Transit Miami

I’d like to thank those of you who took some time out of your day to participate in today’s column. As always, I encourage everyone to participate (even if you disagree with me) in all the subjects we discuss here on Transit Miami. If you have any questions, comments, or story ideas please feel free to contact me at MoveMiami@gmail.com…

2222 Biscayne, a suburban designed building, in the new urban heart of our city center. A terribly planned building for any situation and a nightmare for all South Florida residents, this building epitomizes the mess that is occurring in South Florida. Let’s begin with the rosy depiction of the “artsy like” building. Anyone else notice something conspicuously missing from the streets of Miami? Like Traffic. Lots of it too. In fact, there are actually only seven cars in the whole aerial along with the bus on tracks in the lower right hand corner. Why is this significant? Well because it appears to misrepresent the impact this building will have on the local community and all of South Florida as a whole. I’ll touch up on this in a second.

Next up; the actual building. Something about it just isn’t shaping up here with me (and no it isn’t the actual height of the building either) perhaps it’s the mammoth parking garage the building sits upon. No no, that artistic throwback Bacardi camouflage won’t fool me; I still see a parking garage, a mighty big one at that. Four parking spaces per ever thousand squared feet of rentable space. Given that it’s a 450,000 square foot office building…that equates to 1,800 parking spaces. That’s 1,800 cars which will likely travel with only one occupant every weekday down I-95, along the 836, or through your very backyard. They may even travel from as far as a new development outside the UDB and arrive to work everyday wondering why Miami traffic is such a disaster. That’s beside the point, but, I should also note that the developer has gone out of their way to market the fact that they have doubled the parking requirement for the building…It’s actually considered a selling point…

Now, we’ve got to open our eyes here and smell the coffee. This building is slated to rise about the same time that the City of Miami will be done spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build a streetcar that runs along NE 2nd Avenue (It’s the street to the right where the red bus thing is located.) It is also just one block away from the FEC corridor which may be seeing commuter passenger travel just as soon. How is it then that these modes of transportation were not taken into account when the building was designed? How is it that we are continuing to build our city so poorly? Yes, we’ve finally gotten the right idea about urban growth in our city’s core, but why are allowing ridiculous parking requirements to further jeopardize the quality of life? My usual rhetoric? Yes, but how will anyone get to this building if all of our roads are already over capacity? It’s likely that the developer hasn’t taken this into account or simply doesn’t care. Perhaps the traffic impact analysis is coming back saying that everything is A-OK when it clearly is not…

In addition to failing to take into account the Miami streetcar properly, the building continues to personify what makes using public transit so difficult to begin with. Take the non shaded sidewalks as an example. How would you like to walk in the heat or rain along that sidewalk on your way to the streetcar? While we rethink our daily commuting habits, we need to start planning our buildings to incorporate a new urban way of life; otherwise the daily ridership of the streetcar will be as lackluster as metrorail once was while the tempers along the interstates will be higher than ever…

Oh, by the way, the building is advertised as being located in the “Midtown Financial District.” I guess there must be a bank nearby or something…