A quiet update to the Florida Department of Transportation website last week reveals a major update for South Florida public transportation: The ‘Northeast Corridor’ that aims to link downtown Miami to Aventura on a publicly owned train has been fully funded for construction.
Two hundred million dollars in state funding was added to FDOT’s five year plan for Miami-Dade transit projects. The cash will fill in the gaps left for construction once local and federal funds are accounted for. State funding was previously earmarked for the corridor, but last year the money was controversially removed from the state budget.
The long-promised and long-delayed project would run a publicly owned train on existing railroad lines owned by Florida East Coast Railway that are used by Brightline, a private train company. Downtown Miami trains would run from the MiamiCentral station that already operates a Tri-Rail train from Hialeah to downtown Miami.
The Miami-Dade Northeastern Corridor would be the first segment in an 85-mile regional project known as the Coastal Link, which aims to connect Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties with a publicly owned train.
Cathy Dos Santos Alves, Executive Director of Transit Alliance Miami, told WLRN the return of state funding for the Miami-Dade section of the project means that “ this is the time to take action.”
“ The funding to bring these projects forward is almost always the place where it falls apart. So for the funding to be there, for it to be there from the federal government, from our local match, and from the state now, it completes the picture, and it's really this last puzzle piece being slotted into place,” said Dos Santos.
Five new stations are planned for Miami-Dade’s Northeast Corridor section, including in Wynwood, the Miami Design District, Little Haiti, North Miami and near Florida International University’s Biscayne Bay campus.
Federal funding has been in place since the Biden administration placed $389 million towards the project. The Trump administration has kept that money set aside with the goal of constructing the Northeast Corridor. Miami-Dade has pledged $337.9 million, and the state $200 million. The total estimated cost of the project is $927.3 million, money that is now all accounted for.
“ This is the next big thing that is actually doable.” said Dos Santos. “Realistically, this is what's best positioned to actually deliver an alternative to the traffic nightmare that people have been suffering on I-95 and that has been disconnecting all of our communities up and down from downtown all the way to Aventura.”
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The parent company of Brightline, the private company that runs passenger rail along the same line, is undergoing bankruptcy proceedings, and it is unclear how that could impact plans for the Northeast Corridor. The company owns the exclusive right to run passenger trains along the FEC line, and any public agency that wants to run a public train along the lines will have to have buy-in from the company and pay it an annual lease.
In a bond offering document from 2024 the company said it expected to receive $330 million in leases from Miami-Dade County over the first eight years of a potential deal. The money raised from potentially leasing the tracks to a public train service has become even more important in the context of the bankruptcy proceedings.
Further complicating the picture is an ongoing lawsuit between FEC — the company that owns the tracks — and Brightline. In the suit, FEC argues that a commuter rail service along the same tracks is an “unviable and unsafe pipe dream,” and it argues that Brightline cut it out of discussions with local governments. The suit was paused by a judge in November of 2025, and the companies are engaging in arbitration. A Miami-Dade County judge has set a hearing for an update in the case for January of 2027.
“It’s still a complicated picture but often the reason these projects die is because we can’t get them funded,” said Dos Santos. “There is a path forward here at the end of the day. These things can be resolved.”
Negotiations between Miami-Dade and Brightline are ongoing. Brightline is separately negotiating with Broward and Palm Beach counties for the eventual expansion of the line further up the coast. While the public entity that would likely run the trains has yet to be decided, it appears that it will likely be the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority, the tri-county entity that operates Tri-Rail.
Slashing the funds from the 2025 state budget drew bipartisan rebukes, coming from Miami Mayor Eileen Higgins, who was then a county commissioner, and Republican House Speaker Daniel Perez. Perez was in the midst of a feud with the administration of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, and he warned the state against cutting the funding.
If the state “attempts to shut down major Miami-Dade projects, the Florida House will consider launching an investigation into abuse of office and political retaliation,” Perez told the Miami Herald last year.
If it moves forward, the Northeast Corridor would be the third major project funded with money from the half-penny sales tax that Miami-Dade voters approved in 2002. Money from the half-penny funded the expansion of Metrorail to Miami International Airport that opened in 2012, as well as the Bus Rapid Transit corridor in South Dade. That project began operations last October.
