Second in a three part series for Community Newspapers on getting creative about transit funding.
In my last column I wrote about the idle rail line to PortMiami and the first principle of a creative transit agenda, getting full value from what the public has already invested in while asking the direct beneficiaries to help pay for it. This week that principle comes home to the train we run every day through the heart of our urban core, because the way we treat Metromover tells you everything about why our transit budget never balances.
The Mayor’s report on funding the SMART Program offered the same menu residents have heard for twenty years, raise the sales tax, issue bonds, create a new property tax or raise fares, and this year’s budget goes further, quietly drawing down $89 million from the transit tax increment district, money captured to build the rail corridors we promised voters, to patch operating holes instead. At our first budget hearing this week the Mayor repeated, again, that we must raise transit fares or cancel early morning and late night bus service. We are telling the hotel worker who catches her bus before sunrise that her fare must go up or her route may disappear, while seven and a half million rides a year glide through Downtown and Brickell, one of the wealthiest square miles in Florida, completely free.
Metromover has been free since 2002, when we eliminated a 25 cent fare because collecting the quarter cost almost as much as the quarter. That logic made sense then, but it makes no sense now. The true cost of the free ride is buried in the budget, which conveniently lumps Metromover in with Metrorail rather than publishing its own operating number, but federal reports put it at about $33 million in 2024, the department now pegs it closer to $38 million a year, and this year’s proposed budget adds $52.7 million in capital spending specifically for Metromover, part of a multi year improvement program approaching $371 million. We are spending roughly $90 million this year on the Metromover system that collects nothing at the platform, while riders tell us the stations are dirty and the broken elevators and escalators leave us in violation of ADA requirements…