Will Metromover expand? What to know about the Miami train — and why a shark rode it
The mayor of Miami-Dade County wants to extend Metromover to run east and west along the MacArthur Causeway that links Miami and Miami Beach. The idea replaces a proposal to build a separate monorail across Biscayne Bay.
If the Metromover proposal becomes reality, it wouldn’t be the first time the light-rail system has been expanded.
Metromover started in 1986 with an elevated circular route around downtown Miami. In 1994, the driverless system was extended in two separate legs: the performing arts/museum district to the north and the Brickell area to the south.
While its most devoted passengers are downtown workers, tourists, basketball fans and concertgoers, the most unusual rider was — a shark.
In 2009, the Metromover doors opened at Bayfront Park in Miami and downtown passengers were forced to sidestep a listless six-foot nurse shark, according to a report at the time in the Miami Herald. How did it get there? Apparently the bloody shark was abandoned by people who tried to sell it to fish markets for $10.
Here’s what to know about riding the county-run people mover, and how it got started:
What to know about Metromover
Popular stops: Metromover circles downtown Miami and extends to Brickell and the Arsht center areas. The 20 stations stop near the Miami Heat’s arena, Bayside Marketplace and Miami Dade College’s downtown campus. The system also links with Metrorail.
Stations: Metromover stops at 20 stations around downtown Miami, Brickell and the Omni district.
When it runs: 5 a.m. to midnight daily.
Cost: Free
How Metromover got started
Published April 1986
By Dave Von Drehle
Thousands of Miami’s downtowners Friday jammed onto Metromover, the mass transit of the future, and rode around in circles, loving it. But Fun Ride Expert Amy Burrell said it was not, repeat not, better than Disney World.
“Disney World is better, because it goes slower and it goes like this,” said Burrell, 4, moving her hand excitedly to show how it goes at Disney World.
So score Metromover a close second. It’s fun, and -- as Dorothy Wilbur pointed out -- you can get from work to Burdines on it. For a moment, in fact, Amy Burrell even confused it with the Magic Kingdom, and said so.
Then she looked down from the elevated track and saw the vacant lots and rubble and sun-baked parking that stretch out around stations like State Plaza and Edcom. She realized her mistake.
“Well, this certainly shows that downtown needs a little facelift,” said Dorothy Wilbur, as Metromover purred along.
A facelift? Riding Metromover through the lunch hour, a person couldn’t help hearing much more optimistic talk than that. Talk of transformation. The Wonderful World of the Future, where gleaming high-tech passenger compartments glide silently over elevated tracks, guided by computers from distant control centers.
More than 13,000 people rode Metromover the first day, officials estimate.
Most of the riders weren’t going anywhere, just using their lunch hours to enjoy the 12-minute loop around the city. In air conditioned comfort. And for free.
At 12:40, a voice rang out from the middle of a sardine- packed compartment. “Wow. This is great!” Then the little green- white-and-blue computer-driven box full of people zoomed up a hill and lurched around a corner and everyone shrieked and laughed and stomped on each other’s feet.
The section of track where you zoom and lurch - what some riders were already calling “the thrill part” - comes just after the World Trade Center station on the counter-clockwise route. Here is Metromover in all its glory: thrills, great bay views, modern office towers and lots of high-powered people riding along talking about mergers.
It was happening. Everyone was giving it a try. Everyone wanted to say they rode Metromover on its very first official day.
And they loved it. “It’s great. I just wish I could use it,” said Mark Smith, 27, who unfortunately has to have a car around because of his work, which is managing real estate.
People were smiling and laughing and making friends with utter strangers. They helped each other with the main Metromover pastime, which is spotting landmarks of the downtown never seen before from this vista. For many, it was a new downtown.
“I’m no longer trapped at the Metro Building,” said Bonnie Burrell, who works for the county manager. “This is opening up a whole new realm for me.”
The first experience
Published March 1986
By Luis Feldstein Soto
Guided by the invisible hand of computers, the rubber-tired cars whir around in circles like toy trains living out a child’s fantasy.
Doors slide open, red signs flash, even a baritone voice warns passengers to “hold on while the train is departing” - all orchestrated by machines doing a human’s job.
There’s no driver aboard Miami’s People Mover, but there’s no reason for alarm. For 10 minutes, passengers rise above downtown to see a world hidden from the street.
Clutching handrails, they wend their way from close encounters to faraway vistas. One second they’re wide-eyed over a view of Biscayne Bay, the next they’re squinting through the drapes of a Howard Johnson’s hotel room, almost close enough to make out the wine label on the cocktail table.
They come eye to eye with huge neon signs and the napes of lampposts. They skim the royal palms along Biscayne Boulevard, then squeeze between the walls of concrete on First Street, high above the jewelry stores, smoky grills and $3-an-hour parking lots.
America’s first downtown People Mover opens for business April 21, bringing all points in Miami’s core within a five- minute ride of each other. The fare is 25 cents, free if you connect from a ride on Metrorail at Government Center, where both systems meet.
A round trip on the 1.9-mile loop takes 10 minutes, but only joy-riders will stay aboard that long. Everyone else will choose between two parallel tracks -- one running clockwise, the other counterclockwise -- depending on which will reach a destination faster.
For months, the 12 rubber-tired cars have been posing for photos and otherwise showing off while workers test the high- tech gadgetry. Passersby gawk from below, but only a few have snared on-board previews.
What they’ve experienced, through dips and curves, is more like a “horizontal elevator” than a roller coaster, said U.S. Rep. William Lehman, the $148 million People Mover’s chief fund- raiser in Washington.
“It goes up and down a little bit. I felt as if I was riding the wave of the future,” Lehman said. “It was an upbeat kind of feeling and a great view.”
If what they see pleases the eye, what they don’t see can tweak the nerves. Cases in point:
- There’s no driver aboard, no human hand to negotiate the 30-mile-per-hour stretches and 12-mph curves. That’s done by computer and monitored from a fifth-floor control room at Government Center.
- When the two tracks separate, the car seems to become airborne as its underbelly hides the guideway from view. A peek out the side windows reveals no visible means of support. Actually, the car is hugging tightly to a steel rail below.
- Everyone but the first six people aboard will stand up. The 39-foot cars have only three box seats on each end.
The handrails come in especially handy when leaving a station. The cars pull out with uncharacteristic thrust, costing unwary riders about two backward steps to regain their balance.
Then there’s The Hill, a three-second ascent that can send stomachs aflutter. It looms a few yards beyond Fort Dallas Park station. The car gathers momentum, swoops up a steep incline and levels out at 51 feet above street level, the system’s highest point.
Farther east, it swings around the Southeast Financial Center, only feet from the second-floor conference rooms. It rolls north along airy Biscayne -- with a birds-eye view of Bayfront Park -- before plunging back into downtown’s concrete core.
The view, until then dominated by bay waters and skylines, burrows in on rooftops and busy intersections. The salty breeze from Biscayne Bay gives way to the salty fumes of McDonald’s french fries cooking below First Street station.
For all the scenic variety, the nine stations remain a model of continuity. Arched entrances lead to turnstiles, which lead to stairs and escalators, which lead to open-air platforms with tiled floors and vaulted ceilings.
The windswept platforms preserve the vistas, but at a dizzying cost to vertigo-sufferers. On both sides, only the thin track stands between the precipice and the pavement below.
But the height creates its own antidote -- an immense kaleidoscope slowly churning thousands of poses against the sky.
The extensions
Published May 1994
By Peter Whoriskey
The geography of downtown Miami, stretched thinly across two miles of bayfront, confounds even the simplest trip.
It’s too far and too hot to walk from County Hall to the Omni Mall, or from a Brickell office to the courthouse. The bus routes are often a mystery. So you get in the car, curse the heat, damn the traffic, pay for parking -- and wonder why you bothered.
But downtown is about to shrink.
Beginning Thursday, the whirring overhead trains known as Metromover will span the entire business district, linking three commercial centers -- Brickell Avenue, the Omni neighborhood and downtown proper.
Getting anywhere will cost 25 cents.
Suddenly, it’ll be cheaper and more convenient, if not necessarily faster, to bop from a Brickell office to a downtown courthouse, or from a downtown hotel to movies at the Omni.
The trams will take 29-year-old Art Herrera from his office south of the Miami River to the Burdines downtown. They’ll take Ileana Nieto, a Brickell Avenue bank audit manager, to lunch at Bayside. They will take Emma Briggs, 22, from her Omni area apartment to her job downtown.
Metromover has operated downtown for eight years, a dual loop of driverless, computer-controlled trams running through the city’s core. The new extensions add two miles of track, more than doubling the number of stops, to 21. It will connect with the high-speed Metrorail trains in two places.
The Metro-Dade Transit Agency, which operates the Metromover, predicts that the number of daily boardings will jump from 6,800 to an estimated 13,000 within a year.
“I don’t care what kind of car you own, no one likes to drive in downtown traffic,” said Herrera, an art department manager. “Unless you’re really a snob, you’re going to be riding the Metromover.”
The way people travel exerts a powerful force on the character of a place. The car culture has determined the geography of Los Angeles, just as the streetcar and subway determined the density of New York.
What Metromover could give Miami, in essence, is a new way of looking at local geography. The city could become as easy to traverse as the Dadeland Mall.
It takes about 10 or 15 minutes to walk from one end of Dadeland to the other.
In the same time or less, the Metromover can carry a passenger from Omni or Brickell to stations for the Metro-Dade Center, or the federal courthouse. “It takes all these places and brings them closer together,” said Adam Lukin, a planner for the Downtown Development Authority. “It makes points within the downtown as easily accessible as stores within a mall.”
Yet just how much the Metromover could affect Miami is unknown.
Its popularity will depend on its convenience. Which is the faster way to get around? Which is cheaper? Which is more pleasant?
In a Herald comparison, Metromover travel generally took longer - but passengers saved money on parking.
Taking the car guarantees a seat and your choice of music. The Metromover has only a few seats - it is designed for standing travel.
The perception of crime is also expected to influence ridership.
According to statistics from Wackenhut Corp., the security firm that patrols the existing Metromover loop, patrons have been relatively safe. For the first four months of 1994, there were no reported robberies. The only troublesome incidents were one simple assault, two incidents of vandalism, and three of trespassing.
Will people switch to Metromover? It depends.
“There’s no way I’m going to waste time at lunch on the Metromover if I can drive,” said Greg Albers, 45, a computer analyst on Brickell Avenue.
“Anytime I can let someone else drive, I think I would, even if it would cost a few extra minutes,” said Alan Olkes, an associate superintendent at the School Board.
Though the opening of the downtown Metromover loop did not lead to a building boom, a few restaurants and shops near the new extensions are hoping for new clients.
The owners of the Omni Mall are so excited they spent more than a half-million dollars for a sky bridge from the station to the mall.
The owner of the Fishbone Grille and Tobacco Road bar on Miami Avenue expects more patrons.
And the leasing agents of a five-story office building across from the Financial District station pitch its Metromover access to prospective customers.
“Now an attorney can lease space and get downtown to the courthouse without a car in just a few minutes,” said Maggie Kurtz, who is leasing space at 1390 Brickell Avenue.
But by the county’s own estimates, only a fraction of the 100,000 people who work in the Brickell, downtown and Omni sections will ride Metromover regularly. Cars are just too much of a habit.
About nine of every 10 people who travel to the downtown arrive by car, according to a 1988 county report.
While few downtown workers must march more than three blocks to a station, city streets discourage pedestrians. Modern buildings lack the shaded sidewalk arcades of old Miami, barren parking lots line many blocks, and some streets are deserted -- even during the day.
“You look a lot more impressive walking out of your BMW than you do walking off of a Metromover,” said Ira Sheskin, a University of Miami geography professor. “This is still very much a city based around the automobile.”
For those bold enough to try it, though, Metromover will mean the freedom to circumnavigate the world of downtown, no wheels required.
Evangeline Lacey, a 23-year-old student, will take it from Brickell Avenue to classes at Miami-Dade Community College. Jackie Rivera, a self-described “walker,” will take it on errands around town. Chad Donald, 34, a maintenance worker, will take it from his apartment downtown to the Omni for shopping.
“I’m going to check it out, definitely,” Donald said. “Where else can I go for a quarter?”