I’m posting this now upon hearing from a guest at work that it’s also happening on Miami Beach. Beware!
Something that kind of surprised me not too long ago… When checking into a resort near Disney World, we were greeted by this silly looking sign in our room…
I thought it was clearly a thing intended to increase sales at the in house Pizza Hut, but then this janky thing showed up the next morning.
There is no restaurant location listed.
The phone number is not associated with any listed business… anywhere.
Quite the interesting scam, free credit card info up the wazoo for the price of just printing up some fake pizza menus and spamming them in a hotel.
Whenever I’m staying somewhere I usually just ask the front desk for recommendations, they usually also keep takeout/delivery menus for local places at the desk too. There’s always Yelp and such. Just beware the fake advertisements for nonexistent wheat and wheat byproducts.
Looks like Erika is shaping up to be one of those derpcastle systems that skirts the Florida coast and leads to stinky storms for a few days. Meanwhile, is that the remains of Danny drooling all over us?
Meanwhile let me go off topic here and state that I am getting so tired of these hoodrats selling stolen goods and fake perfume all over Miami. Unsurprisingly the guys selling stolen Tide are commonplace but I can’t take a trip on Metrorail anymore without having someone poke me on the shoulder and ask me if I want to buy any cologne, deodorant, small bottles of liquor, toys, or baby formula, usually any of which still have those “for sale only at (name of store)” labeled EAS tags still on them.
Just fucking quit it, okay?
KG4CYX.NET: your home for staring at flimsy tropical systems and yelling about trains
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“.
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.
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.
Not shown here: the cherry red glowing dynamic brake grid on the fourth car that I just couldn't get a photo of.
Actually, speaking of Green City…. “Green City”, which I colored in Slightly Rotten Tomato Red
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.
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?
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.
The existence of this warning label is also evidence that common sense is starting to wane as a human trait
Some stats came out that made me even more mad about the American Dream mega mall project. Developer Triple Five put out some rough stats on how they expect traffic flows to and from the mall, FDOT ran simulations on it, and what remains of The Miami Herald miraculously decided to publish an article about it with a useful infographic. (It’s very rare that the Herald will report at all on controversial development plans, and even rarer that they won’t just make the article a giant pail of whitewash.)
Sorry if this got unusually compressed – once in a while that happens with mobile downloads due to a proxy being too “helpful
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I’ve driven through this area a lot as a result of having a zombie strewn commute that required me to get creative to get home in the evening at all.
I can assure you the roads in this area cannot take the kind of traffic volume estimated here.
Common sense alone would have told anyone that the area just can’t support this beast. There is simply no way – no transportation infrastructure, no water, no power…
Is this just an elaborate investment scam?? I really, really hope so.
Otherwise, we’re really quite doomed, to be perfectly honest. Or at least those who have to do anything on the west side of Miami-Dade County or southwestern Broward are. I’m still lucky enough to have a reasonable excuse for mass transit that will get me to and from work without massive delays, but I suspect that those housing developments up in western Miami Gardens are very quickly going to become effectively unlivable due to complete lack of timely access.
This is so stupid as to be impossible to believe. This has to be a bad dream. A bad American Dream.
This is some sort of funky diesel hydraulic tug with a big welder sitting on top for work on the Metrorail track. It’s actually kinda cute.
Now with even MORE couplers! The one with the array of Pogo Pins on it matches the Metrorail trains. I’m not sure if, or how, the electrical interface would be used. Third rail power certainly isn’t. It might even be built to be able to tug the Budd UTV cars around where the onboard motors can’t be powered.
This rig is usually seen in action only on weekends when closing a track to perform maintenance does not affect the train schedule too badly.
