You can plan your route, leave early, and check traffic twice. Then you hit Brickell and everything stops.
The bridge is up.
For thousands of Miami drivers each week, the Brickell Avenue Bridge is a daily wildcard. It opens roughly 5,000 times a year, bringing traffic on one of the city’s busiest corridors to a halt. Drivers sit, stare at brake lights, and wonder: How long is this going to take?
For IsBridgeUp founder Ihor Karas [pictured above], that daily frustration looked like opportunity.
Karas, a Miami-based software engineer originally from Ukraine, lives near the bridge and drives his three-year-old daughter to daycare each morning. Somewhere between the waiting and the wondering, an idea clicked.
He realized there was no simple public-facing way for drivers to know whether the bridge was open, whether traffic was stopped, or whether a vessel was minutes away from triggering another opening.
That gap became IsBridgeUp, a platform built to answer one very Miami question: Is the bridge up?
But this is more than a bridge schedule app. The platform pulls live status data, layers in community confirmations, tracks approaching vessels using maritime signals, shows opening patterns, and sends alerts when traffic stops or a boat is closing in. There’s even live streaming from the bridge itself, so drivers stuck in line can show conditions to others still on the way.
The idea’s roots stretch back to Ukraine, where Karas built Rail-X, a platform that helped more than 30,000 drivers avoid unpredictable waits at railroad crossings using real-time alerts and computer vision. After the war made camera-based infrastructure systems difficult to maintain, he adapted the model into something lighter and community-powered.
Now he’s applying those lessons in Miami.
“It’s very nice because in Miami, you have such service like FL511,” he said. “I don’t need to build huge infrastructure… I just connect to that service, collect data, and show it to people.”
That practical approach comes from nearly two decades in software, including work as a technical lead at Sony Music. Today, he runs custom software company KarasSoft LLC, but IsBridgeUp is clearly a passion project – and one that’s striking a nerve.
When Karas shared it in community groups, locals responded fast, with hundreds of reactions and a common refrain: Wait, this is real?
His ambitions already stretch beyond Brickell. He wants to cover all of Miami’s drawbridges, then cities like Chicago and Seattle, where similar chokepoints shape daily life.
For now, though, he’s starting where Miami drivers feel the pain most. Right there at the bridge, watching the clock tick while the boats pass by.
This story was originally published by Refresh Miami, a WLRN News partner. Refresh Miami is the oldest and largest tech and startup community in Miami with over 16,000 members.
