This week on The Florida Roundup...
It was 4:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning May 23, when a scooter and motorcycle were both in the outside lane of the Julia Tuttle Causeway heading toward Miami Beach. That's when The Florida Highway Patrol says the motorcyclist rear ended the scooter. Both drivers lost control and were thrown off, dying instantly. Daryl Williams, a Miami Gardens resident who was fishing alongside the Causeway, was hit by the motorcycle and died later at Jackson Memorial Hospital.
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The scene of the accident became a crime scene, as is customary in traffic accidents that cause the death of one or several individuals. Traffic was closed eastbound in the Julia Tuttle Causeway for several hours, forcing thousands of commuters to look for alternative routes. The effect of this closure was felt way beyond Miami Beach and Downtown Miami. In fact, it caused traffic jams all the way to Broward County. It serves as the latest example of just how interconnected--and vulnerable--our transportation system is to disruption.
Read more: Miami Drivers Appreciate The Gravity Of Tuttle Crash--But Not The Citywide Paralysis
Our dependency of cars and continuous population growth too often translates into a tangled transportation system.
To address the regional efforts to build out public transportation, we speak with a trio of transportation officials from Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach Counties:
- Alice Bravo, Director of Miami-Dade Department of Transportation And Public Works (DTPW)
- Greg Stuart, Executive Director of Broward Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO)
- Valerie Neilson, Multimodal Manager for Palm Beach Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO)
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