Joseph Gagliardo, a longtime South Beach resident, returned home last week from a long trip. As he had for years, he cycled from his home on the Venetian Causeway over to Lincoln Road. For a block or so he slowly pedaled east down the virtually empty mall, only to be…
Critical Mass, the monthly bike ride that takes over entire roads, happens to occur on Black Friday this month. At least fewer people are working today. Which is a good thing, unless, of course, you’re coming home with a car loaded with shopping bags sometime after 7:15 tonight. Tonight’s ride,…
Happy Thanksgiving, Miamians. And here’s something to legitimately be thankful for: No more Pay By Phone parking service fees. Seriously. Beginning at 12:01 a.m. Monday, the Miami Parking Authority (MPA) announced this week, the authority will absorb the $.35 fee that accompanies each Pay By Phone transaction. “As a measure…
Taking a trek to elsewhere in the state for Thanksgiving? Sounds unfortunate, but at least you can look forward to one perk if you take the Florida Turnpike. The road’s 24 -hour service stations will be offering everyone free coffee during specific hours during the busy travel time…
If you live in Miami Beach, the past year has been a steady descent into driving madness. First, it was impossible to travel south on Alton Road. Then random cross streets were also closed. Lanes began to magically merge and disappear like an M.C. Escher drawing. Buying organic kale at…
Last week Riptide reported on the new digital signs on Lincoln Road announcing that riding bicycles on the pedestrian mall is prohibited between 9 am and 2 am. But at that point, police weren’t actually issuing citations to offenders of the rule passed a few months ago. That changed yesterday,…
Passed in 2013, Florida’s law outlawing texting while driving isn’t really so much of a ban as it is a gentle plea to “please don’t do that.” Cops cannot pull you over solely for texting while driving, and even then the highest fine is just $60. In fact, as of…
You can’t miss them. The new signs, on Lincoln Road at Meridian and Washington avenues, are massive, and their message is loud and unambiguous. “NO BICYCLES ON LINCOLN ROAD,” they flash in lighted block letters. “BICYCLES PROHIBITED 9 A.M. to 2 A.M.” The electronic signs went up a couple of…
If you see ghosts and goblins flying around town tonight, don’t be alarmed. Demonic spirits haven’t slipped out of Hell and stolen hipsters’ fixies. Instead, it’s just a special Halloween edition of Critical Mass. That’s right. The year’s most frightening holiday happens to fall on the last Friday of the…
A man performs a stunt on his motorcycle.Motorcyclists performing death-defying stunts at high speeds while weaving through traffic on I-95 are not, unfortunately, an unusual sight in Miami, but last night those tricks proved deadly for one man. Police say the man, either 25 or 26 years old, lost control…
Yesterday Eric Arem, a Hollywood resident, won a court ruling: His red light camera citation was thrown out. At issue was that Arem hadn’t actually received the ticket from the City of Hollywood. Instead, it was issued by a Tempe, Arizona-based company, American Traffic Solutions (ATS). ATS operates the majority…
The news hit Miami Beach residents back in April like an early season tropical depression: the decaying Venetian Causeway would have to close for the better part of a year for a rebuilding project. For residents who’ve lived through more than a year of Alton Road traffic-pocalypse, losing the causeway…
The afternoon of May 31, 2008, a vigorous 95-year-old named Alice Mathas spent hours walking around South Beach with her son Paul. Around 7:45 the pair boarded a Miami-Dade bus headed back to their apartment in Bal Harbour. They didn’t make it. As Alice started down the aisle of the…
The Miami Beach bike-sharing program formerly known as DecoBike will finally expand across the bridge to the city of Miami in November, but the expanded service area isn’t the only thing changing. Thanks to a sponsorship from CitiBank, the service will now be known as CitiBike, which is also the…
Anyone who’s tried to drive through South Beach in the past year can tell you that Alton Road has been a construction-induced nightmare: snarled bumper-to-bumper traffic and nearly impossible pedestrian access to shops and restaurants. Good news! The work on Alton is nearly done. But that means the next phase…
DecoBike, Miami Beach’s 3-year-old bike-share program, has been a stirring success, with more than 1.5 million rides logged on the blue-and-silver cruisers just last year. But spend half an hour watching cyclists zipping around South Beach and you’re about as likely to spot a bear on a unicycle as you…
If your Friday night plan was to skip traffic and sneak across the Venetian Causeway to Miami Beach, you might reconsider. The narrow, two-lane toll road will host this month’s tour de Critical Mass. It’s the first time in five months that Critical Mass will cross the causeways and maneuver…
Miami may be looking to the past for its public transportation future. In the ’20s and ’30s, streetcars zoomed through the city of Miami, and now city commissioners have renewed a push to bring them back. According to Miami Today, the plan had gained steam back in 2006 but lost…
As of last October 1, texting while driving in Florida is illegal. But almost one year after the ban went into effect, it’s clear police across the state — and in Miami-Dade County — are rarely enforcing the law. Only 352 texting while driving citations have been issued in the…
Being a hotel worker is hard — low pay, long hours, ungrateful clientele. But for hundreds of workers at the Fontainebleau and theEden Roc in Miami Beach, life just got that much harder: Because of a change in city parking policy, employees are no longer able to use a nearby…
The more things change, the more they stay the same. LeBron is gone. No longer will we have wet dreams about attending Critical Mass and spotting King James next to us in the peloton. But Miami’s monthly bike celebration continues without him. Tonight’s ride will take cyclists 11.5 miles along…
At a breakfast networking event in Wynwood this morning, Miami Parking Authority chief Art Noriega, addressing the ongoing parking changes that have rankled the neighborhood’s businesses, called Wynwood a kind of “Wild Wild West” of parking and said his agency is working to refine its system. “We knew that the…
