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.<\/p>\n
Governing Board members of the Miami-Dade Transportation Planning Organization (TPO) will take up a resolution<\/a> this week to amend the list of potential transit modes for the planned North Corridor<\/a> to again include a fixed-guideway transit system, similar to the existing Metromover.<\/p>\n The updated list, if the measure is approved Thursday, would also include \u201cother new and emerging technologies.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe evaluation of these technologies, without reducing the existing capacity of the corridor, may result in a cost-effective alternative to advance the North Corridor,\u201d Daniel Iglesias, District 6 Secretary of the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT), told TPO Executive Director Aileen Boucl\u00e9 in an April 15 letter.<\/p>\n The proposed 10-mile elevated rail line, which would run along Northwest 27th Avenue with eight stations and seven park-and-ride facilities, was\u00a0estimated to cost $1.9 billion<\/a>\u00a0as recently as June 2024 \u2014 a\u00a0years-old price point<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Miami Today<\/a> was first to flag the TPO item and the pending vote.<\/p>\n Rising costs have sharply worsened the project\u2019s cost-effectiveness metrics. The cost per passenger trip is now projected at $54.47, placing the project well below the Federal Transit Administration\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Miami-Dade adopted the Strategic Miami Area Rapid Transit (SMART) Program \u2014 originally called the\u00a0SMART Plan<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 in April 2016 to study, secure funding for, and develop mass transit solutions for six high-volume commuting corridors countywide.<\/p>\n So far, just one of the program\u2019s six routes \u2014 the upgraded 20-mile\u00a0South Dade Transitway<\/a>, which runs\u00a0from Kendall to Florida City<\/a>\u00a0along a dedicated busway adjacent to U.S. 1 \u2014 has been fully funded and completed.<\/p>\n That corridor\u00a0opened in October<\/a>. It cost approximately $368 million \u2014 $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.<\/p>\n An even more beneficial budgeting plan has been in place for the North Corridor \u2014 50% federal, 25% state and 25% local \u2014 though nothing has yet been approved.<\/p>\n Other routes eyed for improvements include the\u00a0Beach Corridor<\/a>\u00a0from Miami to Miami Beach, the\u00a0East-West Corridor<\/a>\u00a0from the Miami Intermodal Center to Tamiami Station, the\u00a0Northeast Corridor<\/a>\u00a0between Miami and Aventura on Brightline-owned tracks and the\u00a0Kendall Corridor<\/a>\u00a0between Dadeland and Krome Avenue just east of the Everglades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Five months after state number-crunchers determined the cost of building a long-planned heavy rail line from downtown Miami…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":109261,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[2345,1126,106984,123,125,124,1064,373,106985,106986,106987,106988,106989,106990,106991,106992,55909,106993,55910,11901,1798],"class_list":{"0":"post-242204","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-miami","8":"tag-fdot","9":"tag-florida-department-of-transportation","10":"tag-metrorail","11":"tag-miami","12":"tag-miami-headlines","13":"tag-miami-news","14":"tag-miami-dade","15":"tag-miami-dade-county","16":"tag-miami-dade-county-smart-plan","17":"tag-miami-dade-county-smart-program","18":"tag-miami-dade-county-tpo","19":"tag-miami-dade-county-transportation-planning-organization","20":"tag-miami-dade-smart-plan","21":"tag-miami-dade-smart-program","22":"tag-miami-dade-tpo","23":"tag-miami-dade-transportation-planning-organization","24":"tag-north-corridor","25":"tag-smart-plan","26":"tag-smart-program","27":"tag-transit","28":"tag-transportation"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242204","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=242204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242204\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/109261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}