About miamimetrorail.org
An independent guide to the Miami Metrorail. Who runs it, where every figure comes from, and what we refuse to publish.
What this site is
miamimetrorail.org is an independent guide to the Miami-Dade Metrorail. We are not affiliated with Miami-Dade County or its Department of Transportation and Public Works, and we do not speak for them. Metrorail, Metromover, Metrobus, EASY Card and the Orange and Green line names belong to Miami-Dade County. We built it because the answers a passenger actually needs are scattered: the operator publishes the lines and the hours on one page, the fares behind a set of accordions on another, the parking rules on a third, and the thing that catches out every visitor — that the Orange Line becomes a two-stop airport shuttle at weekends — in a paragraph you have to be looking for.
How the content is produced
Journey times and running order
From Miami-Dade's own GTFS feed. The feed models Metrorail as a single route, so the two lines are recovered from the stops each trip calls at — never from the headsign, which mixes in engineering runs. Times between stations are the median of every real trip in the feed.
First and last trains, and frequency
From the same feed, measured per direction. Taking the median gap over all departures mixes the two directions and halves the answer — that mistake turns a 20-minute Saturday Green Line into "every 40 minutes".
Station names, addresses, parking capacity, public art
From the county's GIS station layer, cross-checked against the GTFS. Where the GIS and the operator's own pages disagree, we say so on the page rather than picking one quietly.
Fares, passes, discounts and parking rules
Read directly off Miami-Dade's published pages, with the date we read them. Those pages are JavaScript applications whose fare tables sit inside collapsed panels, so they have to be opened in a browser — which is probably why some of these numbers are hard to find repeated anywhere else.
Next trains
Live, from Swiftly, which runs Miami-Dade's real-time passenger information. Details on where the data comes from.
Every page carries a date, and the pages that depend on operator figures end with a source line.
What we deliberately leave out
It would be easy to fill these pages with plausible-looking numbers. Data a reader cannot check is worse than no data, because there is no way to tell the two apart. So we leave out:
The number and position of exits at each station
Miami-Dade does not publish it, and guessing from a satellite photo is not the same thing as knowing.
Lift and escalator outages
The county runs a live status page for this. A copy of ours would be stale within the hour and would send someone with a wheelchair to the wrong entrance, so we link to theirs instead.
Parking prices at the airport and Tri-Rail
Both sit beside a Metrorail station and neither is Metrorail parking. They set their own charges; we say so and stop there.
Ridership figures per station
Beyond what the county itself states.
Known gaps and disagreements
Miami-Dade publishes two different low-income thresholds
The fares page puts the free Mobility EASY Card at an annual income under $20,385 and the half-price Commuter card at $20,386–$27,180. The Transit Pass page, on the same site, says under $35,910 and $23,475–$31,300. We print both and say they disagree rather than choosing the one we like.
The county's two sources disagree about three car parks
The GIS layer calls Brownsville and Santa Clara surface parking and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Plaza a garage; the operator's parking page has it the other way round. We follow the operator on the type and the GIS on the capacity, and flag each row.
Culmer and the airport
The operator lists both as having surface parking — the airport with 40 spaces — while the GIS layer counts none at either. The same operator page also says the airport runs parking "for their customers". We show what each source says.
Historic Overtown/Lyric Theatre
35 spaces in the GIS layer, 40 on the operator's page. A small gap, but we are not going to pick one and pretend.
Corrections and contact
If something here is wrong — a fare that has changed, a walking time that does not match, a station detail that is out of date — write to [email protected]. We fix it and log the change, with the date, on Where the data comes from. Miami-Dade changes fares and services without much notice, so every page here carries the date we last checked it rather than pretending it is permanent. Before you travel, the operator’s own Metrorail page is the last word.
How the site is funded
The site is free to read and paid for by advertising shown alongside the content. Advertising has no influence on what we write: we do not sell sponsored articles, we take no payment to feature an operator, a station or an attraction, and we run no affiliate schemes on tickets or travel cards. If commercial content ever appears here it will be labelled as advertising.
Sources
- Miami-Dade DTPW — Metrorail — lines, weekend shuttle, operating hours
- Miami-Dade DTPW — Transit Pass and Transit Fares & Parking Fees — every fare, pass, discount and parking charge
- Miami-Dade DTPW GTFS feed (
google_transit.zip) — running order, journey times, service calendar, headways - Miami-Dade GIS station layer (MetroRailStations_gdb) — station names, addresses, parking capacity, public art
- Swiftly (
agencyKey=miami) — the real-time feed behind Miami-Dade's own passenger information, used for the arrival boards