-West Corridor Metrorail Extension, calls for a 10- to 13-mile extension from the MIC Airport Metrorail station to Florida International University.


Miami-Dade Transit to hold contractor meeting for Metrorail extension

[eaglecall]

the speed in which the projects are developed are ridiculous. The ideas are nice, but I heard about MIC at least 4-5 years ago and it will be ready by 2011? NO WAY.

[Chelito23]

I don't know for sure, but I think the East-West line will not be online before 2020. It is a long way off to say the least. Personally i think we should be throwing money at the Metrorail to make it work and actually go places people want to go, but there is so much special interest and NIMBYism at play that it will take a loooong time....

[tallrick]

They simply do not want to do this project. The land is already available. They could use the railroad right of way they abandoned from the airport to Dadeland. They could even place the train in the center of or along the 826/836 with stations that exit at the airport, and at major intersections. The line could easily go down the center of 8'th street or along the canal. Nobody wants any real mass-transit, they want the area to be a crowded mess.

[MiamiRob]

except for the MIC connector to the airport which the county & state are paying for all the other lines need 50% Federal funding to get them built. The hold up is usually the Feds fault since the process takes forever with redtape. Right now the North line will probably get built first since it will be running up the median of NW 27 Avenue. The East/West line involves hundreds of privately owned parcels that the county has to buy.

[MiamiRob]

North route is dealt setback

Federal transit analysts raised serious questions about Miami-Dade's plan for a Metrorail expansion to the Broward County line.

By LARRY LEBOWITZ
llebowitz@MiamiHerald.com

Miami-Dade Transit's proposed Metrorail North Corridor extension up Northwest 27th Avenue to the Broward County border is about to suffer a massive setback.

Federal regulators will announce next week that the North Corridor will no longer qualify for up to $700 million in matching construction funds.

''As it stands now, they would not recommend it to Congress for funding,'' said Assistant County Manager Ysela Llort. ``We have to turn it around.''

After giving the project a ''medium'' rating last year, the Federal Transit Administration will downgrade it to ''medium-low'' -- branding it unworthy of federal funds. Llort described the downgrade as ''a setback, but not a fatal blow'' to a rail plan that has become a rallying point in Miami-Dade's black community for a quarter-century.

Federal analysts say the county hasn't set aside enough money to maintain and modernize the existing Metrorail and bus system -- especially after the new rail corridors come on-line after 2014.

They also believe the county's long-range financial forecasting is unrealistic. One of the tricks that they rejected: Transit boosted its revenues on paper by promising to raise systemwide fares nine times in the next 18 years.

While they ripped the Transit agency as a whole, the federal analysts did not slam technical merits, ridership forecasts or cost-effectiveness of the North Corridor.

It is unclear, at this point, how much the downgrade will delay the aggressive schedule that leaders have been promising to would-be Metrorail riders in North-Central Dade and southwest Broward.

`TERRIBLE NEWS'

The county had been aiming to win matching federal funds by 2009, start construction in 2010 and open the 9.5-mile extension, with seven new stations, by late 2014.

Several county sources said the downgrade could push the timetable back six months to a year -- and maybe longer if they can't persuade the analysts to restore last year's higher rating.

''It's terrible news,'' said Marc Buoniconti, a leader of the citizens watchdog group that oversees county spending of the half-cent sales tax for transit approved by voters in 2002. ``It sets us back how many years on the North? It puts our proposal on the bottom of the stack.''

Buoniconti, however, wasn't surprised by the news out of Washington. He called the county's financial projections ``flawed and inconsistent.''

``It's always been a house of cards ready to fall down.''

Like Buoniconti, federal regulators called Transit to task for balancing the long-range financial plans with unrealistic revenue assumptions -- including 50-cent fare increases in 2009, 2011 and 2013 and then 25-cent hikes every two years through 2025.

The regulators' skepticism is well founded: Reluctant county commissioners have raised fares only once since 1991. And the three 50-cent fare increases through 2013 would mean a 100 percent increase over today's fare.

CRITICAL TIME

This is not new bookkeeping trickery. For several years, Transit has boosted its supposed revenues in long-range planning documents with multiyear fare hikes that never went before commissioners -- and were never approved.

The downgrade comes at a critical time for the North Corridor.

Mistrust is already high in a community that was promised the original Metrorail line in the late 1970s, only to discover that county leaders secretly shifted it west to Hialeah at the eleventh hour.

Last fall, commissioners who represent communities along the corridor, repeatedly pressed new Transit Director Harpal Kapoor to publicly reaffirm that the North Corridor was the agency's No. 1 priority. He did.

Salvage business owner Terence Waldron, who has co-chaired a North Corridor advisory panel since 1996, said the conspiracy theories are already raging.

''It's going to be chaos in the streets,'' said Waldron, who owns a family salvage business on the corridor. ''There are certain elements on the outside [of Transit] who say that certain elements on the inside are trying to kill'' the North Corridor.

MAYOR'S REACTION

Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez insists the county ``remains committed to the North Corridor project.''

''We will continue to work with the FTA to find a way to fund, design and build this much-needed project which is so important to our community,'' Alvarez said in a statement.

A formal announcement is set for Tuesday in Washington when the Federal Transit Administration releases its annual rating of hundreds of subway, train and commuter rail proposals that are vying for a limited pool of matching federal money.

[randian]

Originally Posted by tallrick

Nobody wants any real mass-transit, they want the area to be a crowded mess.

1) I dare you to find a rail project anywhere that produced measurable reductions in traffic congestion.
2) Rail transit, especially monorail, is so expensive that it makes zero sense either as transit or as a vanity project. Vanity can be had for a lot less.
3) As is typical for such projects, they're floating long-term bonds. By the time the bonds are paid off the useful life of both rail and rolling stock will be about over. In other words, you'll have to rebuild and pay for the system all over again. Unlike roads, you can't route around the sections of track you're rebuilding, which means that you have to shut the whole system down during reconstruction.
4) Rail transit ridership and revenue numbers are invariably much lower than projections. I would argue that the projections in nearly all rail projects are outright frauds.