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Written by Miami Today on December 22, 2025
As expansion of rapid transit in Miami-Dade County has become an approved policy with a diminished hope, county commissioners voted unanimously last week to seek a report on where the money to actually add rapid transit corridors could come from.
The commission gave Mayor Daniella Levine Cava 90 days to report “detailing possible funding mechanisms” for what was branded the Smart Plan to add six rapid transit corridors along with a network of express bus rapid transit routes.
The plan became the county’s policy in 2016, the resolution pointed out, but to date the October opening of the 20-mile-long Metro Express bus rapid transit corridor from Dadeland to Homestead using an upgraded version of the former busway roadbed has been the only completed corridor.
The next corridor on the drawing boards was the Northeast Corridor, a rail line from downtown Miami to Aventura that would eventually be extended into Broward and Palm Beach counties. That service was planned for operation by 2032, the next transit line out of the gate, because the railway tracks are already in place on a route that does not have to be acquired by the county.
But that plan hit a roadblock in Tallahassee this year as $200 million from the state that had already been approved and was pivotal to the plan was yanked out with no guarantee that it would ever be restored.
Other rapid transit corridors in the plan are even further away on the timeline. They include a North Corridor to the Broward County line, an East-West Corridor that would serve the main Florida International University campus, a Baylink in the form of a Metromover extension from downtown Miami to Miami Beach, and a Kendall Corridor that would run up Kendall Drive.
Other than the now-stalled Northeast Corridor, none of the other parts of the Smart Plan have had either funding mechanisms or detailed costs attached to them.
“There is an urgent need to construct the remaining Smart Plan corridors and enhance the mobility of Miami-Dade County residents,” said the resolution by Commissioner Oliver Gilbert III that passed last week.
“I think this item is long overdue,” said Commissioner Roberto Gonzalez, who requested that the administration look specifically at the Kendall Corridor Smart Plan improvements.
Work on that corridor, the farthest behind of all the transit legs, was linked by Commissioner Raquel Regalado to another long-delayed project, which is the synchronization of all county traffic signals to make traffic flow as smoothly and quickly as possible.
“We should get an update on the synchronization of the lights,” Ms. Regalado told commissioners. “Kendall Drive in my district is an area that is a parking lot, and it is part of the Smart Program. I did not move forward with it [under the Smart Plan] because it would involve closing a lane and making what is already a super-congested area more congested. And I’m waiting for the synchronization of the lights.”
Of concern to her, she said, is that the completion of the Smart Plan has been separated from the synchronization of traffic signals when they are really part of the same problem.
“As we’re seeing with the busway [from Dadeland to Homestead], there is a direct correlation between the transit and the signalization. Those two things keep running into each other.”
With Mr. Gilbert’s approval, a report on the signalization issue was added to the 90-day request to the mayor for full details.