The time is 5:15 p.m. on a Wednesday evening. You’ve been sitting in your car on the same stretch of US-1 for about 30 minutes now and let’s be frank — you’re probably running late for something. Since 2019, Miami has risen to infamous standing as the fifth worst city for traffic in the United States, increasing by an insurmountable 30%. While it might be easy to blame the COVID pandemic and Miami drivers’ affinity for breaking traffic laws, the cause of traffic appears to be a bit more complex.
Miami: City of Vice and Leisure
Notably the only major city in the United States to be founded by a woman, Miami was originally founded by Julia Tuttle in the late 19th century. She moved to Biscayne Bay following her husband’s death and sought to develop the area, earning her the affectionate nickname “The Mother of Miami.” Following the Great Freeze of 1894, all the orange groves within the state of Florida had been eliminated — except in Miami. A common myth says that Tuttle — foreseeing the potential of the area — gifted a crate of oranges to railroad tycoon Henry Flagler, requesting he extend his Florida East Coast Railway into the region.
Either the oranges were delicious or her persuasion tactics irrefutable, as Flagler extended his railway south and built the Royal Palm Hotel where the Miami River met Biscayne Bay. A couple of years later, Miami was officially incorporated as a city in July of 1896. It is, however, important to note that the Miami namesake is owed to the Tequesta tribe who occupied the region until the mid-1700s, for their word Mayaimi — meaning big water — was used to describe the area surrounding Lake Okeechobee and, by extension, the Miami River.
After Miami’s incorporation, the city was flooded with tourists, looking to start anew in a city promising rest, recreation and luxury. The city continued to flourish into the 20th century and experienced a real estate boom in the 1920s — not uncommon for Miami — which attracted business tycoons from up north such as James Deering and George Merrick who developed much of Coconut Grove and Coral Gables respectively. Up to this point, Miami had grown steadily with transportation and resources proportional to its density, despite the steady influx of tourists and immigrants escaping to our tropical paradise. So, what changed?
“Following World War 2, it was a time in the United States where cities were decentralizing. People moved out to the suburbs where there was only one use and what connected them were highways,” explains Carie Penabad, a professor at the University of Miami School of Architecture and partner of CÚRE & PENABAD, a Miami-based architecture firm.
Additionally, Penabad hosts the podcast “ON CITIES,” which examines the complex forces shaping our built environment through discussions with leading experts on challenges facing our cities today such as climate change, infrastructure design, and urban policy. Rather than investing robustly in public transit, like older cities such as Boston or New York, Penabad says Miami responded to the trend in urban sprawl and invested in highways and suburban developments west of the city.
As a result, instead of densifying centrically as it aged, the city spread the footprint of its built environment, subsequently segregating uses to different areas of the metropolitan region and thus making transportation via highways a requirement to those who live here.
Zoning Codes and Traffic Woes
Barely older than a hundred years, Miami is comparable to those of us in our early twenties — finding our place in the world, learning to be self-reliant and still making bad decisions. To facilitate productive conversations on Miami infrastructure and transportation issues, it is imperative that we not only acknowledge the city’s youth but also recognize its strengths. Despite the suburban sprawl of the late 1900s, Miami has maintained a resilient grid network unlike cities such as Phoenix which has developed into a sea of interconnected cul-de-sacs. The benefits of a resilient grid network are maximized through holistic zoning and intentional urban planning.
Miami 21 is a Form Based Code — which focuses on the size and form of buildings instead of their use — that was implemented in 2019 and has since governed the building and development for the City of Miami. It utilizes different building zones through transects — a gradient of zones based on their ratios of natural, built and social components from T-1 natural zone to T-6 urban core zone— rather than traditional segregated land use zones such as single family residential, commercial or industrial. Miami 21 was written by DPZ CoDesign, a planning, urban design and architecture firm, whose principals were also the co-founders of the Congress for New Urbanism or CNU, an organization concerned with promoting diverse neighborhoods, climate change conscious designs, and notably, walkable cities, towns and neighborhoods. Miami 21 embodies the values of CNU and promotes pedestrian walkability essential to combatting traffic issues.
The persisting issue, however, is consistency of implementation and changing a culture reliant on vehicle transportation. While Miami 21 is a great first step for the City of Miami, it does not extend to the entire Miami-Dade County nor the extents of the major metropolitan region, meaning much of the colloquial “Miami” is still governed by land use zoning perpetuating vehicle dependency.
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk is a practicing architect and urban planner, a founding principal of DPZ CoDesign, and a professor at the University of Miami School of Architecture. Well versed in the Miami infrastructure, Plater-Zyberk maintains that the primary reason we have so much traffic on the highways is due to zoning. Residents who live in suburban areas are forced to travel downtown for jobs, contributing to much of the rush hour traffic.
“I only spend 15 minutes driving to and from campus each day since I live nearby,” says senior Cameron King, a senior studying biomedical engineering who has a reasonable commute to campus. He amends however, “in the afternoons I go golfing in Palmetto Bay or on Key Biscayne, which means I drive home during peak rush hour traffic.”
Christine Lara, a sophomore biomedical engineering student at the university, commutes daily to campus from her home in Homestead. “I spend around 10 hours a week in the car, driving to and from campus,” she says, explaining that the traffic is always at its worst in the morning, with particular congestion from Cutler Bay up to the University of Miami Coral Gables campus. Both of them agreed that they’re likely to abandon commuting by car, if other methods of transit — albeit Metrorail, campus shuttle or even walking — were more accessible, cleaner and safer.
Lara and King are just two examples of traffic woes, as 63% of the school’s population lives off campus and commutes daily, leading to the increased traffic in the area, expensive parking passes and the school’s parking spot scarcity. Ironically, our parking problems might hold the answer to combatting rush hour traffic.
Parking, Policies and Pedestrians
Astronomical parking costs, too small parking spots or complete lack thereof and haunting and daunting parking requirements have come to make parking in Miami a nightmare for some. The issues of parking, vehicle dependency, traffic congestion and public transportation are all intertwined and should be tackled as such. Plater-Zyberk asserts that, “The federal budget for transportation is enormous, and it’s enormous at the state and local levels as well. However, most of that goes to fixing roads or building new roads.” In the same vein, Penabad explains, “Parking has to be made more difficult and more expensive for public transit to really take off.”
The cycle is as follows: we establish zoning that decentralizes uses and decreases density, which creates a dependency on vehicle transportation, which requires the existence of readily available parking, thus leads to the continuous maintenance and expansion of automotive infrastructure such as highways, interstates and streets due to traffic and road wear. How do we get off this dizzying infrastructure merry-go-round?
While I would like to fancy myself capable of ending the worldwide issue of traffic and vehicle dependent infrastructure in a single article, that’s not entirely feasible nor realistic. The solution to our traffic crisis is a continuously implemented, multi-pronged approach adapting in response to the future development of the Miami metropolitan region. It consists of transitioning from traditional land use zoning in favor of a mixed used city, establishing policies discouraging parking, and creating enjoyable pedestrian experiences. These three components are embodied in other places across the United States such as Downtown Boston’s mixed use neighborhood development, Connecticut’s parking requirement decrease in residential zoning and Manhattan’s Park Avenue with wide sidewalks and neighborly front stoops, respectively. For Miami to evolve from her collegiate stumbling into a fully grown, assured adult city, who is structured by resilient and sustainable infrastructure, we must continuously look towards innovative planning with curiosity.
words_mary gorski. illustration&design_andrés alessandro.
This article was published in Distraction’s Spring 2024 print issue.
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