Tagged: transportation

Miami is notorious for its bad drivers.

We know that it would be futile to try and teach you (yes, you) about things like the "speed limit" and that there is a difference between a yellow light and a freshly turned green light, but we figured someone should at least give you a--holes a bit of a refresher course.

Perhaps you've merely forgotten some things since you took your driver's license test (assuming you ever did take one), so here, have a quick refresher course.

Have you ever tried to cross US-1 on foot? Both in South and North Miami, all the way through Broward and even in parts of the Florida Keys it’s a harrowing experience. People are driving fast and not expecting pedestrians. It has the feel of an action movie to it and one you’re definitely not starring in.

There are other roads that have this same feel in South Florida. Brickell, Calle Ocho and the Macarthur Causeway are streets you take to get from point A to point B and pray you avoid running into a $200,000 luxury car or uninsured $500 car.

Riding a bike is a childhood right of passage.  As we age, we move from tricycle to bike with training wheels to classic two-wheeler. But at some point we shift from bikes to the expanded mobility of owning a car.

Kathryn Moore, program manager at Broward B-Cycle, thinks people should consider going back to the basics when it comes to getting around downtown Fort Lauderdale.

It was a humdinger of a story.

A Miami police officer in a marked squad car is pursued, pulled over and handcuffed by a Florida state trooper after speeding down the turnpike like race car driver Dale Earnhardt, Jr.

A dash-cam video of that pre-dawn October chase in 2011 went viral and sparked a three-month investigation by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper into how local police officers routinely endangered the general public through reckless driving.

Steve Augello lives in Spring Hill Florida, just outside of Tampa. Like a lot of dads, he always made his 17-year-old daughter, Alessandra, check-in with him when she was out. Augello also had a rule.

“You weren’t allowed to have that cell phone out while you’re driving,” Augello remembers telling Alessandra. “I even tested her a few times I called her when she was driving and it always went right through to the recorder.”

President Barack Obama will be visiting PortMiami Friday to talk about the economy.  Gov. Rick Scott, meanwhile, is asking the federal government to repay Florida for the money it has spent on port improvements.

Although Scott often criticizes the federal government for spending too much, he says this is different.

There is a lot of discontent among South Florida residents when it comes to our transit system-- both among drivers and public transit commuters. But according to data from the Census, it could be a lot worse.

After several failed bills and a decade’s worth of debate, texting and driving remains legal in Florida – and the most recently proposed bill wouldn’t change that. But drivers could be charged with vehicular homicide in the case of an accident.

According to the News Service of Florida,

Over the weekend, public transit advocates in Miami built a temporary train station along an imaginary transit line. They called it the Purple Line, sticking with the theme of Miami’s other two commuter rail lines, the Orange and the Green. Organizers of the project say this mock train station is going to help improve public transit in the city.

Several times a week, Miami reminds me of Los Angeles. For better and worse. We're both the land of sunshine, palm trees (theirs are taller) and beautiful beaches (ours are nicer based on ocean temperature and clarity, but we're missing out on the mountains). And both places have much beneath the surface of our beautiful things. Extreme wealth and poverty pressed up against each other, but rarely mixing -- largely because both places are so deeply devoted to the automobile.

Transportation engineers are planning to install pay-per-drive express lanes as part of the next big I-95 makeover in Palm Beach County.

Already in use in Miami-Dade County and under construction in Broward, express lanes provide a faster, limited-access drive for commuters who can commit to the entire distance. Tolls rise and fall as a function of traffic congestion.

In Miami, the tolls range from 25 cents to six and seven dollars, according to traffic conditions.