Archive for the 'North Terminal' Category

Odds and Ends

Published
by
Gabriel Lopez-Bernal
on July 20, 2006
in Airport, Carlos Giminez, Carnival Center, Miami, North Terminal, Parking, Transit and Transportation
. 1 Comment
  • Well it’s official, when visiting the Carnival Center for the performing arts this upcoming season you won’t have to leave the Benz at home with the Nanny and the kids. The Miami Parking Authority struck a deal with the Miami-Dade school board to manage all 770 parking spaces in 4 lots from 6 pm to 6 am weekdays and all day on weekends. One would think it wouldn’t be all that difficult for two different branches of government (Parking and Educational) to come to this agreement much sooner. Is there really that much bureaucratic red tape?

  • As is typical with any county run operation, the Airport North Terminal has finally run into the “Let’s make it look shitty to save money” stage of the project. Due to cost over-runs and a 2+ year delay on the project, our marvelous commissioners are endorsing a plan to “scale down” some of the terminal’s original features. This is why County projects never appear quite as nice as the renderings first depict; if only someone hadn’t squandered our money somewhere along the way county projects wouldn’t look so bad. Excellent quote from the article:

    “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: We need to look to keep the expenses of the terminal project down,” Mr. Gimenez said after the meeting.

    Well, I said it too, but that was before you guys had the opportunity to screw up. I think we should require our commissioners to take some time and money management classes along with the ethics classes I recommended a while ago before they are eligible for election. One would think that these important management decisions would be left up to a qualified erudite professional with a proficiency in Construction Engineering or Urban Planning, rather than Gimenez’s unsuitable BA in Public Administration. Yes, I know he was consulted by professionals on his decisions, but, the elected officials have the final word, so… this mess ultimately falls on their shoulders. Re-election anyone?

You can read all about Gimenez’s Extensive list of Transportation related experience here, on the county commission website. Look at all those committees…Whoa…

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Below the radar

Published
by
Gabriel Lopez-Bernal
on June 4, 2006
in Airport, American Airlines, Miami and North Terminal
. 0 Comments
In an effort to trim the ridiculously high costs of yet another county funded project fiasco, Airport director Jose Abreu plans to reduce the size of the North Terminal. He plans to do this by first receiving approval from the cash strapped American Airlines (um, yeah they won’t have a problem with that, considering they choose to add useless fees at every opportunity in an effort to nickel and dime the hell out of us.) In any case, what we find most troubling (aside from the escalating costs) are the insanely high estimated figures for passenger traffic:

When upgrades were designed prior to 9/11, the airport was projected to serve 55 million passengers by 2010, Mr. Abreu noted. “That just isn’t going to happen, so we have to scale back accordingly.” Now, officials project about 33 million yearly passengers by 2010.

Honestly, who makes these estimations for the use of South Florida modes of transportation? Besides, wouldn’t it have been easier to scale down the project before construction began. In any case, here we are scaling down a project that has exceeded its estimated budget by $300 million, 5 years after 9/11. Pure genius, almost as smart as the $2 million we are paying to exercise this same terminal’s people mover because of project delays (um, couldn’t we have scaled it back then?) Makes you wonder about those “Your tax dollars at work” signs all across the county…