Give low-income Miami-Dade residents a boost — keep public transportation free | Opinion

Thirteen months ago, Miami-Dade County suspended transit fares at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic to “lessen the need for non-essential interactions” between riders and operators. This decisive action saved lives. Because of this and other safety measures, Miami-Dade Transit could continue its mission to “connect people to places” while ensuring the safety of those who count on its services the most.

Getting rid of fares also provides critically needed support to low-income residents and seniors, especially among many of the county’s Black residents — a community that I help represent and that faces a lower average household income than any other racial group in the county. They disproportionately rely on public transit. Saving their daily fare to and from work could account for almost an hour of pay every day.

However, the county has announced that it would reinstate fares on June 1. That will have a detrimental effect on local low-income residents. Florida’s minimum wage remains below $9 — having increased just $1.31 in the past decade — and Black unemployment, which remains severely impacted by the pandemic, will remain in the double digits, 1.6 times the unemployment rate for other Floridians. This, at a time when foreign buyers and residents escaping high taxes up north are driving up the cost of living and forcing our residents out of their homes.

None of these separate issues is divorced from the central challenges of connectivity, mobility and residents’ ability to find and keep jobs outside their neighborhoods. While residents continue to face steep challenges, it is not the time to further burden them.

Based on the last available bus ridership report from the county’s Transportation Planning Organization, the majority of transit riders do not have a driver’s license, meaning that public transit is the only option for them. Once fares are restored, they will have to bear this additional cost.

But the county can do something to address this: Keep public transit free for each and every one of our residents.

For those worried that eliminating fares would lead to cuts in service, it’s important to keep in mind the true dimensions and contributions of transit fares to the county budget. Within a $9 billion budget, the yearly sum collected through fares before the pandemic accounted for less than one-tenth of 1 percent of that total — about $80 million. But for our most cost-burdened residents, fares can add hundreds of dollars a month to a working family’s budget, representing a significant portion of their income. It can mean decisions between fares or a light bill, phone bill or even groceries. The county should not force residents to make such difficult decisions.

For decades, Miami-Dade residents have been promised a world-class transit system that they have never received. Instead, they have been told to make do with unreliable, inadequate service so bad that if this were a test in grade school, the on-time performance of buses, alone, would fail with a C minus.

It’s not the time for the county to place another burden on residents who need transit to get to the doctor or the grocery store, to work, and back home. The county should prioritize its transit riders and stopped failing them. With no further stimulus in sight and unemployment benefits ending soon for many, if the county is serious about providing lasting relief to its residents, particularly in the Black community, it will keep fares free.