Metromover’s $90 Million Dollar Free Ride
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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.
For years the answer to charging a fare has been that fare gates would take two years and cost too much. When my office went line by line through the budget, we found that the county’s own unfunded needs list prices for Metromover entry gates at just $250,000, while the very same budget is already buying a $34.8 million fare collection system that explicitly covers Metromover along with Metrorail and Metrobus. We are purchasing the machinery to charge a fare while insisting we cannot charge one.
I raised this at our budget hearings a year ago and have spent the year since doing the unglamorous work of making it real. At this week’s hearing I reported two breakthroughs. First, I finally have a legal opinion from our county attorneys confirming that a Metromover fare requires only an amendment to a county ordinance, not the voter approval prior commissions were told was necessary a decade ago, and we have also confirmed that the CITT contribution currently dedicated to operations and maintenance can be used for capital improvements to the Mover. Second, this Commission passed my item directing the Mayor to deliver a full accounting of Metromover: past funding, current operating expenses, current and future capital needs, ticketing options and the revenue each would produce. Staff asked for more time, so we will not have the report prior to the budget adoption but rather in three months. To put this in perspective, a one dollar fare collected through the system we are already buying, with free transfers for Metrorail and Metrobus pass holders and continued free rides for Golden Passport seniors, would yield several million dollars a year, almost exactly matching the budget’s own unfunded Metromover list of entry gates, painting and roof replacement, about $4.5 million, with the balance going to what riders actually experience: cleaning, security and stations we can be proud of. A system that is free to everyone becomes the responsibility of no one, and paying riders are counted riders, the kind that appear in the federal formulas that fund transit.
A dollar at the platform, an ordinance amendment our attorneys have already blessed, and a partnership at every station would transform Metromover without a referendum, a bond or a new tax, and without raiding the rail money or touching a single sunrise bus. Before this county raises fares on the riders who have the least and cuts the service they need the most, the free ride through Downtown and Brickell should finally pay its dollar.
Next time: the partnerships already rebuilding our stations at no cost to taxpayers and the on demand ride program that costs hundreds of dollars per rider, money that could fund the buses our workforce actually needs.
Raquel A. Regalado represents District 7 on the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners. She is chairwoman of the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority and vice chair of the MDC Commission’s Transportation Committee.
