FL: Do Miami Beach residents want Metromover? A new poll enters the fight

Miami Beach’s elected leaders oppose extending Metromover service to South Beach — but the city’s residents strongly support the county transit project, according to a new tax-funded poll.

The survey comes from a county transit board that has long championed a “Baylink” transit line connecting downtown Miami to the Beach. Conducted by Bendixen & Amandi, a Miami polling firm, the survey found 79% of Miami Beach residents support a mass-transit link to the mainland. While 40% of residents surveyed weren’t aware of the $1 billion Metromover proposal, the plan had the “strong” support of 67% of those who knew about it.

The Citizens’ Independent Transit Trust paid $22,500 in transportation dollars to fund the poll of 400 Beach residents about the Metromover proposal that the Miami Beach City Commission voted to oppose in early 2024. The vote followed harsh pushback against the county proposal, with Miami Beach residents of a luxury condo tower off the potential elevated transit system chanting “Stop the Train!” at a 2023 town hall in South Beach.

“The vocal few have been very active,” said Meg Daly, a member of the county’s Citizens’ Independent Transportation Trust, an oversight board for Miami-Dade’s half-percent transportation sales tax. The board held a May 14 workshop on the survey results, which Daly called “very strong” and demonstrated to her that the average Miami Beach resident wants Metromover even if they’re not rallying for it. “A lot of people don’t show up and speak up,” she said.

Miami Beach Commissioner Alex Fernandez was a sponsor of the 2024 resolution urging Miami-Dade to pursue a rapid-transit bus line to the Beach instead of Metromover. It passed unanimously. In an interview this week, he said the survey results seem to miss some of the complexities of the debate — including concerns that a Metromover line would likely bring the kind of looser zoning rules that the county can impose around some transit lines.

“Of course we all want public transportation,” Fernandez said. “My concern is about the upzoning it could potentially bring.” He cited Miami Beach’s uphill battle against residential towers now authorized by Florida’s Live Local law and said the city wouldn’t want to face another zoning problem in South Beach’s historic neighborhoods.

Keith Marks, president of the South of Fifth Neighborhood Association, said the survey failed to present a full picture of the potential downsides for a Metromover extension from downtown Miami to where the MacArthur Causeway meets Fifth Street in South Beach.

“People are not against mass transportation,” he said. “When they hear about the cost, the disruption and where it’s gonna go specifically, they are not in favor of it.”

The survey found that while most Miami Beach residents aren’t using public transportation now, 65% of those polled said they’d likely use a Miami to Miami Beach Metromover route once built. Nearly half said they’d likely use it a few times a week, and 13% would use it daily.

Even if it’s ultimately approved, Miami-Dade remains years away from that possibility, with the latest Baylink effort already well behind the schedule the county’s mayor, Daniella Levine Cava, laid out when she announced the effort in late 2022. At the time, the county was pursuing a $1.3 billion monorail line to South Beach under a plan championed by the prior mayor, Carlos Gimenez. In ditching the monorail plan for the proposed Metromover extension, Levine Cava cited rising costs from the monorail proposal and the advantages of extending a transit system that already runs throughout Miami.

She and Commissioner Eileen Higgins, chair of the county’s Transportation committee, announced the shift to Metromover in a joint video and promised a County Commission vote by 2024. That hasn’t happened, the latest missed target in a Baylink effort that Miami-Dade started pursuing in the 1980s.

In a statement, Higgins, now a candidate for mayor in the city of Miami, said the original timeline was delayed as Miami-Dade answers questions from Florida’s Department of Transportation, which controls the MacArthur Causeway and other roadways around the project. “I look forward to the State approving this project soon so we can get residents moving,” she said.

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