Miami Beach: AKA Nimbyville

Now that 30 Miami Beach civic organizations have banded together into a unified force, it appears that any futuristic vision of connecting Miami to Miami Beach with a Disney-style monorail will only occur with the ingestion of large amounts of hallucinogens. Some may say that MVB's plan was conceived on them anyway but after reading The SunPost's story about their efforts to come together to affect "the most important (election) in recent Miami Beach history (which will) determine what the city looks like for the next 25 years," it looks entirely hopeless as "the 30" gangup against change.

Why, you may ask?

1. Because most Beach activists can't see beyond the monorail's concrete which they equate with "development." They can't see that it negates tearing up 95% of the streets because most of it runs on beach sand. Or that it will remove cars from the roads including all light rail and trolley car concepts which share and congest traffic lanes by their mere presence. If you would like to see our solution, please click here, here, and here.
2. It has been determined that a Miami Beach election can be won on as little as a thousand votes. The new Beach 500, a political action committee, has been formed to get 1,000 people to sign an oath promising to vote only for the committee's chosen few.
3. Visionaries with a sense of the future aren't running. The ones that are running are already towing the line when it comes to "development," treating it as a pejorative when in reality it's just another word for "change" which can be good or bad and is, in fact, inevitable.
4. The current antiquated "default" BayLink solution is a result of a second vote forced onto Miami Beach residents. When Miami Beach Mayor David Dermer didn't like the outcome of the first county-wide vote in 2002 where its citizens voted to tax themselves a half-cent on sales for mass transit projects including some form of Baylink, he led the commission in calling for another vote on the subject. The fear of living through years and years of torn up streets seemed in the end only to be his fear because again, Miami Beach said bring it on. Only this time, BayLink has been diluted of its visionary grandeur and, in fact, is everything Dermer dreamed it would be: a fixed-rail trolley car system with overhead electrical wires that will require streets to be torn up for years and years to come.

How sad. What could have been a project that was inspiring, aesthetically pleasing, and removed the main objection of the inconvenience of its construction, will now be replaced with ugly high maintenance catenary lines feeding power to light rail trolley cars that will contribute to traffic congestion instead of solving it.