With its transit system already short on cash, Miami-Dade’s ambitious blueprint for expanding rail service countywide no longer looks viable without higher taxes, according to a memo from Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.
Citing cuts in Florida’s transit grants, soaring construction costs and the county’s own financial challenges, the memo states the 2016 transportation blueprint known as the “SMART Plan” needs billions of extra dollars that likely would need to come from new taxes. Otherwise, most of the planned transit routes would have to wait a generation before Miami-Dade could consider building them.
Of the six commuting routes targeted by the SMART Plan, only one has landed a new transit line in the 10 years since the blueprint launched under then-Mayor Carlos Gimenez. That was the $300 million rapid-transit bus system that opened last fall on the existing South Dade busway, with gate arms at intersections to speed up arrival times…