A Vicious Cycle

It's almost midday and Miami-Dade County Commissioner Javier Souto zig-zags his shiny new purple mountain bike down a sidewalk past a telephone pole, a trash can, a bus bench, and a street sign. Clad in dark-green slacks, a crisp, navy-blue shirt with red and white pinstripes, and a light-green baseball cap, the trim, 59-year-old native of Sancti-Spiritus, Cuba, is journeying from west Miami-Dade to downtown Miami. He hasn't been on a bicycle in quite some time, he admits, but he's responding to a New Times invitation to ride across the second deadliest area in the nation for cyclists: Miami-Dade County. (Tampa was first in a recent poll.)

You may not know it, but federal transportation gurus and Souto no longer consider the bicycle as simply a recreational vehicle. It is an alternative mode of transit for morning and evening commutes. And it will become even more important in the brave new gridlock of the 21st Century. Yet Miami has the smallest percentage of state roads in Florida with bike lanes or paths.

On a Monday morning in May, Souto and chief of staff Bernardo Escobar quickly chart out a course at the commissioner's field office near Coral Way and SW 97th Avenue: Bike east ten blocks; catch a southbound Metrobus equipped with a bike rack; then load their two-wheelers on a Metrorail train at the Dadeland North station and head downtown.

The trek begins at 10:30 a.m., mainly because the transit authority does not allow cyclists to use the bicycle-holders mounted on county buses during rush hour. Pedaling down the sidewalk along Coral Way a couple minutes into the ride, Souto lifts a hand from the bars of his Huffy Stone Mountain and waves excitedly toward a jungle gym of electrical transformers. They are clumped along a power-line corridor that runs through a residential area in Westchester. Such easements would be excellent places for bike paths, he shouts.

The commissioner turns south on Galloway Road and halts at a bus stop. But the next vehicle is not due for 45 minutes. Of course no one has that kind of time when commuting to work so, what the heck, why not ride to the Metrorail station, New Times suggests. It's only a few miles away. The politician agrees.

Rolling southward on Galloway, Souto wisely sticks close to the sidewalk, slaloming past omnipresent obstacles. Crossing an intersection, he yells at an old woman in a blue Cadillac waiting at a red light. He tries to alert her to the fact that he's coming. "People have no respect for the bike," he exclaims.

The perils of cycling in Miami-Dade are revealed as Souto scoots through the crosswalk at the intersection of Galloway and Bird roads; the driver of an old, red Buick coupe arcs toward the commissioner, then suddenly brakes. Souto barrels ahead.

Thirty blocks south Souto approaches the corner of Galloway and Sunset. "Want to see something interesting?" he yells. He makes a sharp right and heads straight toward a lamppost, but at the last second slams his left hand into the metal and avoids it. That is not what he meant by interesting. He pulls into an empty county parking lot next to the Don Shula Expressway. Concrete steps lead to an abandoned bus stop.

Souto likens attacking the county's mass-transit problems to consuming the world's second-biggest mammal. "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time," he explains. Turning the lot into a park-and-ride facility would be a nibble. He also wants his fellow commissioners to chew on this idea: Require bike racks at all office buildings and shopping centers in the condado. With more places to park bicycles, more people would leave their bulky four-wheel gas-gulpers at home, Souto reasons.

Souto has other ideas up his inner-tube sleeve. "We should do some ordinance giving tax incentives to companies and corporations that encourage their workers to commute on bikes," he suggests. More write-offs would go to firms that build showers for sweat-soaked employees arriving from soggy South Florida commutes. "This is one way to get a few thousand cars, hopefully, off the streets," he asserts.

Souto accuses his fellow commissioners of wasting time and money devising schemes to eat the elephant all at once. "There are people here that want to put a second story on the expressways," he says. "They talk about things that may look like great solutions, but where's the money?"