We need more City of Miami trolleys

I've given up on the City of Miami trolley for awhile because frankly, it is frustrating to use. 

Is this mass transportation or is it just for a leisurely ride when you have nothing else to do? The service is terrible. 

I'm not talking about the drivers, I am talking about the scheduling and actual service. The Coconut Grove route was extended and it covers so much of the Grove now, which is great, but the trolleys seem to never come! There are long waits, as long as an hour. This is unacceptable.

And I have noticed that they have cut the trolleys down by half on weekend mornings - in other words, there are only two trolleys running, not the usual four in Coconut Grove. So your hour wait may end up being two hours now!

There needs to be more trolleys added to the system if the city wants to take mass transit seriously. Every old photo I see of cities shows trolleys in every photo, but not just one - many. In the days when trolleys were the main form of transit, they were everywhere. Here, not so much, here they are a hit and miss sort of thing.

We are always told to turn away from our cars and use mass transit but that's not an easy thing to do.

There are condos being built downtown without garages because they want the new generation to use mass transit. It's not going to happen until the mass transit is taken seriously. The trolleys are a perfect fit because they don't run on tracks, so the routes can be changed. People don't like buses, but they love trolleys and trolleys are free!

The reason I am concerned is that we attempted to take the trolley to Art Basel/Art Miami downtown. We thought it would be a great solution to driving, finding parking and dealing with all that traffic. We ended up taking Uber downtown to avoid the wait in the sun for the trolley that never shows up and coming home, it took us three hours - for a less than six mile trip! This was on Friday afternoon, when mass transit should be at its peak but the wait times are totally unacceptable.

I wanted to see how the trolleys connect, so we didn't take Uber home, we attempted to take the trolleys instead. We would have to take the Biscayne, Brickell and Grove trolleys to get home. So we waited, and waited, and waited and no trolley showed up on Biscyane Blvd. The app shows trolleys but they are not moving, they are sitting. I am not sure why, but trolleys don't seem to move. It looks like a static map. Why don't the trolleys move?

We ended up taking the People Mover to Metrorail and then taking that to 27th Avenue and exiting there. And then, again, we ended up waiting and waiting and waiting for the trolley to arrive there. No trolley.  According to the live map, it showed a trolley at 27th Avenue and Coconut Avenue, not far away; and I don't know if it was stuck or not but it sat there for an hour according to the map. It never moved!

I didn't wait an hour for the trolley, after about half an hour, I summoned Uber, which arrived in two minutes and got me home in five minutes, while the Coconut Grove trolleys were nowhere to be seen. When I checked the map again, the one trolley was still at 27th and Coconut Avenue.

I am in New Orleans often. Their streetcars can be seen at any time of the day along the routes. There isn't one every hour or so, they are right behind each other on schedules. You can stand on Canal Street and see six cars at once. If you miss one, there is one right behind it.

Miami's mass transit system, especially the trolleys, are a joke. We keep building and building and building, but we don't do anything to accommodate the building. Let the developers pay for water, sewer and trolleys, especially if they are going to eliminate garages. 

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