Kendall Cruiser

About the Program

Category: Transportation (Best in Category)

Year: 2011

The Kendall Cruiser program is the product of a development process that began in June of 2005, as a result of the Metropolitan Planning Organization's study, "Overview of Bus Rapid Transit Opportunites." The goal of the study was to identify corridors of Miami-Dade County where Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) could provide faster and more reliable service; one of the corridors identified by the study was Kendall Drive in South Miami-Dade County. The project was geared towards achieving three goals: 1) improved travel time, 2) reliable service, and 3) improved fuel efficiency. The service has been running nine, sixty-foot, articulated deisel-electric hybrid busses for seven months since the routes trasitioned on June 28, 2010. The busses run on a heavily traveled stretch within the County, and stop every mile within the ten mile long service corridor. Each of the new hybrid busses come equipped with free WiFi access, and since the beginning of the service there have been over 300,000 WiFi sessions recorded. The route carries roughly 800 riders daily, removing these passngers from the daily vehile congestion present within the service corridor. This translates to an annual ridership of roughly 200,000 passengers.