The US 1 Line, shown in light blue on the Overall Map, follows US 1 and the FEC railway all the way from downtown Miami to Palm Beach Gardens. By far the longest line, it links many of the oldest and most walkable centers in South Florida. Its length and unique location should provide high ridership. South Florida largely grew along US 1, so its special properties are no accident. From Miami to Hollywood to Fort Lauderdale to West Palm Beach, the dense neighborhoods and historic character of the areas around the line are a perfect fit for rapid transit.

In general, the US 1 Line follows US 1, except where the highway splits into a one-way pair, where it switches over to the nearby FEC Railway ROW. This occurs in downtown Fort Lauderdale (the line follows the FECR from Ft. Lauderdale Airport to Sunrise Blvd, though this could also be along the Wave Streetcar route), Delray Beach (from Linton Blvd to around NE 9th St), and downtown West Palm Beach (from Palm St to the Port of Palm Beach). Except from Midtown Miami to Aventura and from Sunrise Blvd to Deerfield Beach, it should not materially matter which of the two ROWs the line follows, as they are almost always less than a half-mile apart and often run right next to each other.

The US 1 Line has shorter station spacing than is usual for light rail, and second shortest in the whole system, for two reasons. US 1 runs through mostly dense, urban neighborhoods, so dense spacing is justified by each station’s ridership. And except for the two exceptions noted before, US 1 runs right along the FEC Railway and its dense and frequent network of regional rail, which will serve as a pseudo-express for longer trips along the US 1 Line.

US 1 is at least four lanes, and usually six, along the entire length of route that uses it, so sufficient ROW is not a concern. Although the highway is a busy north-south car route, it is paralleled in many places by an often under-capacity arterial, often called Dixie Highway or Old Dixie Highway; for example, in downtown Boca Raton the 4-lane US 1 runs next to the 5-lane Dixie Highway. Longer-distance north-south car travel is usually better served by I-95.

US 1’s Miami-Dade alignment runs through a mix of urban and suburban areas, including some large urban nodes in the county, like Omni, Midtown, and Aventura. In Broward County south of Fort Lauderdale, it goes through the most urban parts of the South County, including Hallendale and Hollywood, and also links to Ft. Lauderdale International Airport. North of Fort Lauderdale, it travels through a suburban grid, but the highway is lined with commercial and links walkable nodes like Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach. In Palm Beach County, US 1 runs through the only gridded part of the county, east of I-95, and hits most walkable urban centers, including Boca Raton, Delray Beach, Lake Worth, and Downtown West Palm Beach.

Operations

Operations along the US 1 Line will be challenging, first and foremost because of the sheer length of the line. It stretches 78 miles through South Florida, nearly twice as long as the next-longest light rail or tram line in the world, the Belgian Coast Tram. The extreme length will lead to unpredictable time tables and even train bunching at high frequencies, both problems for its concurrency with Flagler/Baylink in downtown Miami. This can be mitigated in a few different ways.

The first and simplest option is to split up services along the line into different sectors, trading one extremely long service for many shorter ones. Although conceptually simple and fairly easy to carry out, this solution will complicate the service and lead to more required transfers and longer waiting time, as well as a percieved “break point” at each service’s termini. Two routes should connect near Fort Lauderdale, possibly including some overlap through downtown; three routes should connect at Hollywood and Boca Raton; four routes at Aventura, Pompano Beach, and Boynton Beach or Delray Beach; and five routes at Aventura, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, and Boynton Beach or Lantana.

Another conceptually simple but inconvenient option is simply to include layover and recovery time as pads within the route timetable. Although this would allow full through-running, this would likely unnecessarily slow down operation and travel times. Either the pad could be distributed among stations or concentrated at certain “central” stations; if the pad time at each central station equals the headway of the line, this could work like option one, giving riders the option to either jump ahead a train at each pad or simply wait until the train continues.

On the other hand, if the US 1 Line can be held to a strict timing standard, most of the problems with long-line operation shrink or disappear. This has never really been tried in practice (simply because of the lack of a long-enough line to try it on), but may end up working and eliminating the need for a workaround. Strict timing would likely involve absolute signal priority along the route and strategic grade separation at major intersections.

And regardless, some trains will not need to run along the whole line anyway. The line south of Fort Lauderdale should have much more ridership than the line north, since it runs through denser areas and the buses running along these segments have higher ridership. Ultimately, a combination of options 3 and 1 will likely be required for consistent operation of the line.

Ridership

The US 1 Line follows routes 3 and 93 in Miami-Dade County, 1, 101, and 10 in Broward County, and 1 and Breeze in Palm Beach County. Each segment of the line should be analyzed separately, to avoid the bias towards ridership that comes with the line’s length and to recognize the differing characteristics of each segment.

The 3 and 93 in Miami-Dade County have a combined weekday ridership of 6,701 + 3,642 = 10,343 riders/day, and a monthly ridership of 202,491 + 68,569 = 271,060 riders/month. The 3 takes 1:34 at rush hour for its 16.4 mi long route from Miami to Aventura (10.5 mph), and the 93 takes 1:01 for its 13.6 mi long route (13.4 mph), so LRT would represent an approximate doubling of speed.

The 1 and 101 in Broward County have a combined weekday ridership of 5,439 + 2,256 = 7,695 riders/day, and a monthly ridership of 163,370 + 51,889 = 215,259 riders/month. The 1 takes 1:14 at rush hour for its 13.3 mi long route (10.8 mph), and the 101 takes 59 minutes for its 12.1 mi long route (12.3 mph), so LRT would again represent a doubling of speed.

North, the existing bus options become substantially less attractive, as they reduce in frequency. BCT’s 10 has a headway of 30 minutes midday, and Palm Tran’s 1 has 20 minute headways, while the Breeze only runs rush hour on weekdays. As a result, but also because of reduced development intensity as we move north, these routes have much smaller pre-existing riderships. The 10 has a weekday ridership of 4,031 riders/day and a monthly ridership of 108,189 riders/month, and completes its 17.4 mi route in 1:17 at rush hour (13.6 mph). Unfortunately, the most recent ridership information I could find from Palm Tran was from June 2013 (the others are July 2015), but in that month, the 1 had a weekday ridership of 8,746 riders/day and a monthly ridership of 217,418 riders/month, and today completes its 39.8 mi long route in 1:50 (21.7 mph), while the Breeze represents more of an express service which will be replaced by regional rail.

In short, in Miami-Dade and Broward County light rail presents a clear advantage over buses in reliability and speed; in Palm Beach County just in reliability and frequency. Although these latter advantages may not seem much, Palm Tran’s top rider complaints are about reliability and frequency, neither of which are high in the system, and the express bus Breeze along US 1 has never attracted much ridership, showing a slight rider indifference to speed. Thinking politically too, Palm Beach County will certainly complain if they are the only county in South Florida to not get light rail, and US 1 is the most viable corridor in the county for rail, although this should not be a prime motivator for construction, and the ridership and mobility benefits of building the line fully should suffice to justify it.