Five months after state number-crunchers determined the cost of building a long-planned heavy rail line from downtown Miami to Hard Rock Stadium had more than doubled to $4.2 billion, local decision-makers are considering a change of plans.
Governing Board members of the Miami-Dade Transportation Planning Organization (TPO) will take up a resolution this week to amend the list of potential transit modes for the planned North Corridor to again include a fixed-guideway transit system, similar to the existing Metromover.
The updated list, if the measure is approved Thursday, would also include “other new and emerging technologies.”
“The evaluation of these technologies, without reducing the existing capacity of the corridor, may result in a cost-effective alternative to advance the North Corridor,” Daniel Iglesias, District 6 Secretary of the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT), told TPO Executive Director Aileen Bouclé in an April 15 letter.
The proposed 10-mile elevated rail line, which would run along Northwest 27th Avenue with eight stations and seven park-and-ride facilities, was estimated to cost $1.9 billion as recently as June 2024 — a years-old price point.
The figure rose to $2.2 billion six months later. In December 2025, it jumped again after planners added a light maintenance facility at the north end of the route.
Miami Today was first to flag the TPO item and the pending vote.
Rising costs have sharply worsened the project’s cost-effectiveness metrics. The cost per passenger trip is now projected at $54.47, placing the project well below the Federal Transit Administration’s threshold for favorable ratings for federal construction funding. Projects costing $35 or more per trip typically receive low ratings, making it harder to secure federal dollars. High ratings are awarded to trips under $8.
Planning for the corridor has also been plagued by delays. State studies were paused for more than two years after Miami-Dade County halted a public-private partnership effort in 2022, forcing analyses to be refreshed once the project returned to public control.
Miami-Dade adopted the Strategic Miami Area Rapid Transit (SMART) Program — originally called the SMART Plan — in April 2016 to study, secure funding for, and develop mass transit solutions for six high-volume commuting corridors countywide.
So far, just one of the program’s six routes — the upgraded 20-mile South Dade Transitway, which runs from Kendall to Florida City along a dedicated busway adjacent to U.S. 1 — has been fully funded and completed.
That corridor opened in October. It cost approximately $368 million — $100 million of which came from the federal government, with another $100 million from the state, not counting an additional $96 million for a fleet of 60 electric buses.
An even more beneficial budgeting plan has been in place for the North Corridor — 50% federal, 25% state and 25% local — though nothing has yet been approved.
Other routes eyed for improvements include the Beach Corridor from Miami to Miami Beach, the East-West Corridor from the Miami Intermodal Center to Tamiami Station, the Northeast Corridor between Miami and Aventura on Brightline-owned tracks and the Kendall Corridor between Dadeland and Krome Avenue just east of the Everglades.