Waiting too long at a red light in Miami? A county plan to fix that is getting messy

Douglas Hanks
·8 min read

Miami-Dade County recently hit the brakes on upgrading thousands of intersections with cameras and computers to calculate the best time for a green light to flick on and keep traffic moving.

On Tuesday, friction over a county contractor doing that work imploded a deal that county commissioners approved in 2020 to create a computerized signal system that would run every traffic light in Miami-Dade on constantly adjusted schedules aimed at reducing congestion.

Commissioners voted to turn over the work to a rival company and start fresh on creating the kind of synchronized traffic-light system that was first promised to voters in 2002 during the referendum that launched the county’s half-percent transportation sales tax.

“It’s about time we start delivering for our residents,” Commissioner Kevin Cabrera said ahead of the vote. “It’s about time we start fixing things instead of talking about them.”

READ MORE: Fighting Miami-Dade’s traffic war, one green light at a time

The firing of the current smart-light contractor, Munich-based Yunex Traffic, sets up another challenge in Miami-Dade’s uphill effort to improve commuting times with “smarter” technology at 2,900 intersections. County administrators ordered Yunex to stop its work on March 5, and in a memo Monday night, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava recommended terminating the company’s contract and bringing in a replacement to complete the work.

Commissioners went further, approving Cabrera’s proposal to have Levine Cava negotiate a deal to turn the work over to Horsepower Electric, a Hialeah company that finished second in the bidding contest for the county contract in 2020. Three commissioners voted against the change: Marleine Bastien, René Garcia, and Eileen Higgins.

The procurement drama adds another friction point for drivers at the mercy of a county network of traffic lights that could be better.

A May 2023 county report concluded that 22% of the intersections in Miami-Dade had faulty detectors used to accelerate a green light when a vehicle pulls up to an intersection that otherwise runs on a programmed schedule. The Yunex contract was supposed to make it easier to maintain the detection system through upgrades and reduce the need for repair calls, according to the report.

Horsepower already holds local traffic-light contracts and was part of a 2016 county pilot project that installed smart-signal equipment on some Miami-Dade corridors.

The most recent campaign finance data, ending Dec. 31, shows Horsepower corporate officers also made campaign donations to commissioners and the mayor, including $20,000 in November to Commission Chair Oliver Gilbert’s political committee, Common Voices; $10,000 last year to Cabrera’s Dade First committee; $25,000 in 2022 to Levine Cava’s Our Democracy committee and another $2,000 to her reelection effort in December. The Miami Herald could not find records of Yunex executives donating to commissioners, and representatives said the company does not give to candidates.

With Miami-Dade purchasing the software, Horsepower would be tasked only with upgrading the remaining signals without smart-light hardware.

The combination has the administration predicting the system and software would be fully installed within 18 months once the commission approves a new contract with Horsepower later in the year. The estimated cost for the Horsepower deal and the new software is $175 million, according to Levine Cava’s memo. The contract Yunex won in 2020 was worth $160 million, and the county has already paid out $18 million to the company.

The administration said Tuesday it will leave in place the roughly 800 light controllers Yunex has already installed. Levine Cava told commissioners that Miami-Dade can modify existing software that will control the signals and use an algorithm to make decisions on traffic-light patterns, the central goal of the troubled contract.

“We’ve solved the software issue,” she said.

Nevertheless, the proposed quick turn to Horsepower had some commissioners questioning why Miami-Dade wasn’t trying harder to keep the current contract on track without a more detailed plan on how the county would manage the technology of such a complicated system.

“I have serious concerns,” Garcia said in criticizing the Levine Cava memo laying out the case for terminating Yunex and hiring a replacement.

Running late

Since Miami-Dade authorized Yunex to start work in the fall of 2020, the company has installed smart controllers at 790 intersections, well behind the target of 1,500 for the spring of 2024, according to the memo by Levine Cava. The company also hasn’t met milestones on delivering the software needed to run the adaptive-light technology that would be the main upgrade.

While Yunex acknowledges it’s behind, the company says it remains on budget and on track to provide Miami-Dade with a new smart-light system by the time the contract concludes in 2029. Company executives blame delays on poor staffing and slow action on the county side.

In a March 6 letter to Levine Cava, a Yunex executive blamed Miami-Dade and its private-sector contract manager for the hold-ups. “There are numerous outstanding issues which remain open and slow down the project considerably,” wrote Rodney Mathis, head of Yunex’s U.S. division.

The contract with Yunex was also supposed to help the county with another traffic problem: the broken detectors that are supposed to speed up a green light when triggered by a vehicle waiting at the intersection. While the county has a repair crew to tackle the faulty detectors, known as “loops,” Miami-Dade stopped employing contractors to get ahead of the pace of failing equipment after Florida passed a law restricting use of the county’s transportation tax on public works projects.

“Due to departmental funding impacts, these contracts are no longer available,” the May 2023 report from Levine Cava read. “As a result, the loop-repair crew productivity is only sufficient to keep the number of faulty loops from increasing, not decrease the number of faulty loops.”

The 2023 report cited the Yunex contract as a bright spot, with the new contract replacing underground sensors with cameras countywide, reducing the chance of the system being damaged by road construction.

On Tuesday, the administration said it has reworked budget dollars and is moving faster on detector repairs.

Correspondence between Yunex and Miami-Dade in recent months show finger-pointing over holdups for a contract that the company’s former parent, Siemens, won in 2020 in part by submitting a bid about $80 million less than the second-place finisher, Horsepower Electric. In 2022, an Italian conglomerate now known as Mundys purchased Yunex from Siemens for $1 billion.

Last year, some Yunex controllers in county traffic signals began to fail. The company notified Miami-Dade that the lights weren’t grounded properly for electrical surges and said it would need to charge an additional $12 million to fix the issue. The county’s private-sector contract manager wrote back that Yunex should have figured out the issue ahead of bidding and made the needed upgrades part of its proposed price.

Yunex also says it has struggled to get the needed data from Miami-Dade to properly program the new smart light controllers for a countywide system that was last upgraded in 2013.

Most of the data involves the default schedule the lights use to determine when a signal should change colors if a county traffic manager isn’t tweaking the pattern. The company complained that Miami-Dade was not staffing the contract properly, with no single manager available to tackle problems as they arise.

While the county’s Information Technology Department recently assigned a project manager to work with Yunex, Mathis wrote that the “project manager has shown a lack of experience, and acknowledged in meetings with Yunex Traffic that he has no authority to make decisions to move the Project forward.”

READ MORE: Miami-Dade approves $160 million contract to create “smart” traffic lights across county

The last several months saw Gilbert, the commission chair, pressing Levine Cava representatives to bring in Horsepower to at least take over some of the installation work as Yunex fell behind.

“We asked you to talk to them about bringing in the second-place bidder. Did you have those conversations?” Gilbert asked a transportation manager at a Jan. 8 hearing.

Josiel Ferrer-Diaz, chief of operations for the county’s Transportation and Public Works Department, responded that legal issues blocked Miami-Dade from divvying up the work that Yunex won in a bidding contest.

He said that while the agency warned Yunex in September that delays would put the company’s contract at risk, both sides made adjustments in the weeks that followed to produce more progress on the work.

“We’re seeing improvements,” Ferrer-Diaz said at the hearing. “They have kept a fairly good pace.”

Yunex’s contract runs through 2029 and was set to complete Miami-Dade’s multi-phase plan to modernize traffic lights, a main selling point to drivers during the transportation-tax campaign more than two decades ago. The tax has already funded about $160 million in improvements, including cameras and sensors at intersections, according to the most recent county spending report.

The article was updated to include donations for Mayor Daniella Levine Cava’s reelection effort tied to Horsepower Electric.

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