In this series I have written about the idle rail line that could connect our airport to PortMiami with the port and the airport paying for their own station, and about the one dollar Metromover fare that our county attorneys have confirmed requires nothing more than an ordinance amendment. 

This final column is about the third principle of a creative transit agenda, and it is the simplest one: mass transit dollars should fund the buses and trains that move thousands of people at a time. 

When our local government spends those dollars subsidizing individual car rides instead, it is not funding mass transit, it is quietly replacing it, and in Miami-Dade we have been doing exactly that through a program called Metro Connect.

How Metro Connect came into the picture matters because the origin explains the problem. When the county canceled bus routes as a result of the Better Bus audit, Metro Connect was offered as the solution for the neighborhoods those routes left behind; essentially, they replaced these routes with an on-demand service providing door-to-door trips in county-subsidized vehicles. 

By October 2023, it had been made completely free for riders but costing taxpayers roughly $32 million over several years with no fare, no cap and no questions asked; the supposed solution ended up costing more than the problem it was created to solve. 

Before going further, let me be clear about what I am not talking about. STS, our Special Transportation Service for individuals with disabilities, is a shared-ride service required by the Americans with Disabilities Act, and its riders pay $3.50 a trip. That distinction matters because not every county-funded ride serves the same purpose. I firmly support STS and will always protect it. That is a promise we must keep.

MetroConnect is something entirely different. It is an optional car service for the general public riding on the transit budget, promising savings while costing us more than the bus routes it eliminated.

Last year, I led the reform that ended the free ride. Today, MetroConnect riders pay $3.75 per trip, with a discounted $1.50 fare for trips connecting to transit hubs, and the program’s zones and hours were tightened. 

That reform saved millions of dollars.  But the model was still backwards, so this year I asked the department for the numbers. Here is what came back. 

From October 2025 through June 2026, Metro Connect provided about 212,000 rides for 8,209 unique riders at a cost to taxpayers of nearly $4 million. That works out to an average subsidy of $483 per rider. 

And that’s not all, folks because even after adding the fare, the county’s cost per ride climbed from $15 in October to $22 by June while monthly ridership fell by more than half, from over 39,000 rides to about 19,000. 

We are operating a shrinking chauffeur service whose cost per trip keeps rising, for a group of riders that would fit inside a corner of the Kaseya Center.

We need to flip the model, exactly as we did with the rideshare program at Tri-Rail three years ago. Instead of running a subsidized fleet where the county owns the cost of every trip, the county should offer a flat $3.75 credit toward a ride priced at market rates that connects you to a bus or a train, with the rider paying the rest. The same trips taken this year would have cost taxpayers about $800,000 in credits instead of nearly $4 million in subsidies, the per rider subsidy would fall from $483 to roughly $121, and against the program’s $5.5 million budget the flip frees up roughly $3.5 million every single year. 

A capped credit makes the subsidy transparent, limits taxpayer exposure by design, lets the private market compete on service, and points every trip toward the transit network instead of around it.

Now remember what we are being told at our budget hearings: the county must raise transit fares and cancel early morning and late night bus service to close the transit gap. 

Raising fares on the riders who have the least is not a solution, it is a surrender, and the arithmetic proves we do not need it. Flipping Metro Connect frees $3.5 million that we can put towards restoring the sunrise and late night routes on the chopping block. The riders on those buses are the hotel housekeepers, hospital workers and airport crews who start before dawn, tens of thousands of daily boardings that pay their fares the honest way, and every rider we push off a canceled bus deepens the very deficit the cut was supposed to close. 

There is a bitter irony in canceling buses to fund a ride program that was created because we canceled buses, and it ends now. I call the flip a bus rider dividend, because the people who depend on us most should be first in line for every dollar we save, not last.

Three columns, three principles, one standard. Use what the public has already invested in and make the beneficiaries pay their share, charge a fair fare where the ride is free through our wealthiest neighborhoods, and spend transit dollars on transit instead of car rides. None of it requires a referendum, a bond, a new tax or a fare increase, all of it is on the table at our final budget hearing this week, and every piece of it is a choice. 

Miami-Dade has spent twenty years making the same mistakes over and over. It is time we take a better route.

Raquel A. Regalado represents District 7 on the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners. She is chairwoman of the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority and vice chair of the commission’s Transportation Committee.