Imagine waiting in the hot Miami sun for a bus that never shows. Over a three-month period, the group counted 2,103 “ghost buses” that never arrived, a 152 percent increase over the same period the previous year. About 500 bus runs start late each month, and hundreds more more never make the scheduled run at all. The Transit Alliance has been tracking how well buses adhere to their schedules, uncovering serious problems with reliability. “Riders are facing longer wait times, unreliable service, and a poorly designed route network facing haphazard cuts – sending the system into a death spiral of plunging ridership,”writes the Transit Alliance. That’s a long time to wait in Mimi’s sweltering heat, especially since only one in four bus stops provides any shelter. About 75 percent of the Miami-Dade Transit bus routes don’t come more frequently than every half hour. With less service, buses come less often, and the waits grow longer for bus riders. That was the case with Route 103 C, which saw ridership drop after service to Government Center loop was cut. The agency also has a habit of tinkering with its most popular routes, “throwing their ridership off a cliff, and priming them to be eliminated,” the Transit Alliance says. Service was cut on Miami-Dade Transit bus routes in the past year.

Service was increased on just a single route. In the past year, Miami-Dade Transit cut service on 39 bus routes, affecting one in two local bus riders. The total amount of transit service is declining Transit Alliance chair Marta Viciedo said the research drives home the point that public officials and policy makers at Miami-Dade Transit can turn around flagging bus ridership. The findings align with a recent study by McGill University researchers, who concluded that the “volume of service delivered by a transit agency in a region is by far the largest factor explaining public transit ridership.” The Transit Alliance, a local advocacy non-profit, is filling in the picture with a look at changes in Miami transit service. But those theories rely on intuition and guesswork, not research. The popular narrative casts transit as inherently inferior to driving, or blames new arrivals on the transportation scene like Uber. In fact, the drop has been especially steep, falling 25 percent since 2013. Nearly every major transit agency in the nation saw ridership decline last year, and Miami was no exception.

Miami public transit