Officer Kenia Fallat, a spokesperson for the Miami Police Department, was driving an unmarked cop car yesterday when she hit 19-year-old Jimmy John’s sandwich-delivery bicyclist Mason Morales. Yet somehow it was Morales who eventually ended up in jail on criminal mischief charges.
Lace up your sneakers and get peddling — or at least do your best to avoid downtown or the causeways to the Beach — because tonight Miami’s cyclists will embark on their monthly 19-mile trek through town. If you’re trying to avoid traffic to make a quick escape the last Friday of the month, pay close attention to the route.
Miami Beach’s Citi Bike rental program is extremely simple: You pay a small fee, pick a bike off a rack, and ride it to another rack and leave it there. LimeBike, a Silicon Valley startup, is trying to streamline that process even further by removing the need for bike racks. You simply leave the bike on the sidewalk when you’re done, and the brakes lock automatically.
On a Sunday morning about a year ago, Robert Lansburgh rode his bike across the MacArthur Causeway. The longtime cyclist was stunned by the view along the way — but also a bit shaken by the cars rushing past him. “It’s three lanes. It’s not patrolled,” he says. “You have cars that could be going 80 mph. It’s out of control. It’s great if you have a Ferrari and you want to get it in sixth gear.”
The idea of jumping on a bike in Miami is so inherently un-Miami that the thought alone is enough to make most people shudder. In addition to dodging construction sites and potholes, there’s the fact that the blistering heat and oppressive humidity might turn you into a puddle, Alex Mack-style.
In case he hasn’t already done enough to ruin your 2017, President Donald Trump is coming to Miami today to personally make your brutal morning commute worse than it already is. Trump is taking a break from yelling at Democrats and Hillary Clinton on Twitter to reveal his Cuba policy during a speech early this afternoon at the Manuel Artime Theater in Little Havana.
A few weeks ago, Tatiana Arcia parked her car in what she thought was a public lot near McFarlane Road and South Bayshore Drive in Coconut Grove. When she returned less than ten minutes later, boots were locked on three of her wheels. A Premier Booting Services employee was about to affix a bright-orange sticker to her window. “Warning: Your vehicle has been immobilized!” it read.
Planning on driving anywhere this weekend? Good luck! With Urban Beach Week and a new air and sea show dueling for space on the beach, plus the World OutGames hosting events at venues across the county, plus Critical Mass pedaling out of downtown tonight, prepare to stare at plenty of bright-red streets on Google Maps.
Hi, I’m Kristin. I’m the art director at Miami New Times, and I’m used to suffering in South Florida’s agonizing traffic. Most days I spend at least 40 minutes each way trapped in my car, slogging between my house in Broward County and our office in Wynwood.
In a three-day stretch last month, the following things happened on U.S. 1 between Miami and the Keys: Six people in three separate car accidents had to be airlifted to hospitals in one day; a head-on collision two days later left two women hospitalized, one in critical condition; and a rare American crocodile wandered onto the highway, causing a crash involving a Freightliner truck.
If you’re a sentient human in Miami, you know by now that trying to walk or ride your bike around town can be downright scary. Last year, 1,508 pedestrians lost their lives on South Florida roads — the third highest death toll in the nation, trailing only the New York and Los Angeles metro areas.
Maurice Ferré served as the mayor of Miami from 1973 to 1985. During that time, his administration noticed that the Brickell Bridge, which spans the Miami River downtown, had been mucking up traffic on Biscayne Boulevard. The structure is a drawbridge, and every time a boat passed into the bay, traffic on both sides of U.S. 1 ground to a halt. So Ferré’s administration proposed digging a tunnel under the river.
Yesterday the gods of spring break and social media gifted us with a video of a woman twerking atop a Miami Beach Police ATV for a few short but magical seconds. Today they’ve smiled upon us once more.
Jakarta. New Delhi. Beijing. Lagos. Bangkok. Those worldwide hubs conjure images of people crammed in traffic, honking their way through congested streets and crowded town centers. But according to one recent study, none of those global cities has a traffic problem quite like Miami’s.
Artist Cynthia Fleischmann lost the bottom half of her right leg in a brutal October 2015 motorcycle accident. And she says the Florida Department of Transportation’s shoddily maintained I-95 express lanes — where broken and missing poles let people illegally jump over into the express zones — are to blame…
Sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the MacArthur Causeway, you ball up your fists and inexplicably honk your horn, because Miami logic dictates you must. As you let out a guttural cry, a Jet Ski zips past you in the water. Your first inkling — Is it DJ Khaled?! — subsides as a second, more loathsome thought makes its way to the tip of your tongue: Screw that guy.
Most citygoers love Uber, but taxi drivers can’t stand the ride-sharing app. The company has successfully “disrupted” the taxi industry, put drivers out of business, and led to mass protests in the United States and Europe. Now Uber’s new business model could put its own drivers out of business: The company has launched a pilot program in Pittsburgh, where self-driving cars ferry Uber passengers from stop to stop.
Few issues unite Miamians across the political spectrum like the consistently frustrating, for-pay express lanes running north-south on I-95. Some critics claim the lanes kill people. Others say they let rich people pay to drive without traffic. But everyone can agree that few things are more infuriating that sitting in four lanes of dead-still traffic while two perfectly usable lanes sit empty across a makeshift lane barrier.
Biking in any major city is dangerous. But biking in Miami every day can be straight-up suicidal. One study shows Miami is the fourth most dangerous city in America to commute on two wheels — behind Jacksonville, Tampa, and Orlando, three other Florida cities. Miami’s roads aren’t just crowded and poorly protected; they’re also full of drivers who seem to openly hate cyclists. In June, one bike commuter told New Times that an 81-year-old woman berated her after the elderly driver ran her over near the Miami-Dade/Broward County line.
Red-light camera operators are the tow-truck drivers and repossession kings of today’s drone-flying, surveillance-obsessed world. Camera companies place tiny, cheap lenses on traffic lights, wait for you to inch too far into an intersection, and cackle into the sky as they and the cities that hire them siphon a few hundred dollars from your wallet. The cameras themselves might not even be legal in Florida.
Most people who regularly ride Metrobus are accustomed to launching horrid invectives at Miami-Dade Transit on a daily basis. Most of the tweets tend to hit some of Metrobus’ greatest hits, including questions such as “Where did my bus go?” “What’s the point in taking the bus if it’s going to sit in standstill traffic?” and “No, seriously, did the bus I take regularly to work cross the wrong river and accidentally get trapped in the haunted bathhouse world from Spirited Away?”
Miamians with cars are forced to bend over backward each day to avoid the nonstop gridlock that is downtown traffic during the day. Trying to travel between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.? Good luck getting to Doral in less than an hour. Ditto driving across the MacArthur Causeway.
