{"id":108937,"date":"2026-01-07T12:11:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-07T12:11:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/108937\/"},"modified":"2026-01-07T12:11:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-07T12:11:11","slug":"as-metromover-upgrades-lag-expansion-plans-seem-stupid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/108937\/","title":{"rendered":"As Metromover upgrades lag, expansion plans seem stupid"},"content":{"rendered":"

\tWritten by Michael Lewis<\/a> on January 7, 2026<\/p>\n

\"www.miamitodaynews.com\"\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Advertisement\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"As<\/p>\n

Three years ago, it seemed smart to extend Metromover to Miami Beach and the Design District. Today, the county struggles just to keep Metromover rolling where it is now, much less add on.<\/p>\n

The aging Metromover that opened on a fixed elevated guideway through downtown in 1986 got a contract in 2021 for a vital $150 million upgrade, shutting down from time to time to finish work by a May 2025 deadline.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

Yet this month, county commissioners will vote to extend a separate contract just to oversee the lagging upgrade, spending an added $15.5 million in hopes work will end by 2028 or 2029.<\/p>\n

Worse, apparently only one company can actually do the upgrade \u2013 Alstom, which is now years behind \u2013 and presumably that would be the only company that could extend Metromover to Miami Beach. To say the least, that doesn\u2019t instill confidence.<\/p>\n

Alstom is the prime contractor upgrading Metromover. In 1986 Metromover was the first urban application of the Westinghouse Automated People Mover, \u201cwhich is now part of the Alstom product portfolio,\u201d Alstom said in a June 2021 news release.<\/p>\n

\u201cOver the years, the system has been expanded and the vehicle fleet has been replaced but some of the major subsystems are reaching the end of their design life,\u201d that release said. \u201cWe are pleased to be supporting Miami-Dade County in modernizing the iconic Metromover system, which has been serving area residents and visitors for 35 years, and to be helping the county meet its future mobility requirements.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in examining a contract to oversee the work, members of the Citizens\u2019 Independent Transportation Trust were told last month that Alstom isn\u2019t working ahead on future mobility but on past-due patches and is headed into legal quagmires.<\/p>\n

\u201cDue to the prime contractor, Alstom Transport USA Inc., failure to meet required milestones and continued performance deficiencies, additional [construction, engineering and inspection] services are necessary to maintain continuous inspection and compliance monitoring, enforce schedule requirements, support Metromover maintenance coordination, and assist with emerging and anticipated claims, including mediation and arbitration processes,\u201d the trust learned in a memo from Executive Director Javier Betancourt.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As trust members grappled with more than doubling the cost for AtkinsRealis USA Inc. to oversee Alstom\u2019s work, adding $15.5 million to that fee, they properly questioned why that spending is needed. Stacy Miller, county director of transportation and public works, talked about the years-late Alstom work and hinted at future operational outages that will flummox passengers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cUnfortunately, this project is not on schedule and continues to delay,\u201d she said. \u201cWe have modified the hours of service from Metromover to try to provide the contractor with more service hours to instill some opportunity for them to advance this project. In addition, we are working with them on a completely new schedule \u2013 it\u2019s a hybrid schedule that would allow them to hopefully advance work and get greater production rates.\u201d<\/p>\n

That hybrid schedule, according to Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, \u201cwould allow closure of limited segments of the system to expedite installation and certification while maintaining at least 75% of the system in service.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s like rolling blackouts of electricity, where different areas of Metromover would be shut down from time to time. What would that mean to reliability of service?\u201d<\/p>\n

Also like electricity from a utility, it seems only a single company can work on Metromover.<\/p>\n

\u201cI will say that this is a very specialized type of project,\u201d Ms. Miller said. \u201cThere\u2019s very few firms that are capable of assisting us, and there are very few contractors who are capable of performing this work. In this instance, this is the contractor that originally produced the project \u2026 and often is the only contractor who\u2019s available to perform any upgrades to the service.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo you\u2019re not happy with them, I guess, but you\u2019re working with them?\u201d asked trust member Robert Ruano.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want to say I\u2019m not happy,\u201d Ms. Miller responded. \u201cI\u2019m not happy with their production rates, I will admit that. We want to get this work done,\u201d she added emphatically. \u201cWe need to get this work done. We will find ways of working with them\u2026. We are out of time already. We do need to extend the contract time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maybe so, but in late 2022 the mayor changed plans for Baylink running to Miami Beach from a privately funded $1.3 billion monorail across the bay to a $1 billion Metromover extension. In December, the trust was told the $1 billion cost has become $2 billion.<\/p>\n

Given a doubled cost, a system that\u2019s taking forever for maintenance, and a single vendor with which the county is struggling, we shouldn\u2019t rely on expansion of Metromover anywhere \u2013 certainly not as a Baylink that was proposed almost 40 years ago and has yet to be put under a contract that the mayor pledged would be signed in 2023. \u00a0<\/p>\n

There\u2019s just one letter separating mass transit from a transit mess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Written by Michael Lewis on January 7, 2026 Advertisement Three years ago, it seemed smart to extend Metromover…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":108938,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[225,227,226],"class_list":{"0":"post-108937","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-hialeah","8":"tag-hialeah","9":"tag-hialeah-headlines","10":"tag-hialeah-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108937\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}