Miami has an elevated train, a flat $2.25 fare and a downtown you can cover on a free monorail. And almost everyone still rents a car. It can be done differently: you just need to know how far the train goes and where it stops being useful.
The Metrorail is a single elevated track of 23 stations with two services on it: the Green Line, running the whole thing from Palmetto to Dadeland South, and the Orange Line, which branches at Earlington Heights towards the airport.
Between Earlington Heights and Dadeland South the two share track, so on that stretch — the useful one — a train comes every eight minutes on weekdays. Flat fare: $2.25 wherever you go.
Downtown there is also the Metromover: an automated, elevated and free monorail running three loops through Downtown, Brickell and Omni. It is the best way to move around the centre and plenty of people do not know it exists.
And then there is what the train does not cover, which is a fair amount: South Beach, Wynwood and the Everglades have no station. For South Beach there is a bus from Downtown; for the rest, bus or ride-hailing. That is the real limit of doing Miami without a car.
South Beach included, obviously, with the warning that it is the part of Miami that sits worst with public transport.
Everything above you can do on your own with this page open. This other thing we build for you: the same idea as always — you do not know what you got until the day before — applied to Miami.
You choose where you fly from and where you are going, and we tell you what the adventure costs and roughly what getting there would cost. Flights and accommodation you book yourself: we are not a travel agency and we do not want to be.
Miami-Dade Transit runs it. Flat fare: distance makes no difference and neither does the line.
The detail that catches people out: at weekends the Orange Line does not run the full route. If your Saturday plan depends on it, check before leaving the hotel.
If you want it line by line — which stations each one has, what is around every stop and how to work out a specific journey — we have all of it at our guide to the Miami Metrorail. It is one of the sites we publish ourselves, and it is free.
Miami airport is connected by train from the Miami Intermodal Center, one of the better interchanges in the United States.
Yes, if you choose where you sleep carefully. With the Metrorail, the free Metromover and the odd bus you cover Downtown, Brickell, Coconut Grove, Coral Gables and Vizcaya. What is not well covered is Wynwood, South Beach and any trip to the Everglades or the Keys.
$2.25 a ride, any distance and either line, with a free transfer to the bus. The reduced fare is $1.10 and the downtown Metromover is free.
Yes, the Metrorail Orange Line leaves from the Miami Intermodal Center, linked to the terminals by the MIA Mover, and reaches Downtown in about twenty minutes. At weekends that service runs only as an airport shuttle.
Three or four. Two for the city — Downtown, Little Havana, Coconut Grove, Vizcaya — one for South Beach and the art deco, and one for the Everglades or the Keys.
December to April: pleasant heat, little rain and bearable humidity. Summer is humid and stormy, and June to November is hurricane season.
This is what we do when we travel. The other thing we do is build adventures where you do not know which activity you got until the day before.
