Audio By Carbonatix
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?”
Well, since 1992 the county has had millions of dollars in federal, state, and local funds that it could have invested in bike paths and bike lanes. Such projects fall into a category that transportation bureaucrats call “enhancements.” But the group in charge of doling out the cash, the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), which includes Souto and his fellow commissioners, has virtually ignored the wishes of local bicycle advocates. Number-crunchers at the nonprofit Rails to Trails Conservancy in Washington, D.C., found the MPO had spent $17 million in enhancement dollars this way: $12.5 million to renovate the Venetian Causeway; $1 million to restore the Cape Florida Lighthouse; and $3 million to landscape Collins Avenue, South Dixie Highway, and Interstate 95. Smaller road-beautification projects and sidewalk construction in Homestead absorbed the rest. None of it went for bike lanes, paths, or the county’s premier cycling project, the South Dade Greenway Network. Auditors are investigating a citizen group’s claim the county overpaid a contractor who drafted greenway plans.
Souto acknowledges the MPO has left bicyclers in the dust. But he quickly points out that he introduced a resolution two years ago requiring Miami-Dade Transit Agency to install racks on all new Metrobuses.
In coming months Souto and the rest of the MPO will get another chance. A federal measure passed last year offers more bike money. And commissioners are pondering other ways to raise cash for transportation ranging from a one-cent sales tax hike (an idea that has circulated in Miami-Dade County since the invention of the wheel) to raising bus fares to $13 (per ride). Souto, the bike advocate, rejects the idea of a tax, saying a majority of his constituents oppose such fees. Nor do he and his colleagues like the idea of an astronomical bus fare.
Back on Sunset Drive, Souto heads east down a cracked and bumpy asphalt path along the shoulder. Magenta bougainvillea are in bloom. “We are taking time to smell the flowers,” the commissioner chirps.
He takes a right, pedals south on SW 72nd Avenue, and a few minutes later cruises past the Dadeland Station shopping mall and into the adjacent Metrorail stop. He flashes a pass to a surly employee, slips through the gate, and waits for New Times to plunk change into the turnstile. Then he walks his bike to the escalator and heads upstairs to wait for the train. Other passengers look at the bicycles as if they were exotic canines.
Souto takes the opportunity to elaborate on another of his mass-transit proposals: a light-rail train on a section of the old Florida East Coast railroad line that would link Kendall and Westchester to Miami International Airport. To pay for it, he proposes issuing county bonds and demanding investment by area businesses. “We’ll say, ‘Guess what? You are the big landowners here. You have to buy some,'” Souto declares. “Twist their arms a little bit. Because we’re going to connect them to the airport.”
Fifteen minutes later a Metrorail train speeds into the station. New Times follows Souto into the last car. (MDTA requires that bikes ride in the rear.)
After disembarking Souto walks his ten-speed into the food court of the Stephen P. Clark Government Center followed by sheepish New Times; bikes aren’t generally allowed here. His commute has ended after only two-and-a-half hours. Assistant building manager Manuel Ferrer is looking at him. “What, you don’t bike every day?” Souto taunts. The presence of bicycles prompts two security guards to swoop in, but the commissioner persuades them to retreat.
Souto is soon mingling with County Attorney Robert Ginsburg and his assistants, Murray Greenberg and Bob Cuevas, who’ve descended from their 28th floor offices for lunch. Cuevas, a member of the Everglades Bicycle Club, concedes that he would not commute by bike. In part it’s a clothing problem. “We never know when we’re going to have to go to court,” he explains. Then there are safety considerations. If there were showers in the building he might bike from his Coral Gables home, but only in a group. Traveling alone is too dangerous, he says. Nor would Ferrer bicycle to work. “It’s too far,” he comments. He lives about three miles away, in Little Havana.
After a Coke and a flurry of cell-phone calls, Souto escorts his cycle down the escalator to the lobby and through the metal detector, setting off the alarm. A smiling guard allows him through anyway. Once he arrives in his third-floor office, he terms the trip a limited success. “We’ve proven that it can be done,” he attests with a smile. “But we have a long, long way to go with our mass-transit system.”
After consulting with his secretary Margarita Gonzalez on a proposal to bring Brazilian soccer players to town, Souto begins to hatch plans for his commute home. He has a flash of inspiration: His wife Berta, a secretary at the University of Miami medical school, will pick him up in her four-wheel-drive vehicle when she finishes work at 5:00 p.m. He will load the bike in back. “That’s what I’ll do,” he says from behind his large wooden desk.
But Gonzalez comes in and relays a call from Souto’s field office. He must attend a meeting with a police officer in 45 minutes — in west Miami-Dade. Souto instructs Gonzalez to send a van to the Dadeland North Metrorail station. “Be careful,” Gonzalez warns the commissioner as he hustles out of the office. “I need my job.”
Soon Souto is approaching the Government Center Metrorail station con bicicleta. “We believe in my office that bikes are part of the solution to the traffic-jam situation in Miami-Dade County,” he affirms. The commissioner boards the train and heads south to Dadeland, where the van awaits to shuttle him to Westchester.
