Today is the last Friday in July, which means one of two things: You’re a committed Masshole prepping for tonight’s meandering ride through town, or you’re dreading getting stuck for a half-hour on the Venetian Causeway because a parade of hooting Critical Mass bicyclists is streaming across the road.
In Miami, a city where almost 77 percent of people speak a language other than English at home, the language barrier between rideshare drivers and passengers can be pretty real — so real, in fact, that one bilingual Miamian wrote an open letter asking Uber to implement a language option.
As part of a six-month pilot program pitched by Commissioner Ken Russell, six startups will be allowed to deploy their scooters in Miami. The companies — including Bird, Spin, Lime, and Bolt — will start with 50 each, meaning literally hundreds of scooters could appear overnight.
If you thought the thousands of people trying to get to Ultra would be your only traffic headache this weekend, prepare for some bad news. Today isn’t just the first day the music festival tests its plan for transporting hordes of EDM lovers to Virginia Key. It’s also the last Friday of the month, which means cyclists with Critical Mass will take over local roads for several hours.
If you were on South Beach this past Monday afternoon, you might have noticed a yellow Corvette driving erratically down Fifth Street, darting onto a sidewalk near Flamingo Park, and then crashing into a fire hydrant near Fourth Street and Lenox Avenue — all while being chased by Miami Beach Police.
At the end of July, the Florida Department of Transportation closed two westbound lanes on the MacArthur Causeway, kicking off a two-year, $12.9 million rehabilitation project on one of the two main links between Miami and Miami Beach. The repairs must take place, FDOT says, because the causeway is dangerously corroded, in large part as a result of years of salt spray from Jet Skis blasting the structure.
We’ve all been there: It’s 8 a.m. Monday morning, and you’re sitting in standstill traffic on I-95 or the Turnpike or the Dolphin Expressway, wishing you were still asleep. Some jagweed cuts you off at the exit ramp, you hit every red light thereafter, and you get to work at least ten minutes late.
The MacArthur Causeway is dangerously corroded, the Florida Department of Transportation says, in large part from years of salt spray from Jet Skis blasting beneath one of the two main links between downtown Miami and South Beach. FDOT’s solution, though, is already leaving Miami Beach politicians and residents fuming.
For years, swarms of local cyclists have been taking over city streets the last Friday of every month in a massive — and notoriously traffic-snarling — celebration of bike culture. Today they have another reason to ride: in honor of cyclists lost to distracted driving, especially Patrick Wanninkhof, a Key Biscayne native killed in 2015 while on a cross-country trip.
For years, anyone who hopped onto Miami’s Metromover paid a quarter per ride. But in 2002, voters approved a half-penny sales tax that made Metromover free. Ridership soared to 9 million annually in the early 2000s and then peaked again with a surge of new development downtown in recent years.
Last year, seemingly overnight, hundreds of brightly colored bicycles from companies like Lime and Ofo began popping up everywhere in Miami. Or, as Miami-Dade County Commissioner Javier Souto puts it, the bikes began “descending upon neighborhoods,” like some kind of two-wheeled invasive species. He and other county officials are fed up…
One of the (only) fun parts of driving in the traffic hellscape of South Florida is that you never know what you might see: a woman twerking on the roof of a car, a truck towing a flaming boat, or a man sprawled on his stomach on the hood of a Benz blazing in an express lane.
What could you do with 64 extra hours of time this year? You could marathon every Star Wars movie ever produced three times in a row. You could road-trip from Miami to San Francisco with 20 extra hours to nap along the way. Hell, you could ride your bike all the way to Atlanta if you’re into that kind of thing.
Hopping on a bike in Miami takes guts. Even for experienced cyclists, navigating aggressive drivers and oblivious pedestrians is a skill in and of itself. Picking a safe path is essential, which is why the Venetian Causeway has become one of Miami’s most used bike routes. And the Venetian just got an upgrade making it even more bicycle-friendly.
This past Tuesday, when volunteers were preparing to open for their normal 6-to-9 p.m. shift, they discovered thieves had been broken into the collective’s modified shipping container. Someone had hauled away three new bikes, expensive tools, and a generator the nonprofit group uses to keep the lights on. The total value was $4,000. It is the fourth time the bicycle collective has been targeted since it moved to Omni Park last February, according to Ruben van Hooidonk, the group’s vice president.
Last year, Miami Beach began working on a new dock at Purdy Avenue and tested an expanded water taxi service that took riders to downtown Miami and the Miami Beach Marina. Commissioners hoped offering more transportation options on water might help ease persistently maddening traffic problems on land.
American Traffic Solutions (ATS) certainly seems to be one of the most hated companies in America. The Arizona-based firm runs red-light-camera ticketing services for hundreds of cities and counties across the nation. If you’ve ever been fined $150 after a camera caught you driving through an intersection, you can probably blame that company.
The Art Basel traffic apocalypse is nigh. Gridlock looms over the horizon. For local residents who plan on staying indoors this weekend, it’s time to buy bread and milk and screw in some hurricane shutters. For visitors and Basel partygoers, however, the weekend’s horrible, recurring traffic problems are but a…
Perhaps nothing unites Miamians more than our shared hatred for I-95. A simple morning commute on the godforsaken stretch of highway almost always means dodging drivers diving through the plastic poles to get to the express lanes, narrowly avoiding horrific crashes, and sitting in traffic jams that last long enough to allow for an impromptu yoga session.
In the wake of Hurricane Irma, power outages shut down almost 70 percent of traffic lights in Miami-Dade County. The result proved what most of us already instinctively knew: Literally no one in South Florida knows how to use a four-way stop.
A Miami ordinance allows for up to 100 pedicabs to operate within city limits, but unnecessary obstacles in permitting have stifled pedicab companies from breaking in. Consequently, Miami is one of few major cities without pedicabs as part of its public transportation system.
For the past eight years, Miamians have ranked as one of the most stressed-out populations in America. And being trapped in an overpopulated city without adequate public transportation doesn’t help. Metrorail sucks so bad it’s referred to as “Metrofail,” and somehow we still haven’t figured out a way to build a train across the bay to South Beach.
