Public Transportation is Great, Until it’s Not
The Miami-Dade Trolley app makes taking the trolley simple. The tracker allows users to identify their location as well as take them to the nearest stop. With the tracker, additionally, users can also see at what times various trolleys are set to arrive to their location.
May 18, 2023
Did you know more students than you may think take some form of public transportation?
Either using the trolley, Metro-Rail, or shuttle, there are quite a few students who depend on public transport to come and go.
Sophomore Nuria Dolz takes the trolley occasionally visit friends or shop at Brickell after school. She finds the trolley convenient because it’s free.
“It also doesn’t take too long to get to the stops, and the tracker app on the phone is really useful,” she said.
Another sophomore, Lorenzo Buttice, also rides the trolley. Unlike Nuria, who only uses it on occasion, Lorenze rides it everyday to and from school.
“It’s good, but sometimes it’s very random in what time it comes. That makes it annoying when they aren’t on schedule,” he said.
Lorenzo has had quite a number of interesting experiences on the trolley.
“One time a guy boarded with about 40 bags, and it took him an hour to load them. Another time, the air broke. This morning the trolley took 30 minutes to get here, and I was late to school. Sometimes it’s such an inconvenience that I think I should just bike to school.” he said.
Freshman Esme Cush takes the shuttle to Key Biscayne, and finds it very smart as well as useful for many students whose parents cannot come pick them up.
“Once it was our bus driver’s birthday so we did a party for him on the bus,” she recalls.
For Esme, the bus is a friendly place where everyone knows each other.
“Everybody who rides he bus has a friend, so it’s fun to talk, helpful for me, and for my family,” she said.
The Miami Metro-Rail has around 60,734,900 rides per year (miamidade.gov). The Miami Trolley has about 439,696 riders per month (miamigov.com). Overall, around 16.6 million people, or 84 percent of the state’s population use public transportation (floridatransit.org).
