Port of Miami Tunnel
Watson Island entrance
|
|
| Overview | |
|---|---|
| Location | Miami, Florida |
| Route |
 SR 887
|
| Start | Watson Island |
| End | Dodge Island |
| Operation | |
| Work begun | May 24, 2010 |
| Constructed | Bouygues Construction |
| Opened | August 3, 2014 |
| Owner | FDOT |
| Operator | MAT Concessionaire, LLC |
| Traffic | Automotive |
| Toll | None |
| Vehicles per day | 7000 (August 2014) |
| Technical | |
| Length | 4,200 feet (1,300 m) |
| No. of lanes | 2 (per tunnel) |
| Operating speed | 35 miles per hour |
| Highest elevation | Sea level |
| Lowest elevation | −120 feet (−37 m) |
| Tunnel clearance | 15 feet (4.6 m) |
| Width | 43 feet (13 m) per tunnel |
| Grade | 5% |
| www |
|
|
|
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Route information | ||||
| Maintained by FDOT | ||||
| Existed: | 2014 – present | |||
| Major junctions | ||||
| South end: | Port Boulevard on Dodge Island | |||
| North end: |
 SR A1A (MacArthur Causeway) on Watson Island
|
|||
| Highway system | ||||
|
||||
→
The Port of Miami Tunnel (also State Road 887) is a 4,200 feet (1,300 m)bored, undersea tunnel in Miami, Florida. It consists of two parallel tunnels (one in each direction) that travel beneath Biscayne Bay, connecting the MacArthur Causeway on Watson Island with PortMiami on Dodge Island. It was built in a public–private partnership between three government entities—the Florida Department of Transportation, Miami-Dade County, and the City of Miami—and the private entity MAT Concessionaire LLC, which was in charge of designing, building, and financing the project and holds a 31-year concession to operate the tunnel.
The tunnel was first conceived in the 1980s as a way to remove traffic to PortMiami that was congesting downtown Miami streets. Prior to the tunnel's opening, the only route for PortMiami traffic was through the streets of downtown Miami; that traffic, especially trucks, was considered detrimental to the economic growth of downtown and a planned project to expand the port's capacity would increase the volume of trucks through downtown. Those issues would be remedied by the construction of the tunnel, allowing traffic to move between PortMiami and the MacArthur Causeway (which connects to Interstate 95 via I-395) without traveling through downtown. In the first month after opening, the tunnel averaged 7,000 vehicles per day; nearly 16,000 vehicles travel to the port each weekday.
...
Wikipedia