Miami builds more incompatible transit
Head over to humantransit.org, look up the monorail archive. But here is the take away: monorails suck because you have an interconnection problem. They only go so far, and when you want to go further, you have to change vehicles, modes, and routes. Which adds hassle and consumes time.
Pop quiz, which of the following does Miami have?
HSR is on the way, Amtrak is has, Tri-Rail (Commuter Rail), MetroRail (Heavy Rail)...
Looks like light rail and streetcar are perpetually being suggested. And PRT (Personal Rapid Transit ) (GASP) is still considered an alternative. And therer is a 4.4 mile 'people mover'. Crazily enough, it appears to work, with quite high daily ridership (33,000) .
Bus Rapid Transit is provided by the Miami-Dade Busway. Quick googling suggests monorail not build, but in alternative analysis. And of course their is some local bus, including some branded as 'trolley' despite lacking a trolley pole or rails.
MetroMover seems odd to be. It's rapid transit guideway, suitable for a heavy rail system, but with station spacing (every blocks) similar to a sad local bus. It's probably faster than walking, simply because there is no need to wait at intersections. So...it's basically an elevated streetcar, at 3x the costs? On the up side, MetroMover is automated, so frequency is limited by capital investment, rather than ongoing labor costs. It's the transit system the chamber of commerce wants! Wonder how late it operates--no reason not to operate 24/7, with automation.
Metro Mover is free, which helps out with MetroRail ridership, by providing the 'last mile connection' that the heavy rail network can't provide on it's own.
Funny to think about rapid transit that way--halve the price and you can double the length. Miami has 24 miles of heavy rail, for a population of 6.1m people. Salt Lake metro has 1.3m people and 44 miles of light rail. I feel like Miami is punching under its weight.
Salt Lake, you can take the mainline TRAX along freight right of way to a location about 1.5 miles from city center. Then TRAX is street-running (albeit in dedicated guideway) for the rest of the distance. So there is no need to transfer. That's not a thing that can be done with a heavy rail metro, which has to be grade separated (elevated or underground). Which makes it 3-9x more costly per mile than LRT, all else equal*. Following our earlier assumption, that means you can only have 1/3 to 1/9 as much of it--achieving that mile of downtown subway destroys the opportunity for 9 miles of suburban at-grade railway. The mile-long bridge over the interchange chops 3 miles off the end of the railway.
In which context, MetroMover suddenly makes so much sense. It's too expensive to bring MetroRail into the downtown, so a cheaper mode is used. But since it's a transfer network, high frequency becomes very important--a mode to ferry users to the (nicer?) Metrorail stations, while they wait.
Cheapest alternative is walk, followed by local bus. But Miami is a sunbelt city, so presumably it's cut into sections by wide roads, making walking unpleasant and dangerous. As it's auto-dependent, there will be huge demand for parking, so obtaining the on-street right of way for bus lane probably didn't happen, so local buses are probably slower than walking. So something elevated would be very attractive, implying people mover or monorail. Monorail capacity would have been too high.
I'm a little surprised gondola/cable car wasn't considered, but that technology larger post-dates the metro-mover, and it's innovation was caused by the need to deal with steep grades, which Miami lacks. Exceptions do exist, such as tram systems (NYC Rooselevat island tram) intended to bridge waterways. But an elevated tram is basically a point-to-point high-wire act, so its necessarily straight. So that would have been a no-go for the non-linear and distributed array of destinations of downtown Miami.
With this in mind, the hunger for PRT makes sense. If the MetroMover has one clear flaw, it's going to be speed. Stopping every 2 blocks, I can't imagine it moving faster than ten miles an hour, and (drumroll) Wikipedia says it averages 9 miles an hour. So about as fast as a running man or a leisurely cyclist. And thus that covering 3 miles takes 20 minutes. Which probably isn't very competitive with just taking an UBER across Biscayne Bay on I-195, which Google maps suggest is about 13 minutes, call it 10 without congestion. So the UBER is actually not much faster...it just eliminates the (much slower/less pleasant) walk portion of the trip.
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*Underground construction is funny. You can 'manufacture' more space, but only at incredible cost.
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You may have noticed I did not mention automated taxis. That's because they don't exist. I'm told that doesn't matter, that they will exist. I'm skeptical. I'm still waiting on my flying car. If it doesn't exist in Dubai, which is rich, sprawling, auto-centric, with unwalkable temperatures, and autocratic enough to ignore any death-toll, I'm very very skeptical such a thing will ever happen in America.
#---------------------------------------- There is an old Heinline story called 'The Roads Must Roll' about a futuristic network of moving sidewalks, some moving 60 mph. As an urban transport system, it makes a bemusing amount of sense--certainly solves the vehicle storage problem.
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I'm always bemused when UBER is used as a comparison to local bus. Of course it's faster. It also costs 5 times as much. If we're going to talk about a transit system where the average fare is $10, we can imagine 30,000 riders a day to get to $300,000 daily income, or $109m/year. Which would be over a mile of new light rail, annually...
Head over to humantransit.org, look up the monorail archive. But here is the take away: monorails suck because you have an interconnection problem. They only go so far, and when you want to go further, you have to change vehicles, modes, and routes. Which adds hassle and consumes time.
Pop quiz, which of the following does Miami have?
- High Speed Rail
- Passenger Rail (Amtrak)
- Commuter Rail
- Heavy Rail (Metro)
- Light Rail
- Streetcar
- People Mover
- Personal Rapid Transit
- Gondola
- Elevated Tram
- Cable Car
- Monorail
- Bus Rapid Transit
- Local Bus
HSR is on the way, Amtrak is has, Tri-Rail (Commuter Rail), MetroRail (Heavy Rail)...
Looks like light rail and streetcar are perpetually being suggested. And PRT (Personal Rapid Transit ) (GASP) is still considered an alternative. And therer is a 4.4 mile 'people mover'. Crazily enough, it appears to work, with quite high daily ridership (33,000) .
Bus Rapid Transit is provided by the Miami-Dade Busway. Quick googling suggests monorail not build, but in alternative analysis. And of course their is some local bus, including some branded as 'trolley' despite lacking a trolley pole or rails.
MetroMover seems odd to be. It's rapid transit guideway, suitable for a heavy rail system, but with station spacing (every blocks) similar to a sad local bus. It's probably faster than walking, simply because there is no need to wait at intersections. So...it's basically an elevated streetcar, at 3x the costs? On the up side, MetroMover is automated, so frequency is limited by capital investment, rather than ongoing labor costs. It's the transit system the chamber of commerce wants! Wonder how late it operates--no reason not to operate 24/7, with automation.
Metro Mover is free, which helps out with MetroRail ridership, by providing the 'last mile connection' that the heavy rail network can't provide on it's own.
Funny to think about rapid transit that way--halve the price and you can double the length. Miami has 24 miles of heavy rail, for a population of 6.1m people. Salt Lake metro has 1.3m people and 44 miles of light rail. I feel like Miami is punching under its weight.
Salt Lake, you can take the mainline TRAX along freight right of way to a location about 1.5 miles from city center. Then TRAX is street-running (albeit in dedicated guideway) for the rest of the distance. So there is no need to transfer. That's not a thing that can be done with a heavy rail metro, which has to be grade separated (elevated or underground). Which makes it 3-9x more costly per mile than LRT, all else equal*. Following our earlier assumption, that means you can only have 1/3 to 1/9 as much of it--achieving that mile of downtown subway destroys the opportunity for 9 miles of suburban at-grade railway. The mile-long bridge over the interchange chops 3 miles off the end of the railway.
In which context, MetroMover suddenly makes so much sense. It's too expensive to bring MetroRail into the downtown, so a cheaper mode is used. But since it's a transfer network, high frequency becomes very important--a mode to ferry users to the (nicer?) Metrorail stations, while they wait.
Cheapest alternative is walk, followed by local bus. But Miami is a sunbelt city, so presumably it's cut into sections by wide roads, making walking unpleasant and dangerous. As it's auto-dependent, there will be huge demand for parking, so obtaining the on-street right of way for bus lane probably didn't happen, so local buses are probably slower than walking. So something elevated would be very attractive, implying people mover or monorail. Monorail capacity would have been too high.
I'm a little surprised gondola/cable car wasn't considered, but that technology larger post-dates the metro-mover, and it's innovation was caused by the need to deal with steep grades, which Miami lacks. Exceptions do exist, such as tram systems (NYC Rooselevat island tram) intended to bridge waterways. But an elevated tram is basically a point-to-point high-wire act, so its necessarily straight. So that would have been a no-go for the non-linear and distributed array of destinations of downtown Miami.
With this in mind, the hunger for PRT makes sense. If the MetroMover has one clear flaw, it's going to be speed. Stopping every 2 blocks, I can't imagine it moving faster than ten miles an hour, and (drumroll) Wikipedia says it averages 9 miles an hour. So about as fast as a running man or a leisurely cyclist. And thus that covering 3 miles takes 20 minutes. Which probably isn't very competitive with just taking an UBER across Biscayne Bay on I-195, which Google maps suggest is about 13 minutes, call it 10 without congestion. So the UBER is actually not much faster...it just eliminates the (much slower/less pleasant) walk portion of the trip.
#------------
*Underground construction is funny. You can 'manufacture' more space, but only at incredible cost.
#----------------------------------------
You may have noticed I did not mention automated taxis. That's because they don't exist. I'm told that doesn't matter, that they will exist. I'm skeptical. I'm still waiting on my flying car. If it doesn't exist in Dubai, which is rich, sprawling, auto-centric, with unwalkable temperatures, and autocratic enough to ignore any death-toll, I'm very very skeptical such a thing will ever happen in America.
#---------------------------------------- There is an old Heinline story called 'The Roads Must Roll' about a futuristic network of moving sidewalks, some moving 60 mph. As an urban transport system, it makes a bemusing amount of sense--certainly solves the vehicle storage problem.
#----------------------------------------
I'm always bemused when UBER is used as a comparison to local bus. Of course it's faster. It also costs 5 times as much. If we're going to talk about a transit system where the average fare is $10, we can imagine 30,000 riders a day to get to $300,000 daily income, or $109m/year. Which would be over a mile of new light rail, annually...
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