Miami's cycling network is having its best administrative year in a generation — and the region should pay close attention, because the decisions being locked in right now will shape how hundreds of thousands of people move through this city for decades.

The City of Miami's newly adopted 2026 Bicycle Master Plan gives the Miami LOOP its institutional backbone.

The City of Miami formally adopted an updated Bicycle Master Plan in 2026 — the first comprehensive revision since the original 2009 document — committing to a safe, connected, and equitable cycling network citywide. Transit Alliance Miami (TAM), working alongside Bike Coconut Grove and Healthy Little Havana, pushed hard for the plan to include a binding amendment: ten priority projects, each selected against eight community-developed criteria, all to be completed by June 2031. This is exactly the kind of accountability architecture that distinguishes a plan that gets built from one that gathers dust.

  • TAM's criteria explicitly reject "sharrows" as acceptable infrastructure, citing their danger to cyclists and motorists alike.
  • Projects must be distributed across all five City Commission districts, with five additional picks selected on citywide need and merit.
  • The plan mandates data collection on near-miss crashes, a discipline Miami has historically lacked.
  • Approximately 51–56 percent of Miami-Dade residents are classified as "interested but concerned" cyclists — people who would ride more if they felt safer — making protected infrastructure the single highest-leverage investment the city can make.

The Underline's final phase and the Ludlam Trail's fall groundbreaking are turning the Miami LOOP from a vision into a network.

The Miami LOOP is a 235-mile trail vision for Miami-Dade County — and right now, two of its most consequential segments are converging on construction simultaneously. The Underline's third and final phase, a 7.36-mile segment running from SW 19th Avenue to Dadeland South Metrorail station, is scheduled for completion in 2026, adding a free bike-share network that launched in 2025 to an already-beloved linear park. Meanwhile, the Ludlam Trail — a 5.6-mile rail-trail conversion on a former Florida East Coast Railway corridor connecting the heart of Miami-Dade to two transit hubs — has construction slated to begin in fall 2026. Together, these two projects will stitch together a north–south active-transportation spine through communities that have never had one.

  • Miami-Dade County purchased the former Ludlam rail corridor in December 2018; the $34 million project has $30.2 million in funding pledged, including $24 million from the state.
  • The Ludlam Trail is estimated to bring safe access to more than 34,000 residents within a half-mile service area.
  • Miami-Dade County estimates that the Underline and Ludlam Trail combined will result in nearly 8 million vehicle miles avoided annually.
  • Approximately 58 percent of the Miami LOOP's 235-mile network is already complete, and nearly 86 percent of the proposed corridors run through publicly owned land.

The new Bike Master Plan and the Miami LOOP are strongest when they treat cycling as transit, not recreation.

Here is where the 2026 Bicycle Master Plan can push hardest: every protected lane, every trail segment, every bike-share station is most valuable when it feeds directly into Miami-Dade's Metrorail, Metromover, and Metrobus network. The Miami-Dade Transportation and Public Works (DTPW) Transit System Bicycle Master Plan exists precisely to map that connection — and the community criteria TAM has embedded in the 2026 city plan, especially the requirement that projects serve high-demand corridors, align perfectly with that transit-access mission. The opportunity between now and June 2031 is to use the ten priority projects not just to fill gaps in the cycling network, but to close the first-mile and last-mile gaps around the county's biggest transit stations.

  • The Underline at Dadeland South already connects to the South Dade Trail, forming a continuous active-transportation corridor south to Florida City.
  • The Ludlam Trail's northern terminus near NW 7th Street puts cyclists within reach of the Earlington Heights Metrorail station.
  • A free bicycle sharing program launched along the Underline corridor in 2025, developed in partnership with Miami-Dade County, showing that zero-cost, station-integrated bike access already has a working local model to replicate.

Miami has spent a long time waiting for its cycling network to catch up with its transit ambitions. The 2026 Bicycle Master Plan, the Underline's imminent completion, and the Ludlam Trail's fall groundbreaking mean the waiting is ending — not with one big swing, but with three coordinated ones. That is exactly how durable urban mobility gets built.