Category: transit
Kendall votes to push the big red button
Sorry guys, you’re trafFUCKED. Forever. Why? You moved into bullshit like this. Here’s an example of the road structure common in KendHELL:
Developments were intentionally fragmented and designed to make access via anything but motor vehicle impractical to impart an aesthetic sense of distance from the major roadways and create an artificial sense of isolation and security. Many developments are walled in completely and gated.
Yeah… Good luck with that mass transit… It’s nearly impossible. Enjoy your four hour traffic jams.
Might as well just flood it again and return it to the Everglades 😉
The strange tale of the broken Easy Card.
Oh hi. What nonsense is this?
This is what my easy card looks like on a Tri-Rail ticket machine right now. On a Miami-Dade Transit machine, it looks the same but also shows “day pass… Pending” in the bottom pass list.
No matter what kind of pass I load to this card, it will fail to be activated on first use, and will lead to a negative cash balance for the amount of the regular fare for whatever I rode. The display on the bus fare box or rail station gate reads “Transfer 12:00 AM” when this happens.
The card also won’t let me add to its nonsense negative cash value, so it’s now useless.
I’ve spent $17.05 today so far on the day pass that got stuck in limbo, individual fares on each bus (the card won’t work for bus transfers in this state!), Metrorail parking, and a new Easy Card with one Metrorail fare on it that will replace this broken piece of 💩 that keeps eating my passes.
What is going on here?! I’ve never heard of this happening to anyone else’s Easy Card, so I’m guessing I have a unique and beautiful corrupted snowflake here. The customer service staff don’t understand it either.
I wonder what to do with this card. Send it to MDT so maybe they can work with Cubic Corporation to identify the fault and roll out a software fix*? Microwave it? Will It Blend?
What even is this card?! That’s like asking, “what are birds?” … We don’t even know.
And maybe $17.05 was still worth not having to drive through the boat show traffic.
* this is about as likely to happen as one of the buses running on schedule, or the Prog Stom Assy still working properly on a train. Also, MDT will likely not respond to this post, as their response to me asking for information or reporting issues via social media was to block me, so far on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. MDT blocks: Gotta Catch Em All.
Ⓜ🚂🚃🔩💩🌀🚃🚧⚠💫
Bonus silliness:
This is what the Train Tracker has to say. No clue.
But at least it’s bullet resistant. TAX DOLLARS GO WHERE ??
Das Choo Choo
If it ain’t broke, and it’s positively hilarious—
It’s perfect. Don’t “Fix” it.
These videos are of a German “Taurus” locomotive– Siemens EuroSprinter ES 64.
Video of a startup sequence, from onboard – Note that the HMI unit on the dash runs what appears to be Windows 3.x (and starts it DAMN FAST)…
It also, uhhh, does silly things in addition to calling out voice prompts and displaying performance info to the operator…
WARNING: LOUD tone at 35 sec.
The musical silliness does not end there. In fact… the PWM converters used to control the motor speed are not fixed frequency, and they play a rising musical scale upon the train’s departure.
Oh, and the best part? As hilarious as this thing is— IT HELD SPEED RECORDS!
Of course, the French were not to be outdone, and promptly whupped ’em. Not that the Taurus minds, though. It still lives in pride.
The Not So Easy Card
Newly loaded regional monthly pass not working? Oh no problem, just check for a theoretically impossible negative 60 cent cash value on the Easy Card.
Brilliant.
Also, I’ve been blocked by the official social media accounts of Miami-Dade Transit. Gee I wonder why…
The Mover gets some artwork
Better than a stupid ad wrap, honestly.
Who needs the American Dream’s indoor ski slope?
We’ve got your crazy thrill ride right here.
It’s become a big game of chance lately as to whether the Metromover will make this ramp and turnout successfully. Failures are spectacular when they happen; the train either shorts out power with a big loud, bright arc, screeches to an abrupt halt, politely comes to a complete stop and sits there in front of the maintenance facility, or goes dark and free falls down the ramp for a few seconds before being slammed to a halt by the spring loaded parking brakes setting.
There is talk about charging passengers a fare to ride Metromover again, but personally I think all they need is this magical phrase heard on many thrill rides everywhere: “Exit through the gift shop“.
I’m just that ridiculous.
The overhead concourse in the Miami Central Station / Miami Intermodal Center is now fully open end to end. I think it’s got more square footage than the apartment complex I live in…!! Heck, it may be of about equal square footage to the children’s museum.
This space, however, is not used effectively.
Our transit systems do not run overnight, leaving this whole monster corridor unused overnight.
I propose it double as a bar and nightclub. It’d be kind of amazing.
Here’s an F40PH for no good reason.
Okay, who just broke Miami?
Over the past year or so I’ve constantly heard people saying that the transportation problems in Miami are the worst they’ve ever seen… Day after day, as it keeps progressively getting worse.
Well, I’ve never seen it this bad either.
The Venetian Causeway is gone. The MacArthur and Julia Tuttle causeways have nightly reductions to one lane. I-95 is probably closed more than it’s open now. The Palmetto Expressway has dangerous lane shifts causing constant accidents as it is hacked and slashed to bits to turn it into a corridor of Lexus lanes and fail.
The alternative is kind of failing royally though. Today, I was treated to the sight of Tri-Rail sailing away seven minutes early yet again after being delayed for about ten by a Hollywood public works crew closing an entire four lane road to painstakingly remove small pieces of litter from the wide median.
At that point I checked Waze, it’d be 1 hour 25 minutes to drive to work or about 1 hour to catch Metrorail directly. Upon arrival there, I found the system stalled due to a broken down train.
Metromover breaks down on a daily basis, if not more, and the buses are of course at the mercy of the plugged roads.
I think this sprawling mess has just about had it… and that’s even before any dumbass developments like Krome Gold, Lennar Parkland, American Dream, Green City, Ludlam Trail, or anything like that goes live.
Actually, speaking of Green City…. 
Green City is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. The plan is to use this big plot of land currently occupied by seasonal farms and a weird old deep well injection / aquifer storage and recovery (ASR, also known as Complete and Utter Bullshit) site. The development proposals call for this to be a transit oriented development.
Only problem is……. there’s no transit.
The nearest transit is a couple of bus routes that run every 30 minutes during daylight hours and then cut off. WEEKDAY ONLY. The very southernmost part of it is somewhat near-ish to a park and ride and transit hub south of Kendall Drive, but not within walking distance as that thing’s set WAAAY back in the middle of nowhere.
I recall a few years back reading about how there were certain guidelines for transit oriented development; you were not qualified for certain funding and other benefits unless the transit line was already in place and offered 24 hour service with a reasonable service frequency. I can’t find those rules again today. Are those still in place? Or, is the developer simply not actually counting on this thing actually being qualified as transit oriented development and just slapping that buzzword on it in hopes of getting a foot in the door towards pushing the Urban Development Boundary more easily?
I don’t know. All I know is, well, fuck this and the Cadillac Escalade it rolled in on.
AnsaldoBreda MetroFAIL!!!
I’m mad about our trains. Doesn’t help I tripped on messed up flooring this morning and twisted and bruised my ankle. I can just walk that off, but in the future, I might be better off walking?
For no good reason I looked at the specifications on the new AnsaldoBreda cars they’re getting for that line.
Right in the specs, it says “Maximum speed 75 Km/h”. This is 46.6 miles per hour. That’s just barely more than four tens. And that’s horrible.
The current fleet of old Budd UTV transit cars are capable of greater than 70 miles per hour. The ancient Westinghouse control system on them has a top speed of 65. If you look through the window at one of the cab panels you’ll see a row of colored lights corresponding to colored bands on the speedometer, this is the cab signal system that tells you how fast you can go or what the automatic train operation system will be set to in ATO mode. The speeds are 0 (red), 5 (blue), 15 (yellow), 35 (orange), 45 (green), 55 (orange), 65 (green).
The final green light was last seen lit just before September 11, 2001, when Miami-Dade Transit probably realized all their maintenance and parts funding was gonna be siphoned off for the Department of Homeland Stupidity so they cut back the operating speeds to save on maintenance. Ha ha, “maintenance”, that’s a good one. I’d slap my knee but it’s a little sore from hitting a row of seats when I went over.
Needless to say, further reducing the top speed to 45 will probably require timetable changes and break all of the ALREADY utterly broken bus connections throughout the system even worse.
Please remind me again why AnsaldoBreda was even considered in the running for the new Metrorail vehicle project? AnsaldoBreda has an unbroken, perfect track record of always, without fail, delivering railcars that are unsuitable to enter revenue service, requiring months of field rebuilding and reengineering before they’ll even reliably stay on the damn track let alone actually go anywhere.
The sad part? I get the feeling that even if we suffer through about two years of practically nonexistent Metrorail service due to Breda breakdowns, we’ll STILL be coming out better than this. UUUUGGGGHHHHH.
This is yet another reason Miami-Dade County can simply never be taken seriously as a world class…. anything.